For two days now, I’ve found myself caught up in the rush-rush-buy-buy that has become the Christmas season. Until this morning. This morning at precisely 8:17 a.m. I got a phone call that I had been expecting since last night. A voice on the other end of the line ‘just wanted to let me know’ that a baby was being delivered.
I had a busy day lined up – finish the shopping, make jelly, take my kids’ pictures, wrap presents, do the dishes, deliver pictures to clients…..fight the crowds once again. I was SOOO tempted to say “I’m sorry, but I just can’t now – last night yes…..but now, I can’t.” It was an impulse of a moment – didn’t last longer than the flicker of an eyelash – before I said “I can be there in an hour and a half. We just got up.”
Rush the kids into clothes (Connor stayed in jammies, the girls looked like they dressed out of the hamper – and might have!), ran a flat iron through my hair, loaded my camera, consent forms, dropped the kids at a girlfriends, and headed for the hospital.
I’m never sure what I’ll find when I arrive at the hospital for one of these sessions – often it’s a young woman, alone and afraid; sometimes her mother is with her; occasionally, a frightened young man stands by her side. The fear and ‘aloneness’ in such a room can be frightening.
I was greeting briefly, but warmly by a priest – a family friend, I assumed – and an older woman: “I’m Kathy’s mom”. As a I turn towards the bed, I’m already steeling myself for what I’ll see: parents struggling to behave ‘normally’, a mother beside herself with grief, a father ‘being strong’ and telling her that ‘it’s okay’ – even though he knows it’s a lie as he says it. Two people alone in their pain, unable to support each other, unable to be there for one another.
Instead, I see a beautiful young woman holding a pink bundle no bigger than the baby doll I played with as a small child; I see a young man with tears streaming into his beard, his massive arms wrapped tenderly around his wife and daughter. I see her hand resting on his forearm – softly stroking him, whispering small comforts in the circle of privacy his arms have created. As she speaks, her face crumples – and the strength seems to return to her husband’s limbs. He comforts her, now – stroking her hair, cradling their small daughter in his palm.
I spend about 45 minutes with this tiny, new, broken family. I take their daughter’s pictures – the only pictures they will ever have of her. I see them struggle to bring some sense of ‘normalcy’ to this day – to try to put it into a context that will have meaning for them not only at Christmas every year, but every day, all year long. The tenderness between them, the love with which they care for the daughter they can’t take home, the pain on their faces any time they happen to notice that time is passing….as they inch toward the time when they have to hand their child’s body to a nurse for the last time.
I left them, thanking them for sharing their daughter with me. As I stepped out into the sunshine of a beautiful December day in Fresno, I realized that I was no longer walking at a frantic pace; the “I’vegottabillionthingstod
I will never see this family again, probably, but they’ve been bookmarked in my memory as The Christmas Family.
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