James MacIndoe
Nov 7 · 16 min read
Finn and the author in July of 2018.

I sometimes scream when I’m driving. It happens on bad days, always after I’ve had dreams in which I’m holding my son. Sometimes I’m sure it’s him because a doctor has handed me a blond baby and said hold him, he’ll get better. Go on. Take him. I cradle him in my arms and he doesn’t have any tubes attached to his face and he smiles at me and I wake up and all that’s left is the swaddle we keep in our bed. Other times I’m in a glass building, and I’m afraid that the baby I’m holding is new and that he, too, is going to get sick, that it’s only a matter of time before his muscles weaken, before he can’t breathe, and I have to watch him die. Those are the days that I open my lungs at red lights.

When I talk to Jenny about my dreams, she tells me about hers and we hold each other close. When I tell my parents, they tell me that I’ll keep having them. When I lay down to go to sleep the next night, I tell myself the same thing I used to tell Finn when he cried through diaper changes: it’s not forever, it’s not forever… Then I fall asleep and dream the dreams.

*****

I work at a high school, and people keep telling me things like it must be so hard to be here, and it’s true and it isn’t. From the moment I wake up, I restrict what I can think about until I return home, and I pass through the window of time in which I used to care for my son with movements that are detached and methodical. This is the oatmeal, I tell myself. Scoop the oatmeal into the bowl. This continues outside. Scrape the ice from the window. These are your arms moving side to side. This is ice. This is the window. Then there’s the drive, seeing people in the parking lot and timing my walk to the door so that I don’t have to talk to anyone, and dropping my lunch off in the office and responding to how was your weekend or how’re you doing?

I don’t want to go to work, to see children all day and make them excited about life and care about things they don’t normally care about. But I also feel pressure to be good at my job and having something to do is useful. Somewhere between the door to my classroom and the back desk, I realize that I can talk to people and answer questions and send emails and think about team meetings and subject-verb agreement and the elements of literature.

But there are times I sit at my desk and click through the names of students in my classes. I look at their pictures and I browse their enrollment records and scan their grades and read their addresses and their parents’ names and cry. It’s enormous that they’re all alive and breathing and thriving and sometimes get into trouble and need help focusing in class and maybe have a few friends that aren’t good for them. They all learned to eat and walk and spell words and drive, and maybe a few of them love their parents as much as their parents want them to and it’s too much. It’s too much to look at these faces, I can’t do it, and then the bell rings and my next class arrives and I do it.

*****

During my first years of teaching, I had a hard time conceptualizing the love I held for my students. They weren’t my children. They weren’t my friends. They were people with whom I had been charged, and I had a duty to do right by them. When my son was born, I was overwhelmed by the temptation of comparing the love I felt for my child to all 110 of my students. They weren’t my own, but they all belonged to someone. The amount of worry and trauma and love that hovered over each child was almost tangible to me.

Now I am trying to frame another way. Each of them is me. Within each one lies a reservoir of feeling, of happiness, despair, hope, and trauma. They mask it from me the way I mask it from them. But from time to time we see each other.

Being at school is sad most days because I used to look at children and wonder what my own child’s life would be like. Would he be friends with this person? Where would he sit in the library? What will he be good at? What will scare him? Now when I look at children, my mind moves more slowly. Look at this child, I think. Watch him breathe.

*****

My students have just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye and now they’re planning essays. I crouch down next to a girl’s desk and say tell me about your essay. She says she’s going to focus on Holden’s mental problems, on how depressed and crazy he is. I tell her I don’t want us to diagnose characters in our texts with anything. It’s imprecise and subjective and messy. She says that Holden does a lot of crazy stuff though, like he’s so obsessed with his dead brother, he wrote that essay about him, he talks to him when he’s crossing the street and all. He’s just like losing it.

I think about my morning and how when I drive to work, I watch for my birds. I drive north on Wadsworth and watch the sky more than the traffic because between 94th and 100th a pair of Red-tailed Hawks hunt from the streetlamps. When I see one perched, eyes fixed on the prairie beyond the road, I say hey bird exactly the way I used to greet Finn in the morning when I’d scoop him from his bassinet. Hey bird. Good morning.

My car keeps moving and in a second I can’t see any birds, just sky and clouds and more sky, and I think of that morning and start talking to myself, to Finn, to no one. It’s OK, baby bird. It’s OK, baby bird… Eventually I hit 104th and turn left, and I stare at the mountains, the stoplight, the baseball field, the door, a hall, another door, a collection of desks, a child’s eyes, and she tells me that Holden is crazy, and I say yeah — yeah, maybe. Let’s think about something else, now.

*****

Finn is still in the hospital but I’ve come back to work for two days because I haven’t seen my students in weeks and I need to get them started on some new units, and also because I’m new and don’t have any paid leave left. I start each of my classes the same way, even the one in which my assistant principal drops by “just to see how things are going.” I tell my students that I’ve missed them, that I’m sorry to have been gone, but that my son is in the hospital and that we’re still not sure what’s wrong. He probably has a neuromuscular disease, and that whatever it turns out to be he has a small chance of recovering. I tell them that I don’t know what’s going to happen but that I’m scared and I need them to be on their best behavior for however long I’m gone.

No one says anything. My eyes burn. My assistant principal looks at me and I realize I really can’t read anyone’s faces anymore. I ask everyone to get a copy of Fahrenheit 451 from the front desk. We read and answer some discussion questions. They work on unpacking some key quotations. The bell rings, another batch of students files in, and I give the same speech.

*****

Mike is one of my worst students. He lives with his grandparents because his dad doesn’t want him around, and he’s failing his English 10 class because he doesn’t do any work. He chugs cans of Monster for breakfast and eats Takis by the bagful. When I ask him why he doesn’t have his homework, he gets angry and says he can’t sleep and can’t think and why don’t I quit bugging him about it?

During our first nights at home with Finn, I’d dream I had brought him into our bed, and I’d wake up suddenly, pawing at the sheets looking for him so I could put him back in his bassinet. Now it’s winter and Finn is gone. When the wind blows, our windows rattle and flex in the middle of the night, and on those nights Jenny dreams that she’s left Finn outside and that he’s cold and hungry and needs to be rescued. She wakes up panicked and falls back asleep crying and wakes up again.

I stare out the window and ask Mike to take out his notebook and get a pencil from the bin. It’s December, and the trees are grey, the sky is grey, and now Mike can’t find his glasses. I want to help. I want to clean his backpack, feed him breakfast, teach him to write a sentence. But he doesn’t want me to stand here any longer, so I ask him to read the instructions and promise to come back.

*****

We’re at a colleague’s house for the English department Christmas party. Jenny and I are drinking wine in the living room and looking out the sliding glass doors at the trees in the backyard because we are not friends with anyone here.

Rachel, the host, finds us and we talk about things that don’t hurt. She shows us the fireplace that she just painted white and a barn door her husband built to hide their laundry machines, and I am aware that my voice is too loud when I tell her that it’s awesome, that it’s so neat, such a clever idea, and I am aware that Jenny hasn’t said anything in a while, and we maneuver into open space elsewhere in the house.

We are eventually drawn toward two boys, Liam and Rowan, who are playing with a train set on the front room floor. We ask Liam about his favorite subject in school and he talks about math. He tells us about the Fibonacci sequence and later he makes a pi joke. We ask him if he takes special math vitamins, and if so where can we get some? He laughs and says to look at King Soopers in aisle 23 behind the cat food. He is seven years old.

Rowan is two, but he knows his colors and proves it when Jenny holds up different train pieces and asks him, “What color is this? How about this one?” He arranges his track pieces and I feed him a carrot from my plate.

The adults that have massed in the back of the house near the food are now making their way toward us, and they are kind and generous and ask about our apartment and if we’re looking for houses and what’s being back in Colorado like? We try to answer, but words and sentences form slowly in our brains, like wrecks being floated up from the bottom of the ocean. Someone asks Jenny about the job hunt and they say they’ll keep their eyes open, but in two hours no one mentions Finn and we are frustrated because he is still our favorite person in the whole world, we carry him with us everywhere, why can’t people see him? Are they pretending? Are we?

*****

There are periods of time, maybe ten to fifteen minutes long, scattered throughout my day, where I don’t actively think about Finn. It happens by necessity when I’m teaching a lesson or listening to someone tell me about the thing they’re writing. Then I’ll stand up and walk across the classroom to get a drink of water, and somewhere between the unscrewing of the lid and the first sip, a boy’s face cracks open in a wide smile, a girl rests her face on her fist and wrinkles her cheek, a flock of geese crosses the sky outside my window. In these moments I need to grip something solid and tell myself you are in a classroom. Be here now.

But it hurts to pull myself back away from Finn, because I want to see him, I want to hold him, I want to hear him cry, even just in my dreams, even if those dreams are interruptive, even if they’re set in a terrible room with a breathing machine and a gray roof outside the window.

*****

I keep my socks in one of Finn’s changing table drawers. When I reach for them in the morning I tell him that it’s still his drawer, I’m just borrowing it, I’d never take his drawer from him, and can he help me find the pair I’m looking for? I sit on the floor and pull on my socks and then I go to the closet we share and I put on my clothes. And when I am dressed I know that I will need to leave, and when I leave, I know that I should stop this, stop talking to my son who is not here and cannot hear me.

*****

We used the Baby Tracker app on our phones to document feedings and diaper changes, and sometimes we left memos for each other if something concerned or interested us. I’ve only opened the app once since the day we took Finn to the hospital, but I can’t delete it either. These records feel important somehow. They are proof, in some way, not just that our son existed, but that those days actually happened. Days when life was measured in ounces and milliliters, when we ate our meals standing in the kitchen, when I swayed from side to side in my classroom subconsciously.

The records show that, as he declined — imperceptibly at first — Finn slept more and more and ate less and less. On September 28th, the day we took him to the hospital, he had a mixed diaper at 11:30 AM. Before that, he nursed for 12 minutes on the right side at 10:11 AM. At 2:58 that morning, he nursed gingerly for six minutes, and Jenny’s notes indicate that he pushed her away with his hands and pulled his head back at the end. I held him upright for twenty minutes afterward, but my notes indicate that he had reflux ten minutes after that, anyhow.

The end of Jenny’s memo for that early morning feeding notes that Finn “just wasn’t hungry,” but we know now that this wasn’t true. We know now that half of his diaphragm was paralyzed; that his core muscles were atrophying; that his autonomic nervous system was dysfunctional. He couldn’t catch his breath, and he wasn’t strong enough to get milk from Jenny’s breast.

I know now that we couldn’t feed Finn because he couldn’t eat. But when we arrived at the hospital and the doctors examined the hunger sucked blisters on the back of Finn’s wrists, I was ashamed.

*****

The notification on my phone indicates that Google Photos has created an album just for me. I open it hesitantly and find a collection called “Lullaby.” Sixteen pictures of Finn, sleeping, set to music. I watch it before bed and spiral for the rest of the night.

Some days later, I find a file with a bizarre name on my work computer. I can only see that it is an image, so I open it and see Finn sleeping, swaddled loosely, arms thrown above his head, all smooth cheeks and stillness. The picture was taken in our D.C. apartment. I know because I see the parquet wood floor and the edge of a rug. I close the file. I open it. Here he is. I close it again.

Jenny has over 1,000 pictures of Finn on her phone. I have a fraction that many because when I held or played with him I was constantly reminding myself to see him with my own eyes and fighting against the urge to document everything. We had resolved not to post much about Finn on social media, and that translated into me not taking many — or enough — photographs.

Now I am out. There is nothing new to know about Finn. I will only forget.

*****

My son died yesterday. We are also out of toilet paper. My parents take me to Target and we fill a cart with paper products, detergent, and coffee, but because it’s 8 AM there is only one checkout lane open, and now we are behind a mom and her infant. He is about six months old — chubby, healthy, legs pushing against the seams of his onesie. For a second I think that this isn’t real, I’m seeing him everywhere, and for another moment I think I can do this, I am strong, and then suddenly I am sick and I need to go stand in the empty self-checkout station and think about my breathing because of the things that I have seen.

*****

There is a little boy in the apartment next door named Manny, and we hear him through the walls. He knows how to say no no no no no no no and he scampers from room to room to the frequent dismay of his parents, who frequently insist that he stop running! We don’t know what he looks like, but we call him Manny Bird and we like hearing him. When we go on walks we pass the deck outside his apartment and marvel at the tiny chair his parents have placed between theirs, and we wonder what it’s like to bathe a child in the tub, which we hear happen sometimes.

*****

We are in Breckenridge sitting in a horse-drawn sleigh because my mother-in-law wanted us to get out of town and sent us to the mountains for something that is supposed to be fun. But there is a woman from the eastern plains sitting behind us talking too loudly, and there is a baby in front of us, maybe nine months old, bundled for the weather, and she doesn’t like her hat. We are acutely aware of her presence.

The horses pull out of the parking lot and into the snowy countryside full of mansions and pine trees, and the baby pulls her hat off. Her parents put it back on and bounce her and talk to her, and finally she settles. The ride is uneventful, and we are not upset.

It is easier — being around babies, seeing babies, wishing my baby had not died before he learned to eat solid food or see across the room or speak. But I still stare at them in the grocery store, and I watch the way they cling to their parents in the way that smaller objects naturally gravitate toward larger ones. And then I walk to the car and drive home, because what else is there to do?

*****

I am looking for a new book to read and am choosing between Louise Erdrich and Joan Didion. I take The White Album off the shelf and find it filled with papers from a pediatrician appointment in September. One page is a growth chart with a graceful curve printed across the width of the paper, elucidating a baby’s ideal weight gain by month and percentile. Near the bottom of the page is a small arc drawn in by the doctor. It almost looks like a mistake, like someone started to draw on the chart but then realized they’d started too low and stopped to reconsider their attempt.

I remember collecting a stool sample from my son to check for milk allergies the same day I was given that paper. I remember mixing him a new type of formula, sitting with him on the lip of the bathtub because maybe a new feeding environment would help? I remember begging him to take one of the four new bottles I’d brought home. I remember giving him three kisses on his forehead after he drank almost two ounces from the bottle, which he hadn’t done in days. I remember moving those bottles out of the kitchen cabinet in November, putting them in the back of the car, and driving them to my mother-in-law’s house because she has more storage than we do, and we wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

*****

We have two bathrooms in our new apartment, the one we rented in Denver because we just had a baby and wanted and needed to be closer to our families. I’ve only showered in the master bathroom once. I can’t anymore because that is where we folded and left the stroller.

We have stashed a few items, but mostly it still looks like a baby lives here. When I need to get a charging cord from the bedroom nightstand, I swing the bassinet a little to the right so I can pass by the bed and get to the drawer. The nursery door doesn’t open all the way because there is an unopened Exersaucer box behind it, a diaper bag on top of the box, and a chest carrier on top of that. The swing is deployed next to Finn’s bookshelves. The diaper genie is clean and empty with a fresh knot at the bottom of the bag. His clothes are in the closet. But most of them still have tags on them.

*****

Nearly every afternoon in August and September, I’d drive home from school, park my car, and look up at the deck outside our third floor apartment where Jenny and Finn would be waiting for me. Jenny would hoot at me like an owl, I would wave, and I’d speed up the path toward our door, the word “birrrrrrd” propelling me up the stairs. I’d burst inside, hug Finn, hug Jenny, and the afternoon would spread out before us.

Now I climb the stairs slowly, and we fill the evenings with things we couldn’t do when Finn was here, like leisurely dinners and Netflix and serpentine walks through the neighborhood. We don’t bathe him, don’t change him, don’t dress him in pajamas and read Are You My Mother? and Goodnight Moon and Pout Pout Fish because he is not here. We don’t look at the painting in his nursery of an owl family huddled together, or push his stroller and make sure he’s warm enough, or marvel at his wide eyes, his tiny, delicate fingers, or startle awake to his polite midnight squawks alerting us to some kind of need. We can’t do these things because he is not here.

Until recently, there was a moment each afternoon when the geese would swarm from the park next door to the golf course in the next neighborhood over, and I would be drawn to the windows and back out to the deck where I used to sit with Finn and watch the flocks honk noisily overhead. They’d cross the sky from left to right, moving steadily, instinctively, and I’d whisper “birrrrrd” as they sank behind treetops.

I used to try to record their flights, but the footage was shaky and desperate. And anyhow they fly through at night now, and it’s too dark to see more than faint bird-shapes. I am afraid of the day I don’t see them anymore, when they change their route, migrate somewhere warmer, somewhere cooler, just some place not here. I am afraid of the day I suddenly can’t remember the shape of Finn’s hands, his feet, his tiny ears. What happens when he doesn’t come to see me in my dreams? What happens when I look at a bird and all I see are wings?

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade