Jacob's Story ~ Chapter 6 ~ The Long Week

~ The Long Week ~  

Now I'm not even sure how to begin with the story of the week after he died and before the first funeral service.  I don't know how to summarize it because it was such a collage of different strange moments that didn't fit together, a week where everything felt wrong, off, unexpected. It was my first week in my "new life" my life as a mother who's child had died and I had absolutely NO preconceptions, ideas, stereotypes for what that looked like.  No one EVER depicts this in TV shows or movies and if they do, it's more of a looking back not the actual days after.  I think, or I assume, all moms imagine at some point if even for about 10 seconds, what would I do if "something" happened to my child? Before Jacob died, of course, that thought would go through my mind from time to time in relation to Adam and Allie,  and when I did think about it I never even used the word "died" it was always "something".  And knowing what that "something" meant, if one of my children were to die, my conclusion was that I surely would be found rocking in a corner crying somewhere in my home or a hospital for weeks if not months.  Turns out when it really happened to me, there just was not time for that. I didn't want to make time for that, and my living family, luckily, needed me more than I needed to be rocking in a corner. 

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When I woke up on  Monday morning there was no denying that my milk was in.  My chest hurt so bad and that is an understatement. The pain of my milk having come in competing with the pain of having no relief for it, no baby to nurse, a constant reminder, every second, that my baby was gone, was numbing and not something that even the pain killers Dr. Susan had prescribed would help.  I wondered how long it would last and now I can't even remember how long it took to go back to normal.  I remember looking at my body post labor.  I looked so much smaller than I had with Jacob in me but still had a belly.  You always have a pudgy, 5 month pregnant, look after you have a baby, not attractive, but part of the deal, and for the first time, it was a sacred space to me.  I knew it would disappear as the days and weeks went on and I remember having even a depressed feeling about that.  I could still see the little dot on my wrist where I'd had a needle put in to give me fluids while I was in the hospital, at least I think it was for fluids, I could not even remember, but I knew even that mark would disappear.  All these small remnants of what had happened all became small memorials to Jacob that I didn't want to let go of, could not bear to see disappear, but I knew they all would disappear, just as Jacob would.  

About a week or two before Jacob was born Dan and I had finally put up family pictures on one of the walls in our bedroom.  One of those collage picture frames with pics of Adam at the beach, Allie in her exersaucer, Adam's 2 year picture, both of their one year pictures, Jacob's ultrasound picture and pictures from our wedding, us outside of the church, entering our reception....every one so joyous, so innocent.  I would stare at them that week and for months after just trying to wrap my head around how everything went from that, to what it was now.  I would look at our wedding pictures, that day, that hopeful, blissful day we had together, to start our lives, bear children, be "fruitful", and think how naive we were.  We had no idea this day was lurking in our future.  I would even think back to college where Dan and I first met. We did not date in college but had mutual friends and I remember bring dressed up one night for a military ball, when I got back to my dorm that night Dan and some of his friends were hanging out in my friends room across the hall from my room.  We all hung out for just a little bit, but I remember how it seemed everyone thought Dan and I should "date" as we were both Orthodox and seemingly the only two Orthodox at Virginia Tech so there was always this underlying connection between us that we knew we probably should be together but neither of us really was ready for anything.  But I would remember that night. Before Jacob died I would think about that night and imagine if someone had actually told us that we would be married 10 years later what would we have thought or done?  Now, my thought was, what if someone had told us that night that 12 years later we'd be holding our dead son in a hospital room somewhere.  The knowledge that looking back at my life this dark cloud had always been in my future, our future, and we had been clueless. 

At some point in the week, probably Monday, Dan started working on Jacob's coffin.  He used scraps of wood from other coffins he'd made for others over the last 17 months he'd been doing this.  For those of you that don't know, when Dan lost his job along with many others during the economic downturn in April of 2010 his mom was coming to the end of her almost 3 year battle with adrenal cancer.  Her odds had not been good from the start. When she was diagnosed back in 2008 I think, she was already at stage four.  When Dan was laid off, as scary as it was, we knew this would give him time and us time to spend with his mom who was not getting better.  Allie was due in November so I think with that knowledge Dan's mom held on till then.  Dan and I were able to visit his parents in Pittsburgh several times over the last 7 months of her life. Adam was able to spend time with his Baba and she with him. Dan helped his dad finish remodeling their master bedroom so that she would be back in there for the final month of her life.  He would never have been able to do these things had he still been working full time, so in that sense it was a true blessing as that was the only time he had left with his mom, with his family the way it was supposed to be.  We even had a back up plan if I went into labor with Allie up in Pittsburgh, but after driving up there about 10 days before she was due I just could not wrap my head around having Allie in an unfamiliar state, with people I didn't really know.  We had to come back.  I felt awful but knew it would be too much for me to do that so 5 days after Allie was born we got back in the car and drove back to Pittsburgh 5 days so that Dan's mom could finally hold her sweet granddaughter.  She did.  By that time Dan's mom had lost so much weight and was so frail she was almost unrecognizable from the person she had been even six months earlier...she was a different person and the medication and/or cancer had even stolen her sight for the most part.  We knew it was the end. On our way back to North Carolina from that visit Dan said he did want to make a coffin for her and he knew it was time to start....until that point he'd not been able to bring himself to accept that she was really going to die and she rebounded so many times, even I thought she might not die, she might really beat this.  I think it was two days later, as Dan had just started constructing it, when his dad called with the sad news that she had passed away peacefully that morning. It was November 18th.  Dan went into overdrive to finish her coffin.  He worked night and day, then drove to Pittsburgh, finished it in his garage with his brothers and delivered it to the funeral home still tacky to the touch but just in time.  He was exhausted, we all were.  Now 17 months later he was building one for our son, our little baby. 

We launched the Orthodox Coffins website, back in July of 2011, and he had had many orders since that time with many grateful people and families that were really happy with his work and the beauty and simplicity of them.  We both thought about providing small Orthodox coffins for children, I don't even know if we ever really even considered ones for babies.  I knew more people that experienced miscarriage than infants dying.  But in discussing it, we could never bring ourselves to actually have one waiting on a shelf somewhere.  It's normal and acceptable for someone who's lived a long life to die but not a child or a baby.  We never did and so the first baby coffin Dan ever made was for our sweet Jacob.  I don't remember much about him working on it. I was upstairs with the kids most of the time as he was building it.  I remember one day that week I made him a sandwich and took it to him.  Even though my parents were there and Rachel was there, we had to force ourselves and remember to eat meals, make sure the other one ate.  I walked into the garage and saw Dan sitting at his desk, working on the lettering for Jacob's coffin and handed him a sandwich.  We both stared at it, no words to say really, just the heavy knowledge that we would, in a few days, put Jacob in there, close it, and bury him.  

At the beginning of the process of making Jacob's coffin Dan came upstairs and had this empty gallon jug of wood glue in his hands that he had been using for all the coffins he had made.  He had just used the last little bit on Jacob's coffin.  He looked at me and said, "The first coffin I used this jug of glue on was for my mom, and I just used up the last little bit for Jacobs.   I'm tired of making coffins for my family."  My heart broke again, as if that was even possible.  How many times could ones heart break in a week? Apparently a lot. 

Back to Monday, we were scheduled to go to the funeral home to see Jacob and also work out all the details of the services for him and where he would be buried.  I remember getting ready to go to the funeral home... it was all wrong, just all wrong.  We drove up and parked.  Getting out of the car and walking into the funeral home was like trying to walk through quick sand with huge weights on my ankles...I didn't want to go, didn't want to do this, but as was becoming regular that week, it didn't matter what I wanted, didn't make any difference,  it was just another thing, on a long list of things I  had no desire to do but had to. We first met with, now Fr. Andrew, in a nice room.  We had never met him in person at that point but he was so warm and understanding.  He explained that they had picked Jacob up the day earlier from the other horrendous funeral home and that he'd been in the cooler ever since. We went through the details that we would not have him embalmed, wanted to have services only at our church later that week.  There would be an evening service on Thursday night, Jacob would stay in the church overnight and then a very short service on Friday morning followed by a trip to Wagner, SC about 4 hours away, to the SS. Mary and Martha Monastery where he would be buried. 

When the discussion first began of where to bury Jacob we thought about near Dan's mom but that was much further away in Pittsburgh and it would be harder to get there and I knew I didn't want to drive that far, make that kind of a trip at the end of this hellish week.  There were local cemeteries but none that were Orthodox or in our price range.  This particular cemetery was kept up by the three nuns that lived there and they walked the grounds daily.  There were also many other little babies/children buried there and it was simple, sweet and I felt like as much as I dreaded the length of time that it would take to get there, drawing out what would already be arguably the longest week of my life, it felt like where Jacob should be.  I trusted Dan and so together we decided he would go there.  We needed a special permit to take him out of state to be buried, these are the things, the details of death that must be taken care of.  We were grateful for Fr. Andrew and he made what had already been a very difficult experience as smooth as possible.  Then Fr. Andrew regrettably showed us the bill that the other funeral home had given to them to give to us for their having transported Jacob from Statesville to Winston Salem. I think it was $250.  Again; I was nothing short of furious and said I would take care of that personally. Assholes....at least that is the relatively clean version of all the things going through my mind in regards to them having charged us after they disregarded our wishes and so haphazardly handled our son.  Anger, So much anger.  But I would have to deal with that later.  I don't know if it was the experience we had just been through, standard practice for the death of a child or infant, or just out of the goodness of their hearts but Vogler and Sons Funeral Home did not charge us one penny.  Not for picking Jacob up from the other funeral home, not for transporting him out to our church, not for keeping him in the cooler for the week, nothing.  It's the kindness and generosity of heart of people like that that can make a hellish week just a little more bearable.  We were and will always be grateful to them for their extraordinary care of Jacob if he could not be with us. 

Once the details were taken care of they let us go into a room and then they brought Jacob in, in a little bassinet.  I could finally hold him again. I was scared of what he would look like.  Society has duped us all into believing that if you do not embalm you will look like the living dead or a zombie in about 3 hours.  This is not the case, nonetheless, I was not sure what to expect.  He was definitely colder than when I'd given him over to the two men at the hospital but his perfection had not disappeared one bit in the day we had been apart.  With my breast literally full, I held him in my arms again, in that little nook between my chin and shoulder.  He still looked just like he was sleeping and I still wanted him to wake up. The thought would pass my mind for a fleeting second that maybe God could/would still work a miracle but I didn't put much hope behind it.  As much as I didn't want to believe any of this was happening I was starting to realize that it was and I just needed to soak in as much time as I could with him, his sweet body, face, nose, hair, such dark beautiful hair, before I could not see him and touch him.  Dan and I held him. We kissed him, we cried together.  I am sure there were several of our tears that Jacob will forever be buried with from our time here with him.  I knew we could not stay there all day.  We had to get back to our other children and I didn't want him to get too warm since the funeral was still days away.  But I wanted to stay. I wanted to hold him forever, cry forever, forever just lay there with him in that private funeral home room.  This feeling was like having your soul ripped a thousand times.  Pain and then numbness, then pain again.  I think we stayed for about an hour and then we so gently placed him back in the bassinet, not his own, and thanked the staff, somehow dragged our bodies to the car and left him again, somewhere he should never have been. 

That day went on and somehow I finally got the opportunity to take a nap.  Due to the horrible night before, my first night home without Jacob, I had called into Dr. Susan's office first thing that morning to see if she could call in a prescription for sleeping pills or anything that would help me rest.  I knew from being a sleep deprived mom from just simply nursing Adam when he was a baby and Allie too throughout the night over months, that if I did not get to sleep I WOULD be checking into a mental institution eventually.  To me, if I had to take a sleeping pill to stay somewhat sane or whatever sane looked like in the wake of your child dying, that was my plan.  The prescription was not filled yet but I just could not go on.  I am not even sure who watched the kids while I slept, maybe Rachel.  It was mid afternoon and I must have fallen asleep pretty fast. 

I began to dream.  I will always remember this dream as I had never had another nightmare like this one and I hope to never have another one like it again.  It was very vivid, it was dusk and I was near a high school or something, I could see, in the distance, teenagers, boys, doing something that I was not sure of but they were loud, yelling and I knew they were up to no good...I think I screamed at them to get away.  Their faces all shadowed by the hoods they were wearing, dark, evil.  Then all of a sudden I was outside of my home, not our house but somewhere like a trailer, it was night and I was standing on the road, gravel road, between the trailer and the woods that backed up to the house.  I saw those kids again, evil pure evil, they were smirking and running from the woods and then, and I won't say who, but someone very important in my life, came out of the woods, clearly battered, beaten.  I looked at her face and the soul had drained out of her, there was just empty space behind her eyes... they had raped her, I knew it...many of them, so many, and I had not been able to stop it.  I woke up.  It was about 5:30 by then.  The dream scared me so much that I never even told this person that this happened.  I told Dan and hoped the sleeping pills would come in and help me avoid any more dreams but I was terrified to go back to sleep.  Those were demons in my dream.  I woke up feeling like Satan was just trying to get into my head in any way he could and that was his first opportunity to scare the shit out of me.  In a weird way, it was like looking at myself when I looked at her in the dream.  Raped of my soul, beaten, empty, my innocence forever gone.  That made the rest of the night pretty uncomfortable.  I tried to eat a little dinner, but the feeling from that dream lingered in me.  The evil I felt was hard to push away.  My mom is always big on finding saints to pray to in the event you loose something, need to sell your house, need to find your wallet...there is a saint for everything.  So, the only job I gave my mom was to find the saint to pray to for nightmares.  She did and I never had one again.  Thank God! 

The next day, Tuesday, Dan and I took the kids to see Jacob and hold him.  Having seen him the day before, we knew there was nothing to be afraid of and did not think it would scare the kids, because he really did just look like he was sleeping.  They held him, well Adam held him and kissed him. Allie ran around the room emptying tissue boxes one tissue at a time.  Such a mix of emotions, holding my dead son, while being a mom and telling Allie to stop messing with the tissues.  It was in a weird way perfect.  Just as it would have been had Jacob really been sleeping.  Life still went on, there was still the need to pay attention to Adam and Allie even as we held Jacob again in our arms.  We took pictures as best we could with our cell phones and hoped that one day Adam would remember at least seeing his brother and kissing his sweet face.  I wonder what he will remember about this time?  I pray that we have done the right things and have explained it to him in a way he can understand.  Allie I think was too young to remember this but you never know.  She was there and although it was impossible to get a picture of her with Jacob or a family picture, as is always a challenge, we do have her in the video from his burial. 

The week dragged on, I continued to stay busy cleaning and keeping up with the kids, continued trying to press my breasts down to make my milk dry up.  Dan finished Jacob's coffin on Wednesday and we took it to the funeral home.  You know maybe it was Thursday...I can't even remember that.  We laid Jacob out on the white blanket Dan's mom had bought us for Adam's baptism.  We thought wrapping him up in that would be her contribution to his funeral, even though she was the lucky one and actually probably with him for all of eternity as we prepared for these next two hard days and then the rest of our lives without him.  Knowing that this was the last time we would hold him close to us, that I would feel his body next to mine, I just laid on the funeral room floor next to him and cried as we tried to figure out the best way to wrap him up.  Dan and I gently laid him in the coffin and made sure he was tucked in well.  This was a big moment but I can't put it into words...just more of my soul  and heart ripping apart.  Part of both of us will be in that coffin with him for the rest of our time on this earth.  The clock was ticking, the funeral was Thursday evening and he was now in the coffin, we would not hold him again, ever again, and once again, we had to leave him behind and go home.