I was my mother's unexpected pregnancy

Winifred Flosshilde Walther was stillborn two years ago, on my 30th birthday. Winnie—as we have always referred to her—was 19 or 20 weeks old. We were all in love with her, especially our two older girls—in love with her butterfly kicks and in-utero Axel jumps, with her face on the midwife’s portable ultrasound unit, with her name, which struck us as fitting somehow. For some reason the movements had ceased, and a week or so earlier her heartbeat had become undetectable.

I remember that day not as a continuous series of events leading up to the eventual delivery, but as a jumble of apparently meaningless discrete images, some of them almost absurdly banal: ice cream on a tray; a very small bathtub; something about the death certificate; holding her and being afraid to put on her clothes, afraid that I would destroy her tiny body, and eventually handing her to the midwife; my wife screaming “Let me have it!” along with Kate Bush; our bed at home; her suggesting that I leave the house because her mother was there (“It is your birthday!”); friends, one rather gallantly coming all the way from Detroit, dragging me out for Fury-Wilder part deux.

We buried Winnie four days later, on Ash Wednesday. Her obsequies were performed according to the Rite of Final Commendation for an Infant. Once again, my memories are impressionistic—snow falling on black cassocks, the tableau of mourners (fixed in my mind’s eye for some reason is the impossible image of us gathered around a pillar of flame), the Pater Noster, and, above all, the absence of our other children.