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March 2001

Friday, March 2 - Saturday, March 3

Sporting presents from the "Gulf" cast for "The Creature" - a little hat and bib.

Big "Gulf" cast party, to make up for the fact that I never threw one while the show was open. The cast stays until 3:30 AM. I go upstairs to go to bed, and find Toni in great discomfort.

She had terrible stomach pain, and was unable to sleep. Even when she could relax her stomach, her back would hurt and if she got her back comfortable, her stomach would hurt. I didn't know what to do, and I had been up since seven the morning before, I wanted to sleep so badly.

"By five o'clock I deduced this had gone far enough, I had run a bath for her to help with the aches) but then she began vomiting and I would rub her back for a while, I tried a relaxation exercise but then her stomach kept hurting and she needed to vomit again. I called her mother (I scared her by calling so early - but I didn't wake her, Connie is always up around four in the morning) and she told us to go to the hospital, which is what we did after consulting the midwife.

"From six-ish until nine-ish we were delirious in a hospital room, Toni on an IV drip to keep her from dehydrating, they observed her, decided she has a rather serious stomach flu and sent us home with a prescription for medication to take care of the nausea. Toni has been sleeping since we got home, I slept for about four or five hours.

"I wanted to work on the nursery, or at least ruminate on it, that's my next big project. I think. There's always some big project."

Sunday, March 4

Third Bradley Method Class. I go without Toni, she is still too ill from the weekend.

Monday, March 5

Toni stays home from work.

Tuesday, March 6 (Week 28)

As will be suggested by the autopsy, Calvin dies sometime between now and next Tuesday, March 13.

Toni goes to work for half a day, and calls me to pick her up.

Wednesday, March 7

Tom and Jill bring over fixings for corned beef sandwiches and matzoh ball soup, to help Toni in her recovery. By now her appetite has returned.

Toni stays home from work.

Thursday, March 8

"So the baby, which used to do amniotic backflips, has settled down a lot. We do not know if this is because it is growing very fast now (we are entering the seventh month, getting there ...) or because all of the dope has affected it. Is it a lot of dope? Who knows, I wish I has asked, but if the midwife said it was all right (perhaps not perfect, but all right) maybe it is. We do not know."

Toni stays home from work. Her boss calls to ask what is going on, and is less than sympathetic.

Friday, March 9

Toni finally has the strength to return to work, and her boss lets her have it. It is true that Toni missed a most of this past week - but her boss drags up the fact the she had also missed several days in the fall (due to severe morning sickness.)

Toni had thrown a dinner party at our house for her co-workers last December as a way of thanking them for taking up so much of her slack. Her boss now accuses her of throwing parties to make up for ditching work. Toni is beside her self with guilt, anger and stress.

Sunday, March 11

Fourth Bradley Birthing Class

Tuesday, March 13 (Week 29)

Wednesday, March 14

Toni goes to an interview for a teaching position as part of her studies.

Thursday, March 15

Helen takes me to see an exhibit at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. She's heard about my desire to make a night sky in the nursery, and saw something there she thought might inspire me. It did.

Friday, March 16

Toni is still very upset about comments her boss made the week before. That, and now that her strength has returned to normal, she has become increasingly alarmed by the lack of movement from the baby. I try to pick up her spirits, and suggest she calls the hospital, but she is afraid of looking hysterical.

"I asked her to call the midwife and she said she would feel stupid, she should have called her days ago and besides, we will see her on Monday and it's the last thing Friday. We went round and round and I began getting upset, the old Father's Rights thing, but I was only getting emotional about it. I froze up for awhile, I was feeling all kinds of terrible things, then it became about me, and it all came spilling out - well, no it, it came out in bursts, it was hard. About the first blood test, about the baby disappearing in my head, like we would wake up one morning from a dream, together, and think, weren't we pregnant? Wasn't that a happy dream?"

She calls the hospital and gets some advice about testing for movement. We lie down for a half-hour, and Toni feels seven movements in 25 minutes. Later, our midwife will suggest she was only feeling our dead baby bouncing off the walls of her uterus.

Toni sleeps all night through, for the first time in months.

Saturday, March 17

I begin painting the ceiling of the nursery. I choose a metallic blue, and plan to hang throbbing Christmas lights to make it look like the night sky.

Sunday, March 18

Fifth Bradley Birthing Class. We are each asked to look at our spouse and say something to them, in front of everyone, about how things are going. I say to Toni how great a mother I think she is going to be, and that all I want is a healthy baby.

Monday, March 19

We go to the hospital in separate cars for a routine, bi-weekly exam. I am planning on going to an audition for a television commercial immediately afterwards, they are looking for a kind of avante-gard-ish-type art teacher, so I dress in a baggy green sweater.

"My baby is dead. I do not know where to begin."

Tuesday, March 20 (Week 30)

The baby is born at 11:14 PM. We name him Calvin after Toni's grandfather, and Baker, which is my mother's maiden name - and my brother Denny's middle name. Internally, I resist giving him the name Calvin at first, I wanted a living child named Calvin, not a dead one. But that's the point, I wanted a living child, not a dead one.

Friday, March 23

We are released from the hospital. It had been snowy and cold on Monday. Today it is summery and almost seventy degrees.

Saturday, March 24

I go to Coventry to get a few things. Toni warns me that I might be disoriented, and she was right, I was unprepared for my emotional reaction to moving through the neighborhood - it's the most familiar place in the wrld to me and that was part of the problem. I thought everyone was staring at me and I was painfully aware of my own clumsiness. I even thought I heard someone calling my name ("Mr. Hansen! Mr. Hansen!") as a rushed up the street to my car after picking up a few things from the local drug store.

A month or so later I would learn that someone was yelling my name, it was Roseanne from the flower store.

Sunday, March 25

We attend Toni's Writers Group, our first real social activity out of the hospital, and spend time just going over our experience.

Later we try to see "Traffic" but it was too early for that - I was overwhelmed. It's an overwhelming film, anyway, and the hand-held stuff made me nauseated.

That night we go to our Bradley Class. I think Toni is so brave to do this. I had thought in the hospital that this was the right thing to do, but I waited for Toni to mention it. We are able to say good-bye to our classmates, rather than just disappear.

Monday, March 26

Our new plumber, the Plumber-from-God (email for a reference) comes to repair our bathroom. It is an appointment I had made in the hospital.

Tuesday, March 27

We depart for Athens, Ohio for an indeterminate period of convalescing.

Wednesday, March 28

Friends from Cleveland are in Athens for a job, and we all have dinner at Casa Nueva. No one mentions the baby, they just make sad faces and talk about anything else. After dinner Toni is inconsolable.

Saturday, March 31

I read Nick Hornby's "About a Boy." Really. Also, we watch a string of videos. "I thought 'Muppets From Space' was a little too funny, and that 'Erin Brockovich' was a little too sad. 'Barcelona' just bored me ... I think, perhaps, that films about arch, self-involved nihilists are perhaps not my thing these days ..?"

April 2001

Wednesday, April 4

We return home from Athens. Toni has taken the rest of the year off from school, and I have cut back my hours at the ACLU - they tell me to come back when I am ready.

Thursday, April 5

We visit the John Lennon exhibit at the Rock Hall.

Friday, April 6

We go to the zoo, and later have our first joint therapy session.

Saturday, April 7

I resume painting the ceiling of the nursery.

Sunday, April 6

"Today was a huge day, and it was bright and warm and just a great spring day. I had a Bad Epitaph board meeting early, then Sarah, Brian, Toni and I just sat in the patio of the coffee shop, chatting a while. Toni and I had a delicious brunch and headed off to Eggshelland where they have featured this year: Babar & Celeste, Mary Poppins, Thomas the Tank Engine, Madeline and, of course, HARRY POTTER (I guessed that one.) And of course the cross and the bunny. Lots of silver and blue this year and I liked that."

That night I go to a production meeting for "The Alchemist."

Wednesday, April 11

"We were at (our therapist's) again yesterday. That was a good session. She asked us where we thought Calvin was now, perhaps spiritually, did we believe that. We were both ambivalent. I talked about having this disconnect, I wasn't as in touch with him alive as Toni was, just a little, all I have is one kick in the head and animated ultrasound memories and still photos.

"She suggested we each try having a dialogue with our son, writing one down, like a script. I will try that but I am not sure when."

I attend the photo call for "The Alchemist."

Thursday, April 12

I attend "The Dying Gaul" with my parents at Beck Center. Toni is not ready to do something so public. Neither was I. A member of the theater community comes up to me afterwards to express her sympathies - and confide in me that she has been through the exact same thing. A number of people have said this.

Friday, April 13

I coerce Tom to take me out. I phone him up and say, "I need you to take me out, and ask me about my son." We drink and talk a lot.

Connie joins us for the weekend.

Connie and Toni at Eggshelland.

Saturday, April 14

We take Connie to Eggshelland.

I look Calvin's birthday photos for the first time. I am scared to look at them, and when I see them they are not as awful as I had feared, but all I can think is "my poor boy."

Sunday, April 15

We go to see "Bridget Jones's Diary." The movie is fun, but the credits are hard. We used to try out names from movie credits for the baby.

That night I have my dream.

Thursday, April 19

We see Hal Holbrook in "Mark Twain Tonight!" We had gotten tickets before we were in the hospital, but decide to go anyway. Such a large theater, filled with so many people. It is terribly disorienting.

Friday, April 20

One month.

Saturday, April 21

"I finished the room. Not satisfactorily, there are white streaks still showing in a few places, but it was done enough and more than that, I was done. It took five weeks. Five weeks ago, on a Saturday, a beautiful Saturday (was it a beautiful Saturday?) I began painting the ceiling of my baby's nursery, unaware he was already dead. We went away to the hospital, away to Athens, I worked on it a little last week until I ran out of paint and finished it, took down the tape, picked up the trash, removed the ladders, threw away the drop cloth (someone had pee'ed on it in the past month plus) ... then it became more determined, more I knew where this is going, more let's finish this as soon as possible ... I vacuumed (perfunctorily) and undid the burlap from the rug we purchased which had arrived a few days before Calvin died and took it upstairs and laid it out and got the bedside table which I had moved from the office to paint and then into the bedroom after returning from the hospital to watch half of one of the two movies we had rented and put it in there and took my fountain from my office and filled it and put in there and went downstairs and picked up the three large, hardbound children's books, with the mini, yellow Chuck Taylors that have been sitting on them since I put them there last Christmas when (our friends) gave them to us and walked them upstairs and began to get upset and I set them on the table, like they were a dead little boy, and turned on the fountain and sat on the new, cute, purple spiral rug and I began to weep."

Friday, April 27

Denny comes to town, and we go to see the Indians play. It is really cold and we lose, but it is still fun. Kind of.

Monday, April 30

We go with Denny to the art museum to see the ancient Antioch exhibit.

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