Life as a babylost mother can seem full of unanswerable questions.
“Is this your first?”
“How many children do you have?”
Or even, in the early days, “How are you?”
Some days, finding the energy to prepare an answer, be it sullen or witty, seems too much. But I had prepared the response to one particular question when my second born, Liam, was only four months gestation: I knew what I was going to tell him when he asked me what had happened to his sister’s body.
I had gotten the idea from a little, tattered green book called When a Baby Dies. The book contained a short story about a family in England whose third child had passed away. The parents decided to let the older children, who were six and nine years old at the time, decide what to do with the baby’s body, which had been placed into a box. They told the children they could return the body to the earth by burying the baby’s box beneath the ground, or return her to the air by placing the box on a special fire, which would turn her body into smoke. How simple and lovely they made it sound.
The question of what to do with our daughter’s body was huge for me. When the social worker asked if I wanted my baby to be buried or cremated, I slipped from stunned numbness, leaning over my still-pregnant and laboring belly, and began to heave the hugest, deepest sobs. All I wanted to do was bring my baby home. In the end, we chose to cremate Charlotte. This decision was made based purely on the fact that we ourselves would choose cremation over burial, so it only made sense to choose this for our child.
Liam knew that Charlotte’s body wasn’t here anymore, but he saw her pictures all over her house, so he knew that she once was. Whenever we talked about Charlotte’s death, we explicitly divided the body and soul in order to set the stage for my answer when Liam did ask what had happened to her body. We always told him that a person has two parts: the body, which does the moving and the walking and the talking, and the spirit, which does the thinking and the feeling. We told him that when a person dies, their body stops working, but the part that does the thinking and the feeling goes to live in the stars.
Our family doesn’t really have a true heaven concept, rather the idea that the spirit is still lurking around somewhere, that sometimes she’s here, and sometimes she’s there, and we never quite know where she might be.
But, for what seemed like the longest time, he never asked the question: what happened to Charlotte’s body?
Finally, when he was three and a half, we were lying in his bed together one night in the semi-dark, with the sloped ceiling cradling us in his warm, quilted bed. The lullaby CD was playing and we were lying there, just quietly, because he wanted some company.
Out of the darkness he asked, “Do we still have Charlotte’s bones?”
This was it. He loved dinosaurs, and he understood that when something is dead, sometimes you can still see the bones.
“No, we don’t have Charlotte’s bones. Are you wondering what happened to Charlotte’s body after she died?”
He nodded, and curled his body a little deeper into the comma of my belly. I took a breath, and gave him the answer that I had spent all these years preparing.
“When a person dies,” I said, “you have the choice to return their body to the earth by burying them, or return them to the air by holding their body over a special fire that turns them into smoke. Daddy and I chose to have Charlotte returned to the air. And because her body wasn’t working anymore, it didn’t hurt. We still have a little jar with the ashes that are left.”
I stopped explaining, and waited for Liam’s reply. I was almost afraid. Would he be horrified? Terrified? There was a moment of silence. Then he spoke.
“Can wood turn into smoke?”
“Yes, honey, it can.”
“Can paper?”
“Yes.”
And that was all. We listed into silence again, the lullabies playing in the dark.
I was reminded once again how simple it is to be a three-year-old, when it seems almost okay that your sister turned into smoke, just like the logs in your fireplace, and where any answer is as good as anything else, as long as your mom is really listening to you and answering the questions that you have.
I hugged him tightly, remembering that the things that seem most complicated to us adults sometimes don’t seem so strange to the children around us.
Carol McMurrich lives and writes in Western Massachusetts, surrounded by her husband, two living children, and the spirit of Charlotte Amelia. She runs a community resource and support group for babylost families.