The Saturday after Thanksgiving, the day after we buried my Uncle Vince, Nico Alistair Galownia burst forth from his mother, my little sister, and brought with him exuberance and despair in a matter of seconds in a true demonstration of the universe’s capacity to fuck your shit up.
We were gathered at Camp Grampa, where Shannon was improvising a dinner out of some frozen hamburgers and turnips, seeing if a change of scenery could put the grief one layer lower for my sweet Aunt Becky, a woman who just a month before was in this same kitchen, improvising a dinner of fried green tomatoes and fried blue gill that she and Vince had caught, in an effort to get our grief one layer lower.
We got word earlier in the day that Leiah was headed to the hospital to deliver her son, a fella who’d made her belly so big strangers couldn’t contain their “whoa”s when she walked by, earlier that day, so I sent a text to David at 5:50pm to see how it was going. We got right in on the action when he replied “Dialted and pushing. Home stretch.”
In an attempt to do something with all the excitement, Susan and Becky trimmed the little Christmas tree Susan had put up in the living room. I collected bets for weight from everybody in the room to make it competitive.
Finally at 7:37pm my phone tings and there is my nephew, Nico Alistair. A beefy red baby, 19 inches long, 8lbs. 13 oz. Isaac won.
His dad let us in on his name, which wasn’t a guarantee, and told us that he was a super chill baby. And just as quickly as joy filled every cell in my body, fear crept in. Leiah had a huge 800 gram clot that was preventing her uterus from clamping down. She was hemorrhaging, and even though she was in the best place to hemorrhage, a place with blood and surgeons, and even though I knew they’d take the whole uterus out before they’d let it kill my sister, I was afraid. Leiah later told me she didn’t realize that many hands could fit in a vagina. David said, “The whole hospital was in there.”
Fortunately the fear only lasted for an hour before Leiah stabilized. She got blood and the hands that were inside her body did what they needed to do. We got pictures of her, smiling, pale and covered with a mountain of blankets, but alive and having achieved another echelon of love.
Her family was complete, bookended by boys, little girls in the sweet center, and her record for biggest cheeks broken. Though it didn’t take away the loss that brought us together, Nico’s arrival bandaged our family with hope, with certainty that life goes on, that happiness will still bridge the sadness. He reminded me that the terrible things that are going to come our way will be made better by our cohesion and that even in the darkest times, there are beams of light to cling to.
Welcome to the tribe, little man. I hope you love being one of us as much as we love you.
