Proof of Life

​I was told a lot of things about what having a kid would be like. The one you hear most often is that it’s life changing, and while that isn’t untrue it seems to me now that life hasn’t so much changed as it has ended and began again. That there is the life before Cora and the life after; a version of reality that was put to death the morning of her birth and a new one that’s been reconstituted, reborn. But if the first time you see your baby is something like a Damascan road experience I’ve found the conversion to be more of an ongoing process. Some daily practice of realigning priorities, of slow and messy sanctification bringing up to the surface the strongest and weakest parts of myself. 

The process of physically carrying the baby brings a kind of immediacy and connection for pregnant mothers that I can’t say I had as the other parent for a long while. It wasn’t until I actually met Cora in person that I could really call myself a dad, when the anticipated idea of her suddenly and violently took on flesh. Those two days of labor were a blurred marathon. Over thirty hours made up of waiting between benchmarks measured in dilated centimeters. Not much went according to plan. She was a week late and required an eviction. Gabby’s incredible, superhuman resilience took on a whole new color when we had to pivot away from a natural water birth and towards Pitocin and an epidural. Compromises and concessions. They’ve only continued into postpartum reality, teaching us kicking and screaming to be better improvisers. 

Seeing her finally was a revelation, this alien thing burst out with an oblong head and gray skin and big open eyes. There was shock those first few moments. Ringing in the ears, hands trembling. Ten months of preparation to learn there is no preparation. Any erosion of the fear and the doubt you might go through in the lead-up beforehand can’t keep the pure, visceral reality from smacking you across the face. It’s too much to comprehend. It’s hyper-real, like a waking dream often closer to a nightmare. You watch your beloved better half split her body open and you’re unable to stop it. It looks like torture, like dying, and yet you know it’s what’s supposed to happen. It’s a trauma I’m unable to understand. It would be an insult to try. As inadequate as it often felt, my job was to support. Hold her hand, speak into her encouragement, and witness this miracle take place.

Afterwards the nurses took me to the corner of the room where they laid Cora under a heated lamp and cleaned her. On the way we passed the bowl where the afterbirth pooled and so much blood you could smell the iron. She squirmed and cried while I counted her ten purple fingers, her toes. The birthmark on her right foot. Perfect imperfections. Even with all modern technology you can never really know what the baby will look like, if they’re disfigured in some way, so in seeing her a mostly unspoken anxiety is finally quieted. The ultrasounds didn’t do her justice. She looks so much like her mother, so beautiful and well-formed. 

Two sleepless nights we stayed in the hospital practicing feeding her and picking her up and putting her down. When we leave we leave one more than when we arrived, this brand new person that didn’t exist before. Everything with her is new, everything a first time and terrifying. That’s one thing they don’t tell you, generally speaking. They’ll say it’s amazing, joyous, the best thing on earth. There’s truth in all of that, but just as true is the aggravation, the anxiety, the terror. The unnameable fear lurking behind your shoulder when you put your hand to her chest as she sleeps to confirm she is, in fact, still breathing. The stakes can be no higher. Your entire world is encased in this fragile little image of God that against the odds you co-partnered to create. You wonder how there could’ve ever been a time when she wasn’t here. How much less complete your life was before her and you didn’t realize it. This flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. She is Gabby and she is me and yet she’s entirely herself. It’s a paradox you hold in your arms, a holy mystery you’d gladly die for.

It continues to amaze me how every person who’s ever lived all began this way. It’s the most obvious thing in the world yet the gravity of it goes usually unnoticed without having the firsthand experience as a stark reminder. Regardless of who you grow up to be, once you were also this small and so totally helpless you could do almost nothing on your own. You wouldn’t be here today unless someone was willing to wake up in the middle of the night to feed you and swaddle you and wipe your butt. In other words, to do for you what you couldn’t do for yourself. This is what love is. Fidelity. Sacrifice. It shatters the dual myths of independence and the self-made person. You can call this need for community just an evolutionary imperative if you want but I think there’s more to it. Nobody exists because they chose to. There is a love that precedes us. A higher, holy love which redeems suffering and can even transcend death.  

Time is different now. It’s slipperier, more elastic. It seems to slow down during the days only to catch up all at once after a few weeks or months. It’s now more than ever the most precious commodity there is and there’s never enough of it; not for a paternity leave, not to sleep, not to grieve. It can coalesce in the most unfortunate of circumstances, as I learned after Cora entered the world only three weeks after my dad departed it. How the hospital in which she was born was the same as his death; same parking garage, same staff for whom it was just another work day. The hand I use to cradle my daughter’s face is the one which felt the cold stillness of Dad’s arm after we’d stood in honor to watch him draw his last breath. Bookends. Endings and beginnings. These two events forever intertwined, standing like totemic parallels on the fulcrum of my life. If ever there was a moment I could point to as to when I finally, officially entered adulthood it was in the span of those days. 

For everything there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die. Having now witnessed both back to back I can say they have a lot in common. Both surreal experiences; sacred and ritualized but also ugly and clinical and unbelievably painful. Death may be an enemy one day to be destroyed but it’s also just apart of the deal of being human. We are finite creatures living far outside of Eden in a shadowland of the dead and the dying. We huddle around cookfires grouped in the cold dark awaiting our destruction, and were it not for the cross, that’s all we would be. But the fire is from the spirit of God which existed before us and will be here after and gives shape and purpose to creation. Why suffering seems to be so much a dominant part of that design remains an open question. It’s there the day we’re born, through every drawn-out developmental stage, all the way to our end. I’d like to believe it isn’t necessary for right flourishing. My gut says it might be otherwise. 

This life I’ve received is more than I could’ve imagined. More in every way, for good and for bad. Every joy I experience with Cora is twinned by the sorrow of Dad’s absence and it remains a bitter conundrum with no satisfactory answer. Such is life. Confusing, painful, bittersweet. It’s so many things all at once and now Cora has the privilege of living it; the free gift of existence but the burden of it too. A gift that can, at its worst, seem like a curse. She’ll sooner or later face disappointment, adversity. She may, at times, forget the value of what she’s been given as we often do. So I try to pray for her as I know Dad prayed for me. That she wouldn’t make the mistakes I’ve made. That with cruciform integrity she’d be able to mitigate the avoidable hurts of life and withstand the unavoidable. 

I hope to be with her many years, more than I had with my dad. But for every road there’s an end. One day I’ll be gone too, on to take the seat at the communion table prepared ahead for me, and Cora will be left in the place where I am now. This liminal, contradictory place where doubt and faith are able to cohabitate and a cleaner type of grief is possible whose wound isn’t so prone to infection. Where your heart might overflow with gratitude even as it breaks irreparably. A tragedy that is, somehow, also a gift of grace. But for now there is the present task of raising her up in this aftermath of tremendous change one step, hour, day at a time. This new normal: the world with Cora but without Dad in it. 

I find myself sometimes searching Cora’s face and mannerisms as if to find some echo of Dad’s face, Dad’s mannerisms there. Like a kind of thumbprint. Like a lasting remnant of him still here. She carries his name and genetic code. Though they never got to meet each other they are linked on the chain of my lineage, one point starting in 1952 and seventy-two years later reaching to her. She carries the baton, the receptacle of all the people who make up mine and Gabby’s ancestries; all those sinners who lead flawed and compromised lives full of struggle with varying stories of failure and success. They are memories now. Old photographs. What’s left of them this side of heaven only exists in the remembered past, in inherited echoes. As my father does. As I will be. The far road ahead does not belong to us, but it does belong to her.

Bringing a child into the world is a statement of faith. It’s to put forward an invested belief in a future that you won’t actually live to see. It’s saying that despite whatever imagined apocalyptic scenario may occur the earth will continue to turn on its axis, time will continue to unfold, and the life available in that hoped-for tomorrow will still be worth experiencing even with the foreknowledge that suffering and loss and even death are inevitable. To be alive is to struggle, and yet the desire of a parent is that the life they give their child is better than their own. Sometimes better in inches, sometimes in miles. I want to hope the world she inherits will be an improvement over the one I was born to. I hope to have hope, because Lord knows it’s a difficult thing to hold onto. 

Optimism is an inconvenient necessity for parenting, a skill only strengthened by going through the crucible of discouragement and coming out the other side. It requires perseverance, hard work applied to the long view of history where the smallest seeds planted now can one day blossom into orchards bearing good fruit. The meaning of legacy. How a life lived with agape love as its most defining characteristic can reverberate across generations; principled and devoted and generous even with its innumerable faults and admitted disfunction. A life of abundance, full with so much of what the human condition has to offer. Its happiness, sorrow, laughter, tears shared over deeply cultivated relationships. The kind of life Dad had. What I by God’s grace might have. That it would impart to Cora and teach and guide and build a bridge for her good. There’s no greater privilege found on this earth. 

Life has changed, is changing. Reality is a solid bedrock in fluid motion, beginning and ending and beginning again. Every morning is grace, every breath and heartbeat and nanosecond of existence an unmerited gift. Gratitude is the only correct posture, thankfulness to your maker for each and every day which is given freely. Count the days, for they are few, and try to rejoice and be glad in them. Remember that you are contingent, you are dust. But more than that, remember that you are loved. Redeemed. Forgiven. Embraced. Once I was my father’s son. Now I am, somehow, the father of my own child. Dad’s granddaughter. My baby, my Cora. This life that was so close to never happening.