Dear Harvey,

Yesterday, I drove to work and hoped that the tears wouldn’t ruin my makeup before I even got there. I bent with the Terwilliger Curves and I felt how different my heart is now than 11 years ago. How, in the early months after you died, I longed for a break. Just one emotion at a time, a decrease in intensity, at least. I lived under a landslide of emotions, for months that felt like decades: Grief, despair, anger, terror, isolation. Laughter, awe and pride (mostly at your sister’s milestones and antics), even happiness, at times. Also numbness, surreality, a sense of out-of-timeness. All of it, often all at once. No break. Just earth and mud, rocks and roots, spilling and filling my broken vessel of a heart.

As I hit the straight stretch of road, Mt. Hood camouflaged in clouds to my right, I felt the acute grief of those early days, all softened around the edges now that I’m used to it, used to you being gone. There was a comfort in the way it cut through me, a familiarity, a surefire way to get close to you. There was a beauty in that hard-won softness, an old knowing, a crone-like confidence. There was, as always, the longing for you, like transparent guitar strings, resonate when plucked. And so I plucked at them as the highway curved back around and opened up on the skyline of the South Waterfront, where I’d likely be dropping you at school each morning these days.

Under the towering interchanges as road took me to the right exit, I swallowed hard and dabbed the tears with my first finger, feeling in the farrago of my heart: gratitude. Which soon blended itself so completely in the mire that is become dominate. And then, solitary.

Before I’d left for work yesterday, I had messaged with your uncle, who, on the day you were born, had arrived from San Francisco as soon as humanly possibly. I had messaged with Larissa yesterday, too, about meeting her and Virag at the beach tomorrow and remembered Virag coming to sit with me in the park by our house two days after you died and how it was the first time I’d seen her cry. And how, also in the early days, Larissa sat next to me in the living room as I made a routine call to the doctor and, when I became so distraught and tearful that I couldn’t speak, she took the phone and finished the call for me. How when I was so overwhelmed months later and I started yelling at Vesta for not getting out of her carseat fast enough, Jenn put her arm tight around my shoulders, moved me gently out of the way and took my kid’s hands to lovingly help her out and then gave of us each the hug we needed. When Heather and Emilia, your midwives, came over and called for months just as if there was a newborn to tend to, but instead tended to my newborn grief. When Natalie, my best friend from college, appeared at the entrance of the funeral and I didn’t even know she’d be coming. When Kira showed up at our door with her massage table, more than once, and quietly cared for our aching bodies and hearts. When my Grandma had a tree planted in her front yard for you. When my cousin Dana sent a bouquet, that year and this year, too. How Papa wrote a poem and stood up at your funeral to read it and how your Abuela, his ex-wife, went up there as he cried reading it and put her arm around his shoulders to bolster him. How Michael, my chosen brother, came and parked his car outside of our house many days after work and just sat there, to be there but to not intrude. Our sentry.

So much gratitude and this is only a small fraction of the people and the gestures, the love and support that we received and continue to receive. Without you, and with all that I have discovered, become used to, carried the burden of, I can hold it all now. All at once, in my giant heart that has grown into the shape of your absence. Not only can I hold it, but I revel in it now. I feel so alive, so wholly human, when the landslide comes now. And when the silt settles in the bottom of my heaven sized heart, when I take the next curve, dry-eyed and ready for my work day, all I’m left with is gratitude.

I hit the crest of the Marquam bridge and my beautiful, favorite city opened up its full scape to me. I remembered the moment I felt gratitude and joy, impossibly, on this very day 11 years ago. It’s in my book, so I don’t even have to write it anew. It was one of the best moments of my life and here it is: When you were named.

I love you, boy. Happy 11th birthday.

Love, Mom

(An excerpt from my book in progress: Harvey was born at home and whisked away in an ambulance within a dozen minutes of his birth, as he didn’t have a heartbeat and couldn’t be resuscitated. His dad and my then-husband, Danny, left with him to the closest ER and then once stabilized to a hospital with a better equipped NICU, while I finished labor and recovered enough to get to the hospital.)

“I don’t remember the ride to the NICU, who was driving, which roads we took except that every bounce, every bump, every jostle, hurt. They brought a wheelchair to the parked car and every crack in the sidewalk and bump in the pavement reverberated hot shocks from deep in my belly, down to my torn vagina and into my aching legs. I was wheeled down the uneven sidewalk, through the halls, against the metal grid of where the elevator met the floor. I flinch and wince and suck air in through my gritted teeth. I am getting to my baby.

The NICU doors are locked, secure. Someone pushes a button and we were buzzed in. Big white double doors swing mechanically, opening with a slow grace. The staleness of the medical world. The tan on tan on off-white of the doors and walls and window frames. The buzzing quiet. Through the second set of doors, there is a sign that says we must wash our hands before entering: everyone must, the babies are fragile. I can’t stand up at the sink so someone puts milky foam sanitizer into my hands and it is minty cold as I rub it into my palms. 

“This is Harvey’s mom,” a nurse says. I can hardly believe my ears. 

He named him Harvey. The delight blooms across my entire face. Baby Brother finally has a name. Harvey. The name I chose of the two we had it narrowed down to. We couldn’t agree so decided to wait until we saw him. Certain his countenance would decide. The baby I have never held, the baby who never made a sound, who didn’t open his eyes, laid limp in the arms of his midwives, has a name and, yes, here I am. I am Harvey’s mom.

At some point that morning, alone in one or the other hospital, in shock and sobbing, my nearly forty year-old husband must have been asked what his son’s name was and whether with delay or promptly, with great thought and consideration or just off the tip of his tongue, he said: Harvey. Harvey Richard Walker. And there he was. Born again in the naming, coming to life as he lay dying. Harvey Richard Walker.

I am beaming, ecstatic, joyful, still high from becoming Harvey’s mom just then as I see Danny stumbling down the sterile hallway towards me. He is red faced and sobbing. Arms reaching out to me, zombie-like, desperate and relieved to see me and also not wanting to see me at all. Never wanting to see or know me in this circumstance, in this NICU, in what we are heading towards. I sit there, grinning ear to ear, like an idiot. Still in his house shoes, all these hours later, he falls into my arms, onto the wheel chair and I hold him and say joyfully, “You named him Harvey! You named him Harvey!” over and over again.” And he sobs and sobs.