16
There is new life today. Both on Earth and up here.
This morning, Autumn and I sensed new souls in our house. (She is my roommate now, and I finally have the sister I never did before. We spent the first night together, and I had not been happier since I died.) A family of three, two young parents and a baby, were driving down a highway in the middle of the afternoon near their home in Washington State when an old overpass collapsed on top of their car. Death came instantly to all three, a crash and then a whisper and then nothing, and forever opened up. They came here because they are waiting to see how their extended families deal with the loss before they cross over. As Autumn and I watch, they walk up the steps, smile up at their new home, and then cuddle their smiling baby together, a young and pristine family of three forever. Their baby will never grow up, and the couple will never decay and age and have to move into a nursing home together, confined and restricted by dementia and disease. Their love is free for eternity. Some blessings just come in shades of grey.
I did not have very much time to sit and talk, though. Lily Taubman Nichols is in labor. But this will not be an easy labor, I learn as I rush into the maternity wing to see what I can do. There is much pacing and fretting and sighing going on, and many empty coffee cups are strewn about, Styrofoam evidence of anxious thoughts. The scene is both electric and horrific to me, as I would’ve given anything to be the one to bear Cooper’s children. Just watching it makes me want to not exist – or, rather, makes me want to not exist even more. The doctors know something is amiss, but there is a problem they have not yet noticed: the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby’s neck, and they have not detected it yet.
I close my eyes and pray, singing a song nobody can hear but me. A new baby: nothing has ever been more precious, more valuable, no matter how hard I wish to be the one birthing it. All I want is for Cooper to be happy, even though the life he is making without me is breaking me. So I put it out there into existence, send the wish into the universe like a storm: I did not die for this baby just to die, too. We have enough children up here in the grey area. We don’t need any more just yet. Cooper is such a good man, and he doesn’t deserve this. And so I gather the strength of the universe and do something to make up for it.
“So how is he?” Cooper asks at midnight, presiding over the chaotic scene from the balls of his feet. He is getting even better looking with age – I can’t ignore it even now – and the faint laugh lines and deep-set eyes have done nothing but make him look like someone who has finally come into himself. There is nothing more appealing in the universe, a beautiful man who is in control of the world around him. I think of how strange it is that my boy is about to be a father, how quickly my loved ones are all growing up, how thoroughly I am being left behind.
Nurses are darting here and there, and everyone in the family is still worried at the baby’s plummeting vitals. But I know what they don’t: in the last moment, the hand of God or the universe (or me) intervened and unwrapped that cord from the baby’s neck like a child tenderly opening a gift on Christmas morning. And he was born healthy. Cooper has already seen enough heartbreak and loss, and this little life was not meant to fade yet. I made sure of that.
Tears seep down whatever body I have here as I look down into the cold, sterile, hopeful hospital hallway. I spent so much time there as an Unliving that I do not enjoy going back – this time, though, I can make an exception. Still, I wonder: is Cooper thinking of me right now? He never speaks of me. Does he ever even think of me at all? Does he wish this scene was unfolding with me as the star instead of Lily? What is going on beneath that beautiful golden head of his? All I want is to be there, to get back to a time when I was young and alive and made of flesh and blood. It shouldn’t be like this. I should’ve loved him right when I had the chance. But at least I could do this much.
“Congratulations,” the doctor tells Cooper as relief floods his face like summer waves in a tidal pool. “You are now the father of one very healthy baby boy.”
And for a moment, I am almost human again.
But soon I realize I am too close. As Cooper’s family breaks out the cheap gas station champagne, I remember that I am watching too intently. I am observing too much. This is their moment to share, not mine to barge in on. And as much as this annihilates me to admit, Cooper is Lily’s husband, not mine, and this is their baby. So I kiss the child on the head one last time and then, letting my hand linger on Cooper’s cheek as I pass, my touch filled with the possibilities of what could have been, I wrap myself in the stars and drift on.