Rites and Rituals

It was four in the morning; the hospital was quiet when I walked into the utility room on the ninth floor. One nurse was tending to them, three stillborn babies. They were lying there on the stainless steel counter, with a camera beside them. Their tiny bodies had been wrapped up in blankets and they were wearing little knit hats. Two of the hats were blue, one was pink. They had all been born too soon, after only sixteen to twenty-four weeks in their mother’s wombs. Now they were here all cleaned up, made presentable, and waiting for the nurse to take their pictures. The bereavement support staff calls these pictures mementos. “Three already tonight,” the nurse said out loud to herself as she straightened a hat and focused the camera. I don’t know how the nurses do it.

I was shocked the first time I saw this cleaning, wrapping and covering up. Only after all that is the baby returned to the mother. The pregnant mother rarely has time to accept that her baby has died. Usually she calls and comes in when she doesn’t feel movement. Sometimes it is discovered at a regular OB visit or during a sonogram. Nothing can prepare her for it and the side effects of early induced labor. She suffers fever, nausea, vomiting and pain until suddenly the baby is expelled. The stillbirth is taken from the room while the doctor waits for the placenta to pass.

That first time I watched a stillborn I had delivered being returned to her mother I followed the nurse back into the labor room where the mother was still recovering. The mother turned and watched us come closer. “Do you want to see your baby, to touch it?” I asked. I helped her open the blankets and take off the hat. I held the baby as the mother reached to touch a hand and to look down to see if it was a boy or a girl. I watched as she caressed its skin and then slowly covered the baby again.

This showing, this touching, confirms the fact that there really was a baby, and we, the doctor and nurses, have witnessed this birth. Resembling an open casket chance to say good bye, this is a comfort to the mother.

When my father died in his own bed, his children, all ten of us, were there. Ours was a musical family, so we had come home to sing him to heaven. When he took his last breath I walked out of his bedroom to call the undertaker. But my brothers and sisters stayed, removed his sweat-drenched pajamas and washed his body.

They dressed him in his grey suit, the one I had brought him just two winters earlier. I had taken it along with his red paisley tie and white shirt to the two-hour cleaners just that morning. I don’t know why I had made such an effort to insure freshly cleaned clothes. My father hadn’t. He used to leave his ties knotted and hung over hooks. I don’t think one was ever dry cleaned. But it made it handy when he was in a hurry. He just slipped one over his head and tightened it up.

We didn’t place his glasses on him, but a World War II medal I had pinned on his pajamas earlier when I arrived was removed and placed on his lapel. Two of my five sisters had their pictures taken with him while the other three and my four brothers waited in the living room with me. We watched for the hearse to back up to the living room door.

This ritual of washing and dressing the dead is as old as death itself. The taking of pictures is as new as photography. There is some evidence to show that stillbirth photographs, over time, help baby-less mothers find relief. Some say that with a picture the baby is remembered as more human. Many mothers have nightmares about abnormal babies, and seeing the photographs makes the memory less monstrous. I wonder if these mothers hold the pictures over their bellies when the emptiness seems too much to bear.

The first ritual dressing used to be baptism. Both sexes wore the same white gowns and bonnets. I have a complete ensemble including the booties in my office waiting room. Next to it is a shelf holding a baby’s first spoon and bowl painted with circus animals.

More than once, late at night when the chaplain has gone home, I have been asked by grieving parents to baptize their stillborn infant. I could leave it for the nurses but these are my patients. So I become a priest and honor the request. I enter the utility room again. I turn on the facet in the sink and wait for the water to warm. I don’t know why I do this, the baby is not alive, the baby doesn’t know, it can’t feel, it is dead. I do it anyway.

I lift the baby from the stainless steel counter top. Holding it in my left hand—it is so small I don’t need two hands to hold it—I check the water with my right hand, as if I am checking the temperature of milk in a bottle before feeding. And I softly sprinkle a few drops of this suddenly, holy tap water on its head. I hear myself saying, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize you.”

It is not because I believe. In fact, I do not believe that these dead infants are lost souls in need of absolution. I have read the theology of man’s carnal nature. Standing here in front of the sink it doesn’t make any sense.

I have done what I was asked. I still wonder. Now that all hope is gone, do the parents grasp at their belief in another life? In the midst of their loss do they still have faith? To me this rite shows that the baby belonged to them, that it is included in their family traditions, that it has a history.

The first rule of medicine is “do no harm.” So I have wondered if baptism by a nonbeliever would affect the outcome of the ritual. I once asked a Catholic priest and he said it didn’t matter. “In cases of emergency, its okay,” he said. I wondered if he was just trying to avoid driving down to the labor floor in the middle of the night.

The most wonderful baptisms I ever witnessed were officiated by my severely handicapped older brother. Donald was born in the second-floor procedure room of Dr. Vernoy’s clinic in Cortland, New York. After a three-day labor my mother delivered, as my father the general practitioner would say, a “blue baby.” He was her third pregnancy; the first ended in an early miscarriage, the second in a premature baby boy who lived only a few hours.

Donald, the first child to survive and give my parents hope for a family, was not able to graduate from kindergarten. I sat in the car outside the school the night of his parent-teacher conference, the one that would send him home from school for good.

There were no special education programs then. There were no classes for kids with disabilities. There were private schools where children from wealthy families could be kept out of the way, keeping them from embarrassing their families. The only public institutions were mental hospitals. Many severely handicapped children just ended up at home behind closed doors.

This may have been one of the reasons my father bought a sixty acre farm. It was a place Donnie could walk around on his own. He could stand out in the pasture with Terrie the pinto horse, or drive Jersey, our brown milk cow, into the barn, sort of following along with his left hand on her hind quarters.

As he grew older, Donald spent most of the summer in the family pool. It was large with gradually sloping sides. He was safe. I always looked to see what bathing suit he would be wearing. In the middle of his teenage development he exhibited different choices. Sometimes it was his, sometimes my father’s, sometimes one of my mother’s elegant one piece suits. I didn’t know about gender identification and thought he liked the one that felt best that day.

He was always the first one in and would yell out, “Hey Tommy, come over here and let me baptize you!” Donnie didn’t believe in sprinkling. He believed in total immersion, without knowing what it meant. I was fully aware that each time I had to be prepared to come up by myself. Donny understood only the part about putting me under. Then standing there in my mother’s baby blue bathing suit, he would raise his right hand over my head. With his left he would push me down, deep down to the bottom of the pool. As I went beneath the surface I could hear him saying, “I baptize you in the name…..”

Donald always wanted to be baptized. He would ask my father every Sabbath, “I want to be baptized, can I be baptized?” My father was not embarrassed by his handicapped son and took him everywhere the family went. But Dad thought of Sabbath as a solemn occasion and was afraid that Donald might cause disruption to the service. Father was also of the firm conviction that to be a candidate for the rite of baptism, you needed a full understanding of its meaning—confession, death to self, rebirth to life eternal. My father talked about his belief that Donald would be made whole in the next life, the life in heaven. He would sing in the heavenly choir. And with his warm personality he would find himself surrounded by angel friends.

I am not sure why Donald was so taken the rite of baptism. It could have been to emulate Pastor Walton Smith, maybe he liked the music. He knew all the hymns. His favorite was “Shall We Gather at the River.” I will never know. But I did know that it was important to him. So I took the risk of letting him baptize me. Sometimes, I would have to struggle to get my feet underneath me. Sometimes, I would come up gasping. I did it because it was clear to me that for him, taking part in something was more important than what it might mean. He was interested in belonging, not in the consequences or rewards. To be baptized was to belong.

For thirty years Donnie asked. At the end of each baptismal service in church a call went out for those who wanted to be born again and accept the rite of baptism. Donnie always stood up. My father finally agreed, but not in a formal church service. So one Sabbath afternoon the family drove up to Sam Sutton’s RV Campground in Truxton and gathered at the pool, a dammed-up creek. Donald walked right in but wouldn’t let the minister take him under. He laughed a laugh that said he was not sure about this and was frightened. He ended up sort of baptizing himself. He came up happy.

My own church baptism was a somber affair. My family hoped against all hope that it would take. We wore baptismal robes, black for the men, white for the women, dressing for the death to self, dressing for the new life. I remember as a candidate walking down the steps and into the water. I noticed the pastor’s and my robes floating up around us. The thought crossed my mind that we looked like hand puppets, the robe a long sleeve for the puppeteer.

Others were baptized that day. My best friend Biffy Chapin took the plunge. The church was really worried about him. At fourteen he could already do “The Stroll,” a dance of self expression, of coming into your own. There was Candi Luss who could play baseball like a boy. And finally there was Evelyn Wolfe, a large woman in her forties who played the guitar and sang Dale Evans songs. “Peace in the Valley” was her favorite.

Pastor Nelson had left the construction business to be a minister, so the sermon was rough cut. In fact, I can’t remember anything other than the see/saw rhythm of this voice. Then the Nelson boy, Ray, played the violin with his mother and everyone was glad to get out to a pot luck lunch.

Rites and Rituals, sometimes when I am baptizing stillborns at the hospital, it seems rites and rituals are all we have. Like those grieving patients, like Donnie, like me—even when we don’t understand—we still want a record, a family history. We still want to belong. That is why I do what my patients need me to do. I do what I can. I do no harm.