Dear Jordan,
Before he left for Iraq, your father was preparing for two lives. One week he would be drilling his soldiers in the rules of engagement for confronting a lethal enemy, the next clutching my hand and staring in amazement at ultrasound images of you. How he coped with such incongruity—the peril and the promise—I will never know. There was little I could do to help him maintain his balance.
I tried to protect him any way I could, just as he tried to do the same for me. He said almost nothing about the missions he would lead. I never told him about those days in my first trimester when it looked as if your health might be in doubt.
Charles and I had always lived disparate lives, but now the distance between us seemed immense. At Fort Hood, he spent his mornings sharpening his shooting skills and studying maps of Iraq. I spent mine behind a desk shaping coverage of that day’s news—when I was not bent over a toilet vomiting. It was only in the evenings that we had the chance to connect. In long phone conversations, we discussed baby names or the advice I had gleaned from my growing stack of prenatal books. I told Charles of my excitement the day the doctor calculated my due date, March 25, 2006, and about how I could not stop patting and rubbing my still relatively flat stomach. Charles asked how much weight I had gained, advised me to add more protein to my diet or to drink more water, and reminded me to take my prenatal vitamins. I had never answered to a man in my life, certainly not about my weight, but this intimacy felt right.
Still, we did have secrets, and keeping them was easy from a distance. I didn’t mention the morning I became flushed and dizzy on the subway and ended up sitting against a filthy steel column in Grand Central Station, legs splayed out in front of me. Two police officers asked if I needed an ambulance. I managed to say that I was pregnant and just needed to rest a minute. I sucked on a few pieces of peppermint candy until I regained my energy and slowly made my way to the office. After a check of my blood pressure and a nap in the medical department, I had recovered enough to work the rest of the day.
Charles called that evening, just as I was drifting off to sleep.
“How are you feeling, Ma?” he asked, using the new nickname he had adopted when he found out I was expecting. (I secretly detested it, but he fell into it so easily, I didn’t have the heart to tell him.)
“Fine, just tired. How was your day?”
“All right. Just busy.”
We were working so hard to shield each other that it sometimes didn’t leave much to say.
We established a routine. He began his workday at 5 a.m. and usually did not make it home before 9 p.m., when he would call to check on me while he ironed his uniform or ate, usually a ready-made salad and a steak or canned tuna. On weekends and the rare occasions when he left work by 7 p.m., we ate dinner while we talked on the phone and called it “family meal time.” As my pregnancy progressed, I needed to eat earlier and it became more difficult to stay awake for our phone calls. At times, I fell asleep with Charles still talking. He would remain on the line listening to me breathe until he started to doze himself. The sound soothed him, he said, and was a nice end to his day.
“Even when I snore?”
“You purr,” he said.
Except for the morning sickness and occasional dizziness, my first trimester went well until the evening in early August when I walked into my bedroom and doubled over with a pain so intense that it felt like my ovaries were on fire. I stumbled to the phone in a panic.
“I want you to go to the emergency room,” my doctor said calmly. “I hope it’s not an ectopie pregnancy.”
I called my best friend, Miriam, crying hysterically, and asked between sobs for her to meet me at the hospital. She wanted to come get me, but I said it would be quicker to meet there. I knew that was the right call, but I had never felt more alone than on that cab ride to the hospital.
Miriam and I had birthdays only four days apart, and we joked that we were twins who were easy to distinguish because one was tall and black and the other short and white. She was the New York City bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer, but we had met as interns and later cub reporters at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland and had been friends for almost twenty years. We knew most of each other’s secrets and had seen each other through boyfriend blues, career calamities, and dieting dramas. Since she was a fellow Clevelander, Charles called her “home girl,” and we chose her to be your godmother. I loved having her so close, especially with your father so far away. But I had not expected to need her so much so soon.
When I lifted my head off the hospital pillow that night, still sobbing, and saw Miriam standing there, the fear on her face made me cry harder. She hugged me and asked what the doctors had said. I explained that they were giving me intravenous fluids because I was dehydrated but that they couldn’t tell me anything until I had a sonogram.
“I can’t lose this baby. I can’t.”
“Dana, don’t think that. I’m sure everything is fine.”
A doctor wheeled in a machine and I held my breath when the image appeared on the screen. The pregnancy was definitely not ectopie and the fetus’s heartbeat was normal, the doctor said. He couldn’t explain the pain but said the dehydration might have contributed to it. Miriam and I hugged and sighed heavily.
It was past i a.m. when I got home, and Charles had left several messages on my answering machine. I knew I would lie to him in the morning and say that I had turned off the ringer to get some sleep. I would not say how much that day had scared me or how alone I felt. His shoulders were plenty broad, but Charles already had a hundred men leaning on them, and I was determined not to further weigh him down.
I would soon keep another, more difficult secret. It had to do with the tests that screen for fetal abnormalities.
I have always believed that a woman has a right to decide whether to end a pregnancy, but I could not envision choosing to have an abortion myself, even to save my own life. My conviction was based on my faith, unconventional though it was. The God I worshiped understood my quirks and failings and allowed me to be human. He knew that I was trying to live a virtuous life, if not a perfect one. My commitment to my unborn child was part ofthat faith, and I knew I could never discard my baby because a test determined that he or she was not perfect.
“How would you feel if, God forbid, we had a disabled baby?” I asked Charles one day.
He did not have to think long.
“I’m already praying that we have a healthy baby, but I’ll love it no matter what,” he said.
“I’m glad you feel that way because I don’t want to have any of the prenatal tests doctors tell older mothers they’re supposed to have. Is that all right with you?”
Charles said it was. He also believed in my right to make my own decisions about my body.
The next part I did not tell him about.
Early in the second trimester, my doctor recommended that I consult with a genetic counselor and schedule an amniocentesis. When I declined, she was first perplexed, then irritated. She urged me several times to reconsider, then asked if she could order a non-invasive blood test that would screen for Down syndrome but would not provide a definitive diagnosis. I relented simply to satisfy her and move on. The test results were normal, and that seemed the end of the matter. Then, during my next appointment, she sent me for what I assumed was more routine blood work. I was sitting at my desk at work when she called with the results.
One of the tests had revealed a problem, she said: a high risk of Down syndrome.
My heart sank. “What are you talking about? What test?”
She said that she had ordered a more accurate test during my last appointment and the results were different from the previous one. “You need to see a genetic counselor immediately, and I want you to have an amniocentesis quickly.”
What she meant was that time was ticking away for me to have an abortion if there was a fetal abnormality. I was furious.
“Ms. Canedy, you’re an intelligent woman and I don’t understand why you don’t want to have all the information available to you,” she said. “You don’t have to act on it, but if the baby has Down syndrome, it will need specialists and you’ll need to prepare yourself.”
I hesitated, searching for the right words.
“I’m going on faith that God will give me whatever baby he wants me to have. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will be perfectly healthy, but I’ll love it regardless,” I said. “And if my baby needs specialists, then he or she will have them. This is exactly the path that I didn’t want to be on and now you’ve sent me down it anyway.”
I hung up trembling and set about finding a new physician. When I told Charles a week later that I had switched doctors, he wanted to know why. It had to do with my health insurance, I said.
One of my guiding principles is always to look people in the eye and speak the truth. Even so, telling your father those lies seemed like the loving thing to do. His training might determine his survival, and I was concerned that he might lose his concentration if he was anxious about my pregnancy.
As I later found out, Charles was keeping secrets of his own. He had alluded to problems at work but refused to be specific. He also did not tell me until weeks after the fact that he had had laser eye surgery to correct his vision so as to avoid having to wear glasses in the heat in Iraq.
“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked, exasperated. “I would have come to take care of you.”
“Dana, you didn’t need to be flying here pregnant to look after me. I was fine, and it’s over with now.”
I was upset even though I had no right to be. What else was he not saying?
By the time summer faded into fall, I had a definite baby bulge, and the nausea and fatigue had passed. Charles found time late that October to take a break in his training, and I scheduled an ultrasound appointment for the week of his visit. It would be the first time he would see what I looked like carrying his child.
When he walked into the apartment and saw me standing in front of him, he stared as if I were a rare and fragile flower that he longed to stroke but was too afraid to touch. I laughed and grabbed his hands and placed them on my stomach. He fell to his knees, kissed the spot just below my navel, and rested his head there.
“You look beautiful, Ma,” he said when he rose to look into my eyes.
Looking at the sonogram together was magical. I had been attending all my doctor appointments alone until that week and had tried to suppress my sadness at seeing so many other men accompanying their pregnant wives and partners. Now at last my man was beside me.
The technician called us into an exam room, and I hoisted myself up onto the table and lifted my shirt so she could smear cold conduction gel on my stomach. She pulled a chair next to me for Charles and proceeded to maneuver a wand over my belly. Then, there it was, a head and a spine and tiny little fingers. I heard Charles gasp and then he rose to lean over me. He kissed me with such love in his eyes. Then he sat back down, mesmerized, as the technician pointed to a tiny heart and two little feet. She moved the wand around again, and the little life on the screen began to perform, gulping amniotic fluid and raising a hand near an ear.
It was important to us to find out before your father left for Iraq if we were having a boy or a girl. Now, to our joy, we learned that we were expecting a son.
We continued to look at the screen, stunned by our good fortune, captivated.
Then the technician said, “Uh oh.”
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
She and Charles laughed.
“Not at all, but boys will be boys.”
“What does that mean?”
“He found his privates,” Charles said.
“No way!” I said, sitting up to get a better look at the screen. “Are you sure?”
They were laughing at me now.
“Oh honey, he’s just discovering his body,” the technician said.
“Well, don’t take a picture ofthat,” I said.
We packed all we could into that precious week, spending hours looking at cribs. I decided on a black wooden model with sleek lines and a mattress with memory foam for added support
“Memory foam?” Charles said, furrowing his brow. “What does a baby need with a memory foam mattress?”
I was crestfallen.
“Charles, we have to support his little head and back,” I said. It was as if he had asked why we needed diapers.
“I might have to get another job to pay for it, but if this is the one you want, we’ll get it,” he said.
I turned my attention to a CD player that could be attached to the side of the crib. “We’ll need it to play lullabies,” I said before he could register an objection.
I made a mental note to come back another time for the wet-wipes warmer.
It was too soon to be buying car seats and changing tables, but we did anyway, because I wanted your father to participate in as much of my pregnancy as possible—to carry with him the memory of shopping for his “miracle child.” That week it was as though Charles was trying to memorize everything about me. He watched me walk, stomach poking out; followed me into the kitchen when I cooked; and gazed at my image in the bathroom mirror as I applied my makeup.
As I lay in his arms one night, I felt a gentle thumping and grabbed his hand. “Feel this,” I said, placing his hand on my belly. He could not detect the movement.
“Soon,” I said. “You’ll be able to feel it soon.”
I wanted so desperately for him to feel the little kicks before he left.
After that visit, he became even more protective, which made me grateful but at times tested my patience. We were both on edge as the day of his departure for Iraq drew closer.
“What are you doing, Ma?” he asked on the phone one evening.
“Making a cup of tea,” I said.
“Well, don’t reach over your head in the cabinet to get the cup,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“My mom said that if you reach over your head when you’re pregnant the umbilical cord can get wrapped around the baby’s neck and strangle it.”
“Charles, that’s just an old wives’ tale,” I said.
“Well, my mom’s a nurse and she said it’s true,” he insisted.
“I’m telling you, it’s not true and, besides, your mother didn’t work in labor and delivery.”
“Don’t talk about my mother,” he snapped.
“What? I’m not talking about your mother. I’m just saying that I’m not going to kill this baby by making tea. What will hurt the baby, though, is stress, and you’re stressing me out. I’m done with this conversation.”
“Well I’m not talking to you, either,” he shot back.
We hung up in a huff.
When I answered the phone the next morning, the first thing I heard was Charles laughing, and I joined him.
“What was that?” Charles asked.
“Prenatal anxiety, I guess.”
“This baby must be thinking, ‘God, you gave me crazy parents,’“ he said.
Although we had spent hours choosing baby paraphernalia, we had put off deciding when to get married.
“We could go on a weekend cruise before you leave and get married there,” I said.
I knew from his silence that he was not emotionally prepared to board a party ship while getting ready for a war, not even to marry me. I wondered, too, whether I wanted to rush the wedding because I feared he might die before I became his wife.
I finally asked, “Do you think we should wait until you come home to get married? It feels like we’re trying to cram a lifetime into a few months.”
Ever chivalrous, he said he wanted whatever I wanted. I knew he did not want me to think that he had had a change of heart. So I made the call; we would wait. With only six weeks until his deployment, we had no time and energy to plan a wedding anyway. We gambled on having a lifetime to make our family official.
Even with that faith, though, it was time to put Charles’s affairs in order.
On a cold gray afternoon in early November, fitting weather for the bleak business before us, we sat at the dining room table going through a stack of documents. He had made out a stack of checks so that I could withdraw money from his account each month. He had also obtained a power of attorney that permitted me to sign on his behalf for military dependent benefits. He told me precisely when his combat pay would be deposited and how much he expected to save while he was away toward a down payment on a bigger apartment in New York and his daughter Christina’s college education.
“I won’t need to spend much money over there, so it’ll really add up,” he said proudly.
Then he handed me another document. “Put this someplace safe,” he said, “in case you need it.” I looked down and saw my name. It was a copy of the form designating his life insurance beneficiaries.
I wanted the conversation to be over, but there was more to discuss.
“Charles,” I said, my voice cracking, “If, God forbid, you should die over there, where do you want to be buried?”
He seemed at a loss. I asked if he would prefer his hometown or Arlington National Cemetery.
“Arlington would be good. It would be easier for everybody to come visit me.”
I felt a catch in my throat and stood up and walked to the bay window in the living room. Then I turned back to him. “Sweetheart, would you want me to plan your funeral?” I managed to ask.
“Absolutely not,” Charles said. “If something happens to me, you just take care of my son.”
I felt the tears welling up.
“Would you worry about my ability to raise him alone?”
“No,” he said. “Dana, I trust you more than anyone in my life. You’re going to be a great mother.”
“Can I ask you something else?” He looked at me as if I were asking for permission to breathe.
“Woman, when have I ever been able to stop you from interviewing me?”
“I’m not interviewing you. I’m just curious about something.”
“What do you want to know?”
“When people go away to war, what do they do about sex?”
Charles had gotten used to my bizarre questions, but this one was strange even for me. He looked puzzled for a second but then realized I was serious and tried to give me a thoughtful answer.
“Well, when you first get over there, you’re so scared that sex is the furthest thing from your mind. You’re just thinking about surviving and getting used to the conditions and the sounds. After a while, some soldiers do have affairs. I’m not going to lie.”
“With who? “I asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I was just thinking that if you need sex in Iraq, I mean to help get you through whatever you’re going to be facing, I want you to know that you have my permission.”
He looked at me as though I must be having some sort of pre-postpartum delusion.
“Have you lost your mind?”
“No, I’m completely serious. I can’t even imagine what being in a war is like. So I don’t know how you cope in that environment. If you get over there and you find you need somebody to hold, to get through it, I don’t want you to feel guilty. There’s nothing you could do in combat that I would hold against you. Just make sure you protect yourself at all times.”
Charles was flabbergasted.
I was making lunch a short time later and he came in the kitchen. He slid his arms around me and palmed my belly. “You are carrying my child,” he said. “I would never disrespect you by doing anything like that, you crazy woman.”
With all this talk of war and death gratuities and final wishes, the time seemed right to give Charles a gift I had been saving for him—something that had caught my eye at a stationery store.
It was a journal.
Not a blank book—a “guided” journal for fathers, with a question at the top of each page. The first one I spotted asked the writer to describe his childhood. Perhaps this would encourage Charles to jot down a few thoughts for the son he had not yet met
He sat silently on our bed, thumbing through the pages. Nearly an hour later, I found him sitting in that same spot, already writing. He wrote well into the night and for much of the next morning. He took it into the bathroom with him, wrote while he ate, and brought it to bed.
As Charles’s deployment drew frighteningly near, I began to accept the fact of his leaving. When I was five months pregnant, he made a final trip to New York for Thanksgiving and I took a week off from work. I was determined to remain upbeat, but inevitably something would upset me—like the way he kept twisting his arm and wincing. He said it was sore from the many vaccinations he had been required to get. He had received all but the one against anthrax, which wasn’t recommended for anyone who might come in contact with a pregnant woman.
“Don’t you need it?” I asked, alarmed.
“I’m not going to take anything that might hurt you or the baby.”
For the rest of the evening I worried about whether he would survive an anthrax attack. I was afraid to find out what else he had been vaccinated against, and Charles was determined to change the subject. He succeeded in distracting me when he said that there was a special item he wanted to buy the next day.
The following afternoon your father and I stood just inside the entrance of a baby superstore, feeling as lost as if we were at NASA headquarters. There were vast floors of baby gear that I wondered how my mother ever did without: a teddy bear that made simulated womb sounds, a talking potty, vibrating bouncy seats.
Our first stop was for Charles’s special item: an outfit for a newborn. He wanted me to have one that he had chosen in case I went into labor and delivered early and he missed your birth. If all went according to plan, however, Charles would be with me. He would take his allotted two-week leave early, and the doctor would induce my labor a week before my due date to help us coordinate our schedules.
I beamed as Charles searched the clothing racks and touched fabrics, trying to choose the softest one. Eventually he settled on a blue fleece sweat suit with a hood and an emblem of a football on the jacket. It looked too big for a newborn, but when he held it up and smiled, I knew it was an image I would hold on to for the rest of my life.
“It just killed you to let me pick it by myself, didn’t it?” Charles said, laughing.
I assured him that I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. “I can’t wait for us to show it to our son one day and tell him that his daddy bought it for him to wear home from the hospital,” I said. “Maybe he’ll put it on his own son someday.”
I had never seen a man happier than your father was at that moment But then I thought of what was coming. I said that I could not stand the thought of him spending Christmas alone and in danger. He said I had already given him the most precious gift of all.
My belly felt heavy and my back ached, but I was determined to cook what I knew would be our last holiday meal together until he returned from the war.
I was walking past Charles in our bedroom that Thanksgiving Day when I thought about what our lives would be like the same time the next year.
“Just think, we will have even more to be thankful for next Thanksgiving,” I said. “You’ll be home for good and our baby boy will be here with us.”
Charles did not say a word—he just handed me a large framed drawing. It was one of his angel pictures. He had drawn a series of them the previous year and had donated them to a benefit for cancer survivors. This one depicted a man’s chiseled body with an enormous, stunning pair of angel wings attached to his back. The man was bowed in prayer and was clearly presenting himself to God.
“I don’t want this,” I said, shoving the picture back at Charles. “Take this back. This is a picture of you. Don’t give me a picture of you as an angel. You’re coming home/’
Charles thought I would take comfort from the image, but I was shaking so badly I had to sit down. I had been trying to pretend, for just one day, that we were an average couple celebrating an ordinary Thanksgiving, but the angel snapped me out of the dream.
He said nothing and put the picture in a closet I later learned that just before he left for Iraq he gave his mother and several close friends the same drawing.
Later, he sat by a window writing in the journal and occasionally lifted his pen, contemplative, before he continued. He had replaced many of the questions at the top of each page with ones he had written himself. One said: “What was your most painful experience during Desert Storm?” He wrote:
I am glad not to have read entries like that one before Charles left. It would have made it that much harder for me to say good-bye to him.
I told him that he didn’t need to exhaust himself, that he could take the journal with him.
“No,” he said, “I have to finish this before I leave.”
One morning I walked into the bathroom and saw him sitting on the toilet with the lid down, writing while the shower was going. “Sweetie, you really don’t have to do this,” I said. He stopped and considered.
“Maybe I’ll take it with me,” he said, set the journal down, and got in the shower. I knew then that he was mentally prepared to leave for Iraq.
The evening before he returned to Fort Hood, I took him to a steak house and told him to order the biggest steak on the menu. We held hands and talked about how nice the crib would look in our room. Charles made me promise to be careful walking on the snow and ice that winter and pleaded with me not to take on too many projects at work. He assured me that he would come home when I gave birth. I rubbed his arm and said I would be fine until he returned. I reminded him that my pregnancy was going well and that I was surrounded by friends and caring colleagues.
It was a chilly evening, but we took our time walking, oblivious to the other people hurrying past. It would be our last evening together for a very long while, and both of us wanted the night to unfold as slowly as possible. We had decided to see a movie as our last date before we became new parents, and sat through a bad romantic comedy about a bachelor trying to win the affections of his high school crush. The ridiculous dialogue would ordinarily have annoyed me, but it was good to hear Charles laugh. I rested my head on his shoulder and we kissed between scenes.
All too soon the darkness gave way to dawn. We untangled ourselves and knew it was time to face the difficult morning ahead. I wrote a letter to Charles while he was in the shower and tucked it into his bag. He discovered the envelope while packing the last of his things and I asked him not to open it until he was on the plane to Iraq.
The doorman rang to tell us that the car I had ordered to take Charles to the airport had arrived. Then I broke down.
Charles kissed my swollen stomach as I stood shaking and sobbing by the front door. He placed the palms of his hands on my belly and sighed in his own anguish. I pressed his head into me. Both of us held on as long as we could. Then he stood up, wiped away my tears, and said softly that he loved me. I could see in his face that a whisper was all he could speak. And then he left.
I did not want him to hear me sobbing again, so I waited until I was sure he was on the elevator, then cried until my head ached and my eyes stung. I went back to bed and cried myself to sleep.
Charles called from Texas several hours later as he was driving from the airport to the base. I could tell that his focus had already begun to change. He talked about shipping his art to me and where he would store his truck. He would need to disconnect his cell phone and go to the pharmacy to stock up on eye drops. And there was the issue of where he would sleep in the days ahead. He had moved out of his apartment and put his furniture in storage the day before he flew to New York, but he still had a week until deployment. I told him to check into the nicest hotel he could find, order room service, and watch pay-per-view movies. He told me he had a cot in his office and would sleep there.
“Charles, you are not sleeping in your office on your last days in this country. You deserve to treat yourself well. Check into a hotel. I’ll pay for it.”
“I don’t need to stay in a hotel,” he said.
“But where are you going to take a shower?” I asked.
“At the barracks,” he said.
“Charles, please. Why?”
He hesitated.
“I don’t want to spend money on a hotel. We need to save it for the baby.”
Every night that week he called from his office, and each time I pleaded with him to go to a hotel. One of his soldiers, Kenny Morris, and his wife, Donna, had offered him a spare room in their house, but Donna said she suspected he wanted to give her family privacy during their last days together.
By the end of that week, I had come to realize that forgoing the comfort of abed was not just about saving money. It was part of his mental transformation from the man I knew into the warrior I did not. The instant he walked out my door, he was no longer just my man and the father of my child. He was a soldier headed for war.
The night before he left, Charles settled into that cot and called me one last time. He told me not to worry about him, to take care of myself. He told me he would contact me as soon as he could after getting there. I told him that I was proud of him and would try to be strong.
“Charles, can I ask you something?” I said.
“Sure, Ma, what?”
“Can you think of anything we haven’t talked about? Anything left unsaid?”
He thought for a minute and said he could not.
“Well then, if you have to go, I’m so thankful that we can’t think of a single thing that we haven’t said to each other. Isn’t that a blessing?”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
“I love you, Charles.”
“I love you, too, Dana.”
He said he had my letter in his carry-on bag and would read it as soon as he was in the air. He said that he knew it would sustain him during the journey ahead. No words I had ever written were more important than these:
Charles, my love,
Thank you for the gift of your heart. I do not feel worthy of your love, but I cherish it and thank God every day that he led me to you.
I am so in awe of you, my brave man, and I am so proud that you are the father of my baby.
When you have fulfilled your duty, please come safely home to us. I cannot wait to spend the rest of my life as your wife.
Do not worry about us: focus on protecting yourself and I will take care of myself and your son.
With all that I am, I love you,
Dana