WHAT TOO SHALL PASS? | Moshe Gordon
I can tell you from the start that the baby died. His name was Solomon, and he was born in a tiny hospital in Antigua, Guatemala where I was volunteering my summer.
Geriatric obstetrics cases were common for this hospital, located in a small, remote, impoverished town, but in all my years of medical school back in the States, I had never seen a woman in her fifties give birth. While admitting her, I thought to myself, ‘This will be difficult.’
It was not difficult. Throughout the brief, precipitous labor, the mother babbled with joyous, delirious facility that she had been waiting for this child her entire life. His name would be Solomon, she told anyone who entered the delivery room.
***
Every day from dawn to dusk, the mother sat beside Solomon’s bed. The baby’s head was already swelling to an unnatural size. He had been born with water on the brain, which we had called hydrocephalus in medical school. A pocket of ever-expanding cerebrospinal fluid was trapped inside his brain, and it would soon kill him.
I tried to console the mother. “Perhaps there is some hope,” I said softly, executing a show of empathy as I had been taught in school. “Maybe there will be some kind of miracle. It’s unlikely, I know, but I read a case of a man who lived to his fifties with the same condition as Solomon.” I figured talk of miracles would be meaningful to this seemingly devout Christian, but she appeared uninterested.
“Little Solomon knows his mama loves him,” was all she said.
***
The hospital bed was made from sheets of rusty, corrugated iron supported by plastic milk crates. The mother brought another multicolored checkered felt blanket each morning to supplement the thin mattress, so the bed looked increasingly kaleidoscopic and baby Solomon was elevated to new heights with each passing day. As the bed’s poshness increased, the spartan, gray-yellow walls of the room and the dilapidated, rickety, wooden rocking chair, forever occupied by the mother, seemed even more harsh and uninviting by contrast. Flaking paint and cobwebs glared down at me from every angle, as I tended to Solomon on his throne. The small bedside table, missing a leg, served as a lectern for the mother’s ever-present Bible.
State-of-the-art medical equipment, donated by my medical school, filled the remainder of the room. The tentacled machines had wrapped Solomon in their life-saving embrace, supplying oxygen and nutrition while monitoring the baby’s slow decline. The mother sat amid their cacophonous beeping and gazed upon Solomon’s swollen head.
The Bible was opened to El Cantar Las Cantares, Song of Songs.
***
That book. I remembered that book. My religious uncle from Detroit had encouraged me to read it so many years ago. And how I read it! As a preteen, it set the standard of love for me. Immersed in the sublime metaphors of the erotic poetry, I experienced what depths human emotion could achieve and I savored every verse, teasing feeling from text and happiness from hope.
What had happened to me since then? Where had my emotions hidden and from what fear had they fled?
It seemed to me that Solomon’s mother, sitting placidly beside her dying baby, her dream of a lifetime, was a reminder of what I once had.
***
Solomon died one night, 26 days after he was born. I was asked to perform the autopsy, scheduled for the following morning. I spent the whole night at a rooftop bar, looking down on the ancient capital of New Spain, nestled in its ring of volcanic peaks; its cobbled streets serene in the late, cool evening. Two blond boys sat nearby; the younger is thrumming out “Yellow” by Coldplay on his Taylor guitar and chants the lyrics in an ethereal falsetto. The older boy is immersed in the tranquility and the aesthetic of the moment. I watched, trying to capture the moment, to be there for it.
***
The body lay before me, the skin translucent in the early morning light, an exquisite corpse, serene and silent. The surgical saw sliced through the dermis with its fine layer of peach fuzz hair and split open the skull. Careful, cautious, wary, I severed and dismembered, deliberately, preserving in the act of penetrating. Suctioning away blood, the cortex itself came into view. I had felt vaguely detached all morning. A state of fugue delirium blanketed my mind protecting me from thinking. I stared blankly at Solomon’s exposed brain. It was like no cadaver I had ever seen. The tissue had been severely pressed and crushed between the relentless pressure and the unyielding skull wall. As I stared at the gyri and sulci looking for anatomical features I recognized, they seemed to wriggle and form sensible images.
***
The brain is showing me scenes I remember from Solomon’s lifetime. A child’s voice echoes softly, indiscernibly through the foggy halls of my mind. There is the mother bent over his tiny body and oversized head, crooning as she massages that small area of his chest - the place I had shown her to touch the baby. The only place where she would not disturb the elaborate systems of tubes and pipes enveloping her son. Watching this scene splayed across Solomon’s brain, noticing it for the first time, pulling it from the depths of my untapped memories, the fog suddenly parted, pierced by the child’s voice - breaking through chanting distinctly:
Thy head upon thee is like Mount Carmel;
the hair of thy head like purple;
the king is held captive in the tresses thereof.
How fair and how pleasant art thou!
***
A janitor ambles past Solomon’s room listlessly mopping the hall. He does not use a bucket filled with water. He sprays the floor with a handheld bottle. To do that day in and day out.
***
She is pointing at his face. “His eyes,” she is asking me, “explain to me again what is happening to them.” Sunset eyes, a clinical term, an indication of the disease’s progression. Solomon’s eyes are sinking. The brain is pressing on them from above, forcing them to the bottoms of the orbits. The irises are already submerged and the pupils will soon sink beneath his lower lids. The child sings; I recognize his voice as my own:
His head is as the most fine gold.
His locks are curled, and black as a raven.
His eyes are like doves beside the water-brooks;
washed with milk, setting over a brimming pool.
***
That bed, bedazzling in the splendor of a mother’s love. Solomon’s brain shows me this in the moment of his cardiac arrest. We flooded the room with docs, injecting drugs and pounding his thin chest. Sterile instruments reeking of formaldehyde pierced and prodded the beleaguered boy. The nurses could not pry the mother from the room. She gazed upon Solomon as we brought him back to life for one more day.
Who is this that cometh up out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke,
perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant?
Behold, it is the litter of Solomon;
threescore mighty men are about it, of the mighty men of Israel.
They all handle the sword, and are expert in war;
very man hath his sword upon his thigh, because of dread in the night.
Go forth, O ye daughters, and gaze upon king Solomon, upon the crown wherewith his mother hath crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart.
***
The boy is dead. The mother weeps inconsolably. She has not left the bedside since the arrest. I do not wish to see this again. I cut through the scene. My scalpel penetrates easily, but the images are unchanged - shifting, undulating, ever-present. I cut deeper searching, investigating, trying to disregard the sad story I can’t erase. Here it is - the cavity. I have penetrated Solomon's death sentence, a chamber of water encased within his brain. I broaden the incision, releasing the pressure. The fluid flows freely over the entire cortex, bathing the images with its viscous stickiness. Submerged and obscured, I am yielded but a moment's respite from the exhausting scenes. The child keens, pining for the elusive:
My dove, my undefiled, is but one;
he is the only one of his mother;
he is the choice one of her that bore him.
Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm;
for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave.
The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of God.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
Moshe Gordon is a first-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.