- (Read Danish version here.)
The ambulance drove us through the sleeping city. The windows of the houses were black and shut. It was raining, and the blue lights on the roof flashed coldly against the wet asphalt. On the hospital bed beside me lay Siri, her eyes closed. She was gasping for air, clutching her large, pregnant belly with both hands. I gently stroked her hair. A faint nausea washed over me, and my head buzzed with exhaustion.
It had been no more than half an hour since we’d been in bed. No more than half an hour since we still believed we were the expectant, happy parents of twins. Just days ago, we had seen the black-and-white glimpses of the twins on the ultrasound scan. They were moving cheerfully beneath Siri’s heart, wriggling and kicking, so alive, each movement a testament to the great joy awaiting us—the Big Day when we would meet our children.
Now we were in an ambulance, on our way to the emergency department for complicated births at Rigshospitalet.
When we arrived, the midwife immediately began examining Siri. “Your cervix is still closed,” she said quietly. “But your cervical length has shortened.” Siri stared at her for a long time. “Am I in labor?” she asked.
“No, you’re not in labor, but you’re having contractions. We need to administer a tocolytic drip. We may still be able to stop the contractions that way.”
After the midwife left, I took Siri’s hand. “It’s going to be okay,” I said. Siri’s eyes darted around. Tears began to fall. We both knew the twins were at risk of being born three and a half months prematurely—and that their chances of survival were slim.
I was allowed to sleep on a bed beside Siri. I was exhausted, and several times I dozed off, but I kept waking with the sensation of falling and had to grip the bed. Siri lay on her back all night. The medicine dripped slowly through a tube into her. She cried. Each time I woke, I took her hand, but the tears kept streaming from her eyes onto the pillow.
I kept repeating the words: “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. The contractions will stop. Tomorrow, we’ll be home again.” But inside, I felt the fear. Fear that the twins wouldn’t make it, fear that everything in our lives would collapse.
Morning arrived. The gray light from a low-hanging sun filtered through the blinds. When I woke around six, I couldn’t sleep anymore, so I got up and went to the bathroom. The first thing I saw was my own reflection in the large, square mirror above the sink. I stood there, staring at myself, hesitant, transfixed. I had a strange feeling that I didn’t recognize the person in the mirror. It looked like me, but the man in the mirror was older, more worn, his eyes so unbearably heavy.
I forced myself to straighten my back as I opened the bathroom door. Siri was still asleep. The droplets continued their unrelenting drip through the tube. I walked over and pressed the button that made the blinds slide up with a soft metallic whine. Outside, in the real world, it was raining. People walked through the rain with umbrellas, cars splashed water onto the sidewalks, and just outside the hospital, bus number 3 drove by. How could this be happening? How could bus number 3 be running on this day when everything was so close to falling apart? Everything outside, all this normalcy, all this ordinariness, felt so distant. I no longer belonged in the real world.
There was a signpost across the street with a poster on it advertising an insurance company. The slogan read: “If… relax, it’ll all work out!” Out there, in the real world, you didn’t have to worry; relax, it’ll all work out. If something goes wrong—oh well—you’ll get compensation from us, it’ll all work out. But here, behind the window in our private hospital room, there was no compensation. No one could relax. No one could fix anything for me, Siri, and our twins. No one could do anything.
By the afternoon, Siri’s condition had worsened. Gradually, but steadily, it got worse and worse. The staff tried to reduce the dosage of the tocolytic medicine, but each time they did, the contractions returned. There was a high risk that labor would start. All night, we lay waiting for a miracle, waiting for the contractions to subside so that we could leave the hospital and go home to look forward to the arrival of our twins.
I slept a little. When I woke, there was always a midwife, a nurse, or a doctor checking on Siri. It was an endless procession of faces—serious faces trying to smile. But they all knew there was nothing to smile about. The thing that must not happen was happening.
The next morning, a doctor came in and told us they had to deliver the twins by cesarean. We had to prepare ourselves for the fact that our children would be very, very small, far smaller than ordinary newborns. They would weigh about 700 grams each.
The midwife stood beside the doctor. “Would you like to speak with a priest?” she asked. At those words, something inside me shattered. Like glass splintering in a hand. A priest? Was that really where we were? Were we about to lose our children? I nodded to the midwife. We needed all the help we could get. The priest came and assured us he would be present during the operation so he could baptize the children “if…”
After the priest’s visit, a steady stream of doctors and nurses came in. They were preparing for the operation. While one doctor was examining Siri, new pains shot through her. She twisted in pain, and suddenly, she started hemorrhaging. The sheet turned red, and the duvet was soaked in blood. A puddle formed in a depression in the mattress. Panic set in for Siri. “I’m afraid I’m going to die! I’m afraid I’m going to die!” she screamed.
“You are not going to die,” the doctor said. “But you’ve had a placental abruption. We need to operate now.” He nodded to the midwife, who disappeared and returned with some sterile clothing and a face mask for me. I went to the bathroom to change. I was nervous and fumbled with the buttons on my jacket. There were a pair of white wooden clogs. Across the toes, someone had written “Father” in red marker.
When I opened the bathroom door again, I was astonished to find the room empty. Siri’s bed was gone. I was about to step into the hallway when the midwife came to fetch me. “Siri is in the operating room,” she said, pressing my arm. I stumbled after her in the oversized clogs. The shoes were far too large, as was the word on their toes.
A nurse opened the door to the operating room. The first thing I saw was Siri lying on the operating table. She was exposed from the back down. Her lower body and buttocks were red with blood. There was a flurry of activity, everyone moving incredibly fast. There were two surgeons, two pediatricians, an anesthesiologist, and a swarm of nurses and midwives. I froze in the doorway. I looked at the blood and Siri’s hair, which hung down at the end of the bed. How will I ever get over this? I thought. This is too heavy; I can’t bear this. But I walked over and sat by Siri’s head.
“You have to talk to me,” Siri said, crying. “Talk to me, I’m scared.” Her eyes were wide open, her cheeks wet with tears.
I don’t remember exactly what I said to Siri, but I kept talking while trying to listen to the surgeons. The spinal anesthesia was going well, they said. Now they were starting the operation. A screen was put up so we couldn’t see them cutting.
Minutes passed, and I whispered soothing words to Siri. “Now comes twin A,” one of the surgeons said. I fell silent, listening. On a clock on the wall behind the surgeons, the second hand ticked with a deafening noise. Then I heard the sound of a baby crying, but it wasn’t the cry you usually hear from a baby. The voice was much smaller, more delicate and fine. The midwife took the baby from the surgeon, and as she lifted it over to the pediatrician, I saw a tiny human squirming in her hands. “I think it’s a girl,” she said. I sank and couldn’t speak anymore. A little later, the second one came. Another frail voice. She showed us the baby. “You also have a little boy,” she said.
A nurse took my hand and led me out to the ante-room, where the two incubators stood. The priest was standing between them. “Congratulations,” he said, shaking my hand for a long time. “A boy and a girl, it couldn’t be better.” I said thank you, but I thought: Yes, it could be better.
Two nurses wheeled the incubators down the hallway, and the priest and I followed. When we reached the neonatal ward, I was allowed to look at my two small children. They were so small, incomprehensibly small. It tore at me, tore so hard that I could hardly breathe. A maddening, stinging, screaming compassion and love for the two children welled up in me like a boiling geyser erupting from the ground. I stood for a long time, looking through the incubator glass. Everything about the children was so perfect; they were small, but everything was perfect. The girl had long eyelashes and fine, feminine features. The boy was a real boy, and he protested when the nurse dressed him.
Half an hour later, Siri’s bed was wheeled down to the neonatal ward. A few incubators were moved aside, and we were shielded so no one could see us. The priest came in fully robed with a lace collar. He pushed a small steel table in front of him. On the table stood a chiseled, old-fashioned baptismal font with water gently sloshing. It was a baroque sight. The priest and the font in the middle of this high-tech hell with screens, machines, tubes, and wailing alarms. From the outside, it must have looked very strange, but everything Siri and I had been through in the last few days had suspended all boundaries and norms. We baptized the children Thor and Alma. The priest carefully dipped the water from the font onto the children’s bonnets.
After the baptism, we were settled into the recovery room. I was restless and paced back and forth in the room. I wanted to go back to the incubators, but I didn’t want to leave Siri alone. At one point, I looked out into the hallway. There stood a woman. It was my mother. She hesitated, looked at me. She was scared, and I could see that she had been crying. It hurt me so much to see her. She seemed so fragile, so transparent. When I embraced her, she started sobbing helplessly. “The children are born,” I said. “They are called Thor and Alma.” My mother couldn’t stop the tears. She went over to Siri’s bed, hugged her, and said that the children would be fine. That everything would soon be okay.
Later, my father and Siri’s parents came. Flowers were placed on the bed. No one had the strength to find vases. My father opened a bottle of wine, the wine that had been set aside for The Big Day. I had been looking forward to drinking the wine on the children’s birthday, with our parents. I had looked forward to us all standing around Siri’s bed, happy, relieved, joyful, and the twins lying on her chest. Now I couldn’t taste the wine at all. I just stood there with the glass in my hand. I stood with our parents and looked at Siri, silent, broken.
Afterwards, I took them down to the neonatal ward. One by one, they came to the incubators. They looked at their grandchildren. I told them who was Thor and who was Alma. They didn’t say anything, held their mouths, and cried. They couldn’t bear what had happened.
I hadn’t cried. I held back the tears, trying to carry my burden with a smile. But when I stood under the shower the next morning, I broke down. It came suddenly and hard, impossible to hold back, like cramps in my body. I sank. I lay on the floor while the water fell over me, curling up completely, sobbing.
In the days that followed, we spent a lot of time by the children’s incubators. It hurt so much to see them, because they had electrodes on their skin, IVs in their noses, and countless wires and tubes on them. Every three hours, they received morphine so they wouldn’t feel the pain. They lay waving their arms and legs, but when we placed a hand over them, they calmed down. Thor could barely grasp the tip of my little finger. He squeezed it. For his size, he had strong fingers, and I felt a pang of fatherly pride. We whispered to the children, sang to them. It was clear that they knew we were their mother and father. They recognized our voices. They grew quiet and listened. They hadn’t opened their eyes yet, but we could see they were trying when they heard our voices. As long as we sat with them, we felt good. We forgot everything around us when we held them. But when we left the neonatal ward to sleep, the emptiness and pain came back.
One morning, a doctor called us in for a meeting. “Alma has had a brain hemorrhage,” the doctor said. “She will never have a normal life. We need to stop the treatment.” Hearing these words about your child is one of the worst things that can happen. You know she’s not dead, but she’s going to die. There is no way back; she is going to die.
An hour later, our parents came to say goodbye to Alma. They stood by the incubator and looked at her, said goodbye. Siri and I sat in a room, waiting for a nurse to release Alma from the respirator, tubes, and sensors. I stood by the window and looked down at the ripples in the puddles. Soon after, the nurse came with our daughter and placed her on Siri’s chest. Alma had folded both hands under one cheek. She lay perfectly still. A little angel. We kissed her, told her how much we loved her. In between, she gasped for air. We could do nothing. We just sat there with our little daughter, watching her die as we whispered to her and stroked her hair.
I couldn’t move for the rest of the day. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Or I looked at Alma, lying in a cradle next to the bed. Siri was breastfeeding by a pumping machine. In the hour we sat with Alma, my milk had come in, and my breasts were swollen. It wasn’t until evening that I had the strength to go down to Thor. Beside his incubator stood the empty one. Thor’s condition had slightly improved, and he was taking the milk.
Siri and I took turns being with Thor’s incubator. We kept track of the nurses’ work and soon learned to understand the numbers and graphs on the screens. We could see how he was doing, we got happy when the numbers went up and anxious when they went down. This was how the days went, a constant pendulum between the neonatal ward. Some mornings he was doing well, other days worse. We started to believe he would make it. But in the last few days, his numbers dropped. His lungs weren’t working, and there was little sign they would get better. One of those days when things went really badly for Thor, I did something I had never done before, something I would find pathetic in any other situation. I locked myself in a bathroom and knelt on the floor. I prayed. I prayed that if a life was to be taken, it would be mine. Thor should live, he should grow up and be a happy person. Let me die, let my son live. But this, my only prayer ever, was not heard.
The inevitable happened. We were once again called for a conversation, and the same thing happened. His lungs couldn’t handle it anymore. We sat with Thor and held him until his heart stopped beating.
We were allowed to take the twins home. The day before the funeral, the casket arrived. We dressed them. It was impossible to find clothes in such small sizes, so we had to dress them in doll clothes. We laid them next to each other. Close, as close as they had been in Siri’s womb.
Half an hour before the funeral, we laid flowers and gifts next to Thor and Alma. A gold bracelet and a pocketknife. I was about to close the casket, but Siri cried and said I shouldn’t close the lid. “I can’t,” she cried, “I can’t say goodbye to my children.” In the end, I had to ask Siri to leave the room.
Once she was gone, I sat for a while, looking at them. Inside me, something was burning out, something that would never heal. I will never, ever be able to bear this, I thought.
Then I closed the lid on the casket.
