When Time Stands Still: Birth, Death, and All That Waiting

Sometimes a monumental life event doesn’t feel anything like you’d expect.

On October 16th, 2020, at 10 a.m., my husband Dan and I arrived at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ready to have our baby. 

I was a cool 41 weeks pregnant, and was finally going to be induced. In the week before, already past my due date and off of work, I laid on my back, belly up, with my feet hanging over the arm of our tiny couch (the only one that would fit through the doors of our apartment) and watched Emily in Paris. I had read one last book. I’d taken so many slow walks around the block, staying close to home in case I went into labor. The early fall days were gray and warm, and the pre-vaccine world still felt empty. Each day started with a sense of possibility and ended with a limp acknowledgment that there was more of this to come. 

So when we got to the hospital, I felt done with the waiting. I was energized again, and ready to meet the little guy who’d been jumping around in my body all summer. Finally, the day was here.

Or so I thought.

Once we were settled in our roomy birthing suite overlooking the Charles River, I was hooked up to various monitors and the induction began. People have asked me how I was induced—did they start with the pitocin? Was it the tube? And the embarrassing truth is I can’t remember. I was the ultimate pregnancy yes-woman, doing whatever they told me without giving it a moment’s thought. All I know for sure is that it was 10:30 when they told me it was starting, and that nothing else happened all day. I lay there, with Dan in a chair next to me, and the world slowed down again. 

We hadn’t brought a laptop (rookie mistake), so we propped up Dan’s phone on the hospital table to stream our current obsession, Married at First Sight. A few hours in, our excitement wore off and we continued to lose steam as we watched the couples encounter new challenges with their married lives. Here and there, I tried to snooze. In between, I shared selfies with my group chats, and kept up with their conversations as I normally did. They had told me before that they knew I’d be too busy to text—but I was languid, full of nothing but time.

Almost three years later, in April 2023, I again found myself waiting for a major life event to happen—not a birth this time, but a death. My beloved Aunt Eleanor, my mother’s sister, had started to show signs of Alzheimer’s only a little over a year earlier. In those 13 months, she went from the warm, full-of-life presence she’d been to a skinny, lost, and sometimes angry person who we knew could not live much longer. 

My mother was the baby of her family, and Aunt Eleanor, eight years older, was her closest sibling in age. With all four grandparents dead by the time I was in fifth grade, my mom’s two older sisters, Ann and Eleanor, served as my grandparent figures. Ann was the wryly funny but sometimes stricter one, occasionally chastising us for doing things like taking the lord’s name in vain, and Eleanor was the rebel who still sometimes snuck cigarettes in her attic bedroom. They lived together in a big house about 40 minutes from where I grew up, where we went for every holiday. It was Ann and Eleanor who spoiled my sister and me and bragged about us to their friends. After Ann died when I was in college, Aunt Eleanor remained my cheerleader throughout my adult life. In fact, in the years that I worked at BuzzFeed, I was awed to learn that she printed out every article I wrote, sharing copies with whoever came by the house.  

Aunt Eleanor was a big woman, with a big belly laugh. She never married or had children of her own, and she had no regrets. She was, quite stubbornly, exactly herself. So to see her frail, bedbound, and barely able to speak felt particularly cruel. She deteriorated quickly, and by March in my weekly visits to her nursing home I found her more confused, fragile, and inarticulate each time. 

It was a Friday afternoon when my mom texted to say that hospice had ordered enough medication to keep Aunt Eleanor comfortable, and she didn’t know if we’d see her awake again. On Saturday, I rushed to the nursing home in the morning and sat by her bedside. She wasn’t conscious; she just lay there, skinny, her thin white hair flush against her forehead and her face in a pointed, pained expression. She was still breathing. So I sat. Soon my sister arrived, and then my mom and dad, and we all sat. 

The next day, we did it again. As the hours passed, we alternated who got the most comfortable chair. We looked at our phones. We talked about Aunt Eleanor—about how she looked, and how we loved her—but we also talked about the ordinary stuff of life. My sister, a teacher, described the kids in her class; I updated everyone about a visit with my in-laws. In the afternoon my dad and I drove to a nearby Starbucks to get everyone caffeine. On Monday, with the situation unchanged, I told my boss I couldn’t come in and went back to the nursing home for more sitting. That day, though, I came prepared—I stopped at a coffee shop to pick up a turkey club, and stuck a few easy-reading novels in my bag. Now I knew: The day would be long, and sometimes empty.

In the end, my son’s birth was not boring, but harrowing. When I began to feel contractions around 7 p.m., we learned that the baby was not handling them well. The night was a continuous stream of nurses running in and out of our room, trying to get me to sleep on my side and checking my vitals. The next day, my OB decided that a C-section was the best option, and my giving-birth story took an even more frenetic turn as I was rushed to the OR. After our baby, Lou, was out, safely in Dan’s arms, I lay on the table alone while doctors stitched me back together. It was hard, then, to recall that just 24 hours earlier I’d been doing so much nothing. 

Aunt Eleanor’s death, too, arrived with more force than the moments preceding it. On Tuesday—the fourth day of waiting—I decided that the waiting could wait, so I did a few hours of work in the morning. That’s how it happened that I found out she was gone while in the back of an Uber on my way to be with her, instead of by her side like I’d been for three days. I sobbed, and my driver was quietly kind to me; asking if I was OK and offering to roll down the window. He whispered his sympathy when he let me out. 

We do so much waiting in our day-to-day—waiting for a meeting to start; for the train; to be taken off hold with an insurance company. Waiting for these life-altering events can feel, on the surface, much the same: just passing time. We’re still watching Instagram stories and commenting on memes; still playing Wordle and doing the crossword. Everyone still has to eat. In that way, it can feel like there’s no difference between the mundane and the meaningful. They share so much of the same DNA. 

But these moments, the long, quiet ones before all the noise begins, are different. When I asked Anne, a family friend who spent 13 years as a hospice volunteer, if she was ever bored while she sat with a dying person, she said that she wasn’t. “I find it just like a short story, or a novel; I find that there is just drama in the doing nothing parts. I suppose that’s my own way of coping.”

We talked a bit more about the people she’d come to love and then watched die, and she told me, “We often think that there’s a perfect way to do things, and both birth and death kind of defy that.”

I think that’s the root. A birth or a death rarely goes exactly as we had expected, or even close. And it feels strange to be stuck inhabiting ordinary life before something so monumental. Maybe experiences like these are just teaching us, again, that there’s no right way to be, after all. 

Once it’s over we usually only tell the action parts. “Please welcome to the world: Lou!!!” I wrote on Instagram, withholding not just Married at First Sight but all the other mishegoss. Three years later, I shared a post that celebrated Aunt Eleanor’s life, and didn’t mention her drawn-out wait for death. But the waiting was part of it. An innate part of how it happened. An innate part, after all, of life. 

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