Words

from Cassia van der Hoof Holstein,
Mother

Thank you so much for being here. We have been sustained in these awful weeks by your love and support in its many, many manifestations, including your coming from far and near to help us remember Luca. Asher is too young to offer his own thanks, but I am grateful that he has gotten to spend time with many of you, and will have this chance to meet others for the first time.

This Good Friday, we think too of Chad and his son Hudson, and of their lost Lindsey.

Having Asher and Luca has been by far the greatest joy of my life, and losing Luca the greatest sadness. I grieve for his brother, who is without his twin. I am sundered, as they have been.

One of the many joys of carrying my boys was the sense of connection it gave me to other mothers, those I knew and those I didn't, and especially to other new moms and moms-to-be. I remember writing to a friend, who is here, about the intense connection one feels in pregnancy, the sudden vulnerability to harm done to any child anywhere. I felt the rawness of my desire and inability to protect the children I saw as I carried mine through Malawi and Rwanda and Lesotho, through the other parts of the world where I have been so lucky to work and live.

In that world, babies die all the time. In this world, in our world, the death of a baby is a tragic anomaly, and deaths like Luca's feel impossible to us, unjust. It is often written that because poor families in that world have and lose many children, because death is such a constant, they have a different conception of the value of life. This never sounded quite right to me, and now that I have lost a child I know how very wrong it is. As we mourn our Luca - with a grief that feels total - so these other families mourn their adored children. I don't believe that the world's poor value their children's lives differently than we do ours. But they live in a world which accepts the radical injustice of food and water and medicine only for those who can pay for it.

Like Luca's death, the deaths of their babies are tragic. Unlike his, most of them are preventable. And so as I grieve my son, I grieve with the many, too many mothers to whom I am now connected, I mourn their needless losses.

I am sorry that many of you didn't get to meet Luca, and I wanted to tell you a bit about him. Luca weighed a little less than five pounds when he was born. He was almost as long as his nearly eight-pound brother, and had elegant, delicate features and the most extraordinary porcelain skin. His face was that of a Florentine cherub: the carved-marble arches of his nose, his rosebud lips. He had beautiful, long-fingered hands that he often rested thoughtfully on his cheeks or under his chin, or wrapped tightly around my fingers.

There was also, it must be said, something of the plucked chicken about him. We debated whether he was a roaster or a fryer. His legs were so scrawny that none of his carefully chosen baby clothes fit him, and he spent his first two weeks wearing diapers and blankets, our wise little Chickenlegs swami.

Luca often slept with his legs at a startling angle - sometimes 45 or 60 degrees, occasionally straight up in the air. This made it hard to keep blankets on him and was a source of much amusement to his family and alarm to visitors. The two boys would snuggle together in their cousins’ cradle, Luca’s legs poking out of the bundle of blankets and babies.

Luca had a blue, blue gaze and he would fix it on you intensely, turning his head suddenly to capture your eyes with his own. I loved to speculate about what he was thinking, so composed and knowing.

Whatever it was, it animated his whole body so that his delight was expressed with wriggles, gigantic grins and his favorite exclamation, YAH! His loudest YAHs were reserved for nursing, which he did often and joyfully, with delicate hummingbird sips and an expression of total concentration. I loved to look down on the crowns of the boys' heads just touching while they nursed, to see my sons growing literally, it seemed, before my eyes. Sometimes they held hands while they ate, as they did in my first and favorite photo of them.

That we didn't get to keep Luca is a terrible grief, but it does not diminish the joy of having grown him, and birthed him, and known him. I feel so, so lucky. Lucky most of all to be Luca and Asher's mamma. I feel lucky to share these boys with their fine and brave father, who is exactly the sort of person I would like Asher to be when he grows up. I feel lucky, as ever, to be part of my amazing family, which gives me succor, and makes me proud, and makes me crazy, and makes me dinner, and lunch, and between-meal snacks. Peter and I and Asher and Luca have been extraordinarily blessed with the love of our families and friends. My sister Nel said at our wedding that I have a network of friends that is strong as steel and beautiful as lace. I was so humbled by the truth of that, and it is even truer today.

If it takes a village to raise a child, then twins must require a city. Over the past two weeks, we have been free to focus completely on our babies, as literally everything else has been done for us, including planning and executing this service. When Luca was in the hospital, so many of you took care of Asher, and us, and the house, and strengthened and supported us all with your calls, and texts, and emails, and flowers, and cards, and most of all the strong sure knowledge that we were being held in your hearts and thoughts.

Having children has also given us a new family of friends, and we are grateful to the many of you here who helped us grow the boys on the inside, and deliver them safely, take care of them once they'd arrived, and care for Luca in the hospital. He had superb and kind care from the start, the sort of care I would wish for any and every child.

In the hospital, Luca was never alone. At night, I climbed into his crib with him, and I treasure those peaceful hours. With my eyes closed, his ventilator and monitors disappeared, and I could imagine us home in our own bed, waking in the quiet night with moms and babies all over the world.

During the day, we held his little hands and told him the stories of his life, how his grandpa Tony climbed out his window naked as a boy, how his parents met, about his cousins Katie and Amanda and Chris, stories of the legions of cousins and aunts and uncles who have been loving him since before he was born. Many of you helped to keep him company, sitting with Luca and stroking his sweet head, reading him books, talking to him. I caught Jared telling him that he had a hot nurse. I told him what Cambridge looks like, and how cool it is in the living room in our house in Marignana, even in the summer, and that he should never, ever accept a dare offered by Matt Holstein, especially if it involves a bicycle, and Cazenovia Lake.

Asher will have time to learn these stories from the people they’re about, and to see these places himself. We intend to raise Asher not in Luca's memory but in his honor: joyfully, in the spirit of adventure, and without fear. And so I must ask you for your help again: please help us remember the brother Asher will always have. And please help me open my encircling arms, perhaps gently at first, if I am hovering, noodging, or otherwise over-protecting this little man. I wish for him a full life in the world, as my parents wished for and gave to me.

When I wake up, I reach for Luca. He should be nestled into whichever side of me his brother is not. There is a moment of panic as I think something may have happened to my baby. And then I remember that it has.

I suspect that one morning or midnight I will stop reaching for him. But his absence, and his dear, wise presence, are with us forever.

Cassia

(Words spoken at Luca Holstein Albers’ memorial service, 21 March 2008.)