Foot prints

I had lost my first child before I even held him in my arms. The doctors had said that he would not make it. We still hoped to see a healthy baby. Hopes don't always get realized in fact they seldom do as what happened with us. We needed a miracle.

"Neha and Amar are the perfect couple and the only thing missing in their lives is a child", this is what all our relatives used to say after a year and a half into our marriage. Of course we wanted a baby and our wish was granted after two years of our marriage. When the good news finally knocked on our door the families on both sides were beyond happy. But I was always a little scared. You know they say, "The more the expectations, the more the hurt."

We got to know there were complications right after we started to believe that everything is going to be normal. I remember the grim look on the doctor's face when she was taking an ultrasound. I wanted to know instantly what was wrong but she insisted on having some tests to confirm her diagnosis.

"The baby has a hole in his heart", her exact words. You never bother to know about critical life threatening diseases until they happen to you. The closest I had been to a person with a hole in his heart was a man in some random movie. Now I had another person as my own child. The family broke down, "The more the expectations, the more the hurt."

Our families hid their despair in front of us but we knew they were sad. Amar , too, tried to put on a brave face but who could stay that calm when a part of them is going to be taken away. Our first child was going to be born with a hole in his heart in a month's time.

When you know there are complications, all your thoughts of whether it is a boy or a girl, or what will be the name take a backseat. The only priority question was, "How was he going to live?" Or worse still, "How long was he going to live?" I always knew loosing a family member was a big loss but loosing a child or watching them die before your eyes everyday was something I had to keep myself ready for. I was shattered.

Then Amar, me and our families saw a ray of hope in the face of our baby. It was his eyes, the shine in them that gave us courage despite of his frail body and the doctor's words. Those eyes always smiled. Not the very happy smile but a hopeful one. He gave hope to us and when we knew there was no hope he gave us courage to face what lay ahead.

The day our baby was born we took his foot prints. Not as a hospital procedure but it was one of my wishes. When I was growing up I always wondered how little I was. I wanted a way to measure myself. Old photographs were there but it did not let me measure against anything. So I wanted to keep the foot prints of my child, precisely taken on every birthday, so that he could measure himself and would not have to wonder like I did. Of course, I did not know that he would not celebrate even one birthday.

The only option we had was a donor, but operating on a little, fragile body was out of the question. "We need to keep him alive and healthy till we are sure that we can operate on him", I wondered how doctors get the strength to break such news to people. We knew we would lose him. He was just too weak.

So we decided we would take his foot prints every month. We celebrated his birthday every month and ensured that he remained happy. He was a perfect little baby, not physically though. He mostly smiled, his hopeful smile, and slept quietly when he was tired. Everyday me and Amar would play with him for hours then watch him sleep peacefully. Our relatives all grew fond of him. Everyone knew that he will be lost one day but still we strived to be happy and keep him smiling. He was our little world in the brief nine months that he was with us.

"How can a tiny soul endure so much?" Still he fought, for a whole nine months our baby lived as happily as any normal baby would. We celebrated when he learnt to sit and learnt to grasp with his tiny fingers. The whole family adored him and, yes, we took his foot prints every month without fail. I had lost people before but the void that was created by loosing something as precious as my own baby could never be filled. Not even when we had our second child.

We did have two more babies after that, twin girls, but he was always going to be the first one. His sisters know him, have seen him in photographs and videos but the most they love is to measure his foot prints, the tangible proof of his existence, one that we could touch and feel. All nine of them adorn the wall of his sister's room. For me his foot prints are in my heart, my first child whose memories will never fade because of the foot prints that he left behind.