Fetal Position
I wrote some of this a few weeks ago. I left it for a while. I feel chronically under-equipped to write adequately the enormous grief of Palestine. It’s a form of perfectionism. I know it’s about me. And I’m not the point. So when I read the news that Mahmoud Khalil – detained and pending deportation under the allegations that he promoted anti-semitism by protesting Israel bombing Palestinian civilians – was denied his request to attend the birth of his first child, I knew I needed to revisit this piece and share it in all its imperfection.
____
A woman in Gaza had her six-week-old niece and her father buried in the same funeral shroud in October 2024.
____
When I walked into the hospital room to meet my newborn niece, she lay on my brother’s chest, his flannel unbuttoned. Her body curled into itself, like a smudged comma, her spine a barely-there curve. She would seem a period if not for everything around that said she’ll keep going. She would’ve seemed reverting to a single fist of flesh if not for my brother’s breath, resisting her body returning to what she was. His rise and fall coaxing her life into this one. Teaching her to breathe by breathing underneath. The effortlessness. The persistent surrender to oxygen.
As I sat down in the plastic-leather hospital chair next to the bed, my brother said: dads need to have skin-to-skin time, too.
____
Skin-to-skin contact is a critical component of the postnatal process. Postnatal is generally defined as birth to six weeks. Baby’s skin on a parent's skin, specifically their chest, helps with multiple parts of the work of Arriving and Staying in Life: regulates body temperature, breathing, heart rate, and builds immunity to infections. For nursing parents, skin-to-skin boosts milk production. For all parents, skin-to-skin generates oxytocin, the feel-good hormone. In a study about skin-to-skin amongst dads, it boosts their self-esteem and lowers their cortisol and blood pressure.
____
Her name was Sham Abu Naser.
Six weeks. What percentile was her weight? Could the mourners discern the lump of baby on his chest? Could the mourners even pick out his body from the 130 other family members Israeli soldiers killed in the same drone attack?
I can’t imagine they faced her forward in the shroud. She was too young to face forward. Infants that small are swaddled to chests inward, heart-to-heart, cheek-to-breast.
We can’t see details past 18 inches until we’re three months old. When nothing is familiar, our sight is mercifully limited. How terrifying it’d be to see everything when nothing is known, everything monstrous.
I picture Sham’s name on the white board where my niece’s name was written in neat, pink nurse handwriting. Next to it, Dad: my brother’s name. Next to that, Mom: my sister in-law’s name.
Sham’s parents’ names weren’t on the family tree graphic that NPR made to visually represent the incomprehensible depletion of the Abu Naser family. They probably couldn’t fit that much detail on that many tiny dots in a standard 1080x1350 Instagram post.
I picture Sham being coaxed to breath on my brother’s chest, in a room in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. The room where my niece learned to be alive. Where forces seen and unseen decide whether thousands of other babies learn or don’t. Stay or leave.
___
My younger brother told me how a lot of the gunshot wounds he sees in the ER are from men accidentally shooting themselves when they’re extremely drunk. Or when they wake up. Or when they’re falling asleep. The gun is next to the bed. Perhaps they’re just reaching out for something or someone to pull close to them. They end up with a bullet in their leg, foot, shoulder, head.
____
After a Palestinian man stabbed some people at an Israeli bus stop around 2015, and was killed by an Israeli with a gun, my dad wanted to buy one. I don’t think he’d ever shot one before that point. I don’t know if he ended up purchasing one.
He told me he wanted to be prepared. If he did buy one, I highly doubt he kept it in his nightstand. The table next to his bed was always cluttered: CPAP machine, Bibles, pens, artwork, 4 or 5 yellow legal pads where he wrote the insights his God gave him about Israel and the Jewish people and The Zionist Plan That Explains Everything. He needed the pads and pens to write down the prophetic dreams before they slipped back behind the veil.
A few times after some of the worst seizures, he lay curled on his side, reeling from the electrical storm that blitzed his brain, from the monstrous images he couldn’t even articulate. He told me that during some of these, he felt like he had been forsaken by God. That he felt like he was alone with Death. In consciousness he said he knew hadn’t been, that God wouldn’t do that. But under the cloud of poisoned neurons, his sight was clouded with unspeakable darkness
I wonder, when the seizure clawed his brain, if he had a gun. If he had kept it in his nightstand. Would he have wished to reach out for something or someone.
____
I feel like most families with a dad have a photo of the dad, asleep on a couch, head rolled back, with a baby, scrunched in memory of womb, asleep on his chest. In my family there’s at least two of these photos.
My dad loved them. He put them on the walls. He loved holding babies but was often a little awkward about it. He was an anxious dad. Often, things weren’t in the right place at the right time. His temper sat on the coffee table and worries hung on the key hooks.
The older I get, the more I become like him. In the months after he died, I had never felt more out of place in Nebraska, around regular people, around people effortlessly alive. It wasn’t that I wanted to die, necessarily. I was forgetting ease. Life was unceasing labor. With the weight of his absence and the disturbing manifestation of him in me, I felt curled into a chronic question mark. I had alarming, new back pain. His bags appeared under my eyes. I looked into the mirror and instead of my own grief, I saw my father’s sadness.
I think he loved those photos of him and baby because he felt confident that he was doing everything completely right. It didn’t matter that he and the baby were both asleep. They had found effortlessness together. The rare surrender.
____
In Hungary, I met a 30-something Israeli who asked if I’d shot a gun. I told him no. He said, oh, then I am more American than you are.
Isn’t that the Palestine-America-Israel project. By turning Palestine into Israel, Israel turns into America.
Tonight, a man will reach out for something or someone. He will end up in the ER or dead.
In America, men go to bed with a gun to their chest and go to the grave to keep it there.
In Gaza in October, a man goes to his grave with his baby on his chest. The baby enters the next world without really knowing this one. The familiar was still a little strange and everything else was glare, and shine, and blur, then bright, and screams, and smoke, then silence and silence and black.
What a mercy our sight is limited, when nothing is known, and everything monstrous.
In a grave in Gaza, a baby’s body curls into her fathers, skin-to-skin, ashes-to-ashes. The path to and from the place before birth and after death just six-weeks of breath away. Because of the bombs, and the men who love power more than they hate death, because Israel is turned into America, because of the forces seen and unseen that decided and decide to make thousands of babies leave, Sham and her father can’t regulate each other’s heart rates or temperature or blood pressure. There is no more oxytocin or cortisol. Past death and before birth, there is no effort.
Surrender attacks and swallows them whole.
__________________________________________________________________________
Your honesty and openness to vulnerability makes your writing so powerful.