True Icon

When it became certain that he was going to die, not long after his emergency baptism with water from the communal sink, our N.I.C.U. nurse, bopping back and forth on the soles of her Hokas, asked if we’d prefer to move Ignatius and his medical equipment into a private room. She was kind and capable. She was also—we agreed later, sharing grimaces—far too peppy. Smiling and humming, she busied about the room, connecting cords into beeping boxes to keep Iggy’s soul tethered to this realm while we said goodbye. As she untangled and unwound, knelt and popped up again, she asked us what we needed: “Do you want a different blanket for him? We have some nice ones for occasions like this.” Weeks earlier, back at home, I had unwrapped, washed, and folded dozens of swaddle blankets in matching sets—gifts from the twins’ Noah’s Ark–themed baby shower (“two by two”). But the matching blankets were at home, in their matching drawers, beside their matching wooden cribs. I looked at her and couldn’t say anything. I didn’t care about a baby blanket. My baby was dying.

She disappeared and returned with a stretchy bamboo swaddle blanket. It was ivory-colored and covered in a pattern of tiny teal stars.

“Oh . . . thanks,” I muttered. Not wanting to hurt her feelings, I draped the blanket over his starchy hospital blanket and clumsily tucked it between his wires and tubes.

“He looks sooo adorable in this blanket!” she crooned. I peered down at his face and hands on my chest. He looked motionless and purple.

“Yeah,” I managed to mumble.

A month later—the dirt still fresh on baby Iggy’s grave at our newly purchased family plot in the Calvary Catholic Cemetery in West Dallas—we were finally able to bring home his identical twin, Gabriel Xavier. Our four daughters, ages seven, six, four, and three, had been anxiously awaiting their surviving brother’s arrival. They had lost a baby brother, who was very much anticipated, loved, and known. And they had suffered for months from being separated from me. I had been stuck in the hospital’s antepartum ward for almost a month, and even after I was discharged from the hospital, I spent every waking moment back at the N.I.C.U. with Gabe, trying to nurse him to health. So, when my husband and I finally walked up the concrete path to our house with their skinny little six-pound baby brother, free at last from medical tubes and hospital monitors, Gabe became the center of the girls’ universe and of our family’s healing. With both parents and all living children in the house at last, we began to breathe again.

A few weeks after Gabe came home, I peered into his crib to check on him and discovered, to my horror, that someone had swaddled him in the teal-starred blanket the nurse had foisted upon us the day his brother died. Traumatized, I stripped it off him and hid it away in the back of his closet. I was surprised to see the blanket since I had no recollection of bringing it home. I surmised that someone must have packed it into our hospital bag, and once we were home, some well-meaning helper must have washed it, unaware of its history.

Months later, our four-year-old ran by me with the blanket tied around her neck as a cape. Evidently, she had stumbled across it while rifling around in her baby brother’s closet. I confiscated it again and hid it in the back of a different closet. Hoping to settle the matter for good, I sat the girls down and explained the origin of the blanket. I assumed the knowledge that their baby brother had died in this very cloth would deter them from trying to play with it anymore.

But I was wrong. Knowing the blanket’s history only made it more appealing. A pattern emerged: I would hide the blanket, they would find it, I would hide it again, and the cycle would continue. Our four-year-old, in particular, had a special devotion to the blanket. She would lay it on the living room floor and place on it a little wooden cross towards the top. Then she would sit or lie down on it, quietly thinking. I am a little ashamed that I discouraged the girls’ reverence for the blanket for so long. It took me many months to realize that they were, in a way, venerating a relic.

Until I lost a son, relics had seemed to me like one of those strange, oddball Catholic things not safe to bring up in polite company. I’m not sure why. To collect objects owned by the deceased is hardly a practice exclusive to religion, as the ledger of any auction house shows. Ronald Reagan’s golf putter sold at auction for one hundred fifty thousand dollars. The studded white jumpsuit Elvis famously wore at Madison Square Garden went for more than one million, and Judy Garland’s ruby red slippers commanded thirty-three million. In popular culture, the practice is not even reserved for the deceased: A single one of Lady Gaga’s false fingernails sold on eBay for twelve thousand dollars.

What’s more, given the amount of scriptural support for the practice of venerating relics, it’s unclear why the practice seems to be followed mostly by Catholics. Acts describes how the early Christians would touch handkerchiefs and aprons to Paul and bring them to the sick and possessed, and “the diseases departed from them, and the wicked spirits went out of them.” When the hemorrhaging woman wished to be healed, she knew that just brushing the edge of Christ’s cloak would heal her.

Christ Himself created one of the Church’s most cherished relics. While Jesus was carrying His cross on the way to Calvary, a woman was moved with compassion and approached Him. Desperate to give Him some kind of consolation, she wiped His bloody, sweaty face with her own veil. Later, the woman realized that the image of Christ’s face had been imprinted on the cloth. The woman has been named “Veronica” by tradition, derived from the Latin vera icona, or “true icon.” Thousands of miracles have been attributed to Veronica’s veil, and the Church preserves and venerates it to this day.

I have come to think of our N.I.C.U. nurse as not unlike Veronica. Just as Veronica approached Christ to wipe His face, desperate for some way to alleviate His suffering, the nurse had given us the little teal-starred blanket because she was attempting to find some way to console us. The blanket became his only real possession, since we didn’t have the time or the presence of mind to give him anything else. And just as Christ left His imprint on Veronica’s veil, He also allowed Iggy’s blanket to become something more for our girls, a way to give them the grace of consolation.

Almost a year after Iggy died, I was in New York for some meetings. From the conference room in the Courtyard Marriott in Hudson Yards, I texted my brother. His wife, my sister-in-law, was in labor with their first baby, and there had been complications. It was mid-morning on Saturday, and he had stopped responding to me.

As colleagues hummed about structured data and client requests, my mind curved inward into a private darkness. I began to relive my labor with the twins from months before, involuntarily transposing those events onto my sister-in-law’s experience. Once again, I saw “Baby B”—as the doctors called him—our Iggy—being ripped from my breathless body rocking on the sterile table, coming out paper white.

Cognizant that I was in an alternate mental state, I texted my boss to tell her what was going on. She looked at me from across the table and signaled that I should leave. A saint in her own right, she had flown in for Iggy’s funeral; she understood.

I walked out of the hotel onto West Thirty-Fourth Street. It was raining. With no umbrella, I walked southwest down Eighth Avenue, straight through the little rivers of pooling water and trash, destroying my Tory Burch flats. As it happened, I had purchased those same flats for Iggy’s funeral almost exactly a year prior. I had wanted the flats for a decade but had exercised restraint because of their price tag. When Iggy died and I was selecting my funeral outfit, I realized I had finally found the perfect excuse to buy some—walking down the aisle a few days after an emergency cesarean. Allowing them to be destroyed in the rain water a year later somehow felt right.

I stopped under a canopy and plugged in Saint John the Baptist in my maps and was on West Thirtieth in a few minutes. The church’s façade was discreet and camouflaged amidst the busy street of storefronts and red bricks. But as I approached, I felt my spirit lift upward inwardly as the height of its spire came into view.

To my surprise and delight, the church was hosting Eucharistic Adoration. A small group knelt in the pews reciting prayers before the monstrance. Soaked to my bones, I checked my phone one more time for an update. Finding none, I fell onto my knees, then lay prostrate, face down in the center of the aisle.

My forehead pressed into the tiled floor as my soaking-wet hair dripped down, and I breathed my prayer in and out. With my body and my soul, I pleaded with Christ to grant my niece her life. I begged Him to spare my brother and his wife the sorrow of kissing their baby goodbye, as my husband and I had done almost a year before. I beseeched Iggy, as his mother, to offer up all of his merits to obtain the favor of this cause. I called upon the entire communion of saints to turn their eyes towards me and plead with God for this baby’s earthly life.

Ever so gradually, I got up and sat in the pew and allowed my heart rate to normalize. A middle-aged woman who looked like my mom came over to me and handed me a booklet: Prayers of the Society of Padre Pio. She pointed over to my right, where a reliquary jutted from the wall. I was too far away to read the signage, but I made out the hallmark outline of Padre Pio’s brow and beard. Could this be—a true Padre Pio relic, right before me? I whispered “thank you” to her, then eased out of my seat and tiptoed over to the reliquary.

It contained three large relics of Padre Pio in a glass encasement set into the wall. I touched my fingertips against the glass and silently thanked God for the consolation of feeling so close to both Christ and this holy man, Padre Pio, whom I had always admired. At the gift shop on my way out, I purchased rosaries for the girls, a John the Baptist card for my friend, and three bottles of “Padre Pio Relic Oil” for seven dollars. I wondered how they created the relic oil. An image of church ladies running oil through the relics like a colander and then bottling up the liquid passed through my mind, making me smile.

Finally, at 1:15 P.M., my brother texted me. The baby was here and all was well. I stepped outside. The rain had stopped. I wandered up to Penn Station and devoured a pastrami sandwich and a black and white cookie. The woman next to me told me my dress was a beautiful color.

Later that night, on the way to a jazz club, a few of my non-Catholic colleagues asked me where I had been. I told them that I had found a Catholic church. Emboldened, I decided to share the story about the Padre Pio relics, adding a little apologia on their significance.

“That’s really cool,” one colleague said. “So what were his relics?”

I paused for a moment, then answered, hoping I didn’t sound too sheepish.

“Some heart tissue, a glove, and a dirty sock.”

By October, Iggy’s blanket had become such a fixture in our household that the girls would often fight over whose turn it was to hold it, twist it, cherish it. In moments of grief, I even found myself walking upstairs to carefully pry it from the hands of one of my sleeping daughters, to hold it myself as I prayed. I wished I had saved one of Iggy’s dirty socks.

And so, emulating Mother Church once more, our family made the decision to begin partitioning our personal relic. Delicately, my mom began cutting out little squares of the blanket.

Our girls now each have their own relic blanket, with a four-by-four cutout of Iggy’s blanket sewn in the corner for them to hold. We have given miniature “blankets” to friends and family: cotton handkerchiefs with one of his teal stars woven in.

Upon receiving the Iggy relics, some have burst into tears. One friend texted us that she has been holding it during her medical treatments. A few people said nothing at all, which is understandable. It must be hard to know what to say when someone gives you a snippet of a baby blanket that belonged to her dead son.

Since she was born last September, my brother and sister-in-law’s little daughter has been on a difficult medical journey. And so, desperate to bring her and her parents some consolation, my mom is in the process of sewing her a personalized relic blanket—a garden-themed quilt with a sizable piece of Iggy’s blanket sewn in the corner.

When they receive it, I am sure they won’t want to hurt my feelings. So they’ll drape it over her and snap a photo for me.

They’ll wonder, inside, what they could possibly do with another baby blanket, and why I would care to send it. They’ll manage a text: “Thanks for the blanket!”

And I look forward to responding, “She looks sooo adorable in it!!”