Birth, Death, and Bureaucracy

The Denver County Birth and Death Certificate office shares walls with a local gym on one side and a tattoo removal place on the other. Life and death nestled snugly between hope and regret.

I wait in a plastic chair beside new parents and my fellow bereaved: We who have recently heard lungs take their first breath and we who have recently heard lungs take their last. Everyone is exhausted.

We could all use a chaplain.

There is no app for certificates. For these things you need a piece of government paper. With a raised seal. Proof that a life has either begun or ended, as though the human body itself had not already made that perfectly clear.

We wait.

When called, we walk over peeling floor decals, those worn ghosts of social distancing past -to receive our proof of the obvious.

This go around in the grief grinder is simpler than all the others – this one is natural. Expected. It is not even interesting.

Eighty-three is an estimable number of years to have lived. Fifty-seven-year-old women lose their fathers. Always have.

There is nothing particularly tragic here. Just clean grief.

Still in its wrapper.

(Even so, my eyes don’t sting any less for it.)

How is it that the most common human experiences feel the most alienating when they are happening to you?

“This is the most singularly weird thing that has ever happened to anyone,” I remember thinking when I was pregnant, as if every person ever born didn’t represent a woman’s pregnancy. I felt like telling the cashier at Safeway, “You’re not going to believe this, but there’s another human being growing inside my body.”

The bizarreness of pregnancy, when it was my own, was all-consuming.

I look down at the curly-headed baby in the pink car carrier next to me.

That baby is not yours to hold, I tell myself.

But I want to. Desperately.

The twenty minutes I spend in a plastic chair at the Denver County Birth and Death Certificate office demands of me a self-restraint perhaps unseen since the shaky days of early sobriety.

Stop looking at the baby.

Stop it.

Don’t.

Ugh.

I distract myself by imagining a nationwide sticker system in which the bereaved could walk into county birth and death certificate offices and choose a red sticker if they would like to hold a newborn, and young parents could choose a blue sticker if they would be happy to let someone else hold the baby for a minute.

A mutual aid society of the barely-holding-it-together.

The grieving get one warm, milk-drunk baby placed in their arms. The parents get ninety seconds to complete a government form without a small human attached to their body.

Everybody wins.

“Bolz,” the woman behind the bulletproof glass says, which is how I am summoned from fantasy back into bureaucracy.

I walk to the window and give the woman my name, my ID, my credit card. She smiles and slides the certificate toward me through the metal tray. My father’s name. His date of birth. His date of death. Cause. Time. County. State.

The official facts of a life, which of course say nothing.

Nothing on that paper says how his hugs felt, or how his homemade pecan pie tasted, or what his best stories sounded like.

These papers only prove that our people died.

Our grief proves that they lived.

-Nadia

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