Family History

"Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of our family," my mother said.

Was it Day Two, or Day Three? I see myself on the big brown chenille couch in the TV room, holding Captain Zimbo and watching Eureka impassively. Zane, the sexy bad boy computer genius (because we all know one of those) is doing something to annoy Jo, the gorgeous sheriff's deputy. I'm barely ambulatory, but occasionally I get up and cut myself a piece of the hazelnut tart that Tanja has made. It bears more than a passing resemblance to chess pie, and I cannot resist it, despite the fact that I had had every intention of returning to my pre-pregnancy low-carb diet right away.

If I give my mother the benefit of the doubt, this might mean, "Honey, this is really, really bad. I realize how bad this is." But the truth is, it made me feel like an alien freak, the only person, going back hundreds of years, who was defective enough to give birth to a dead baby. Which even as she said it I understood was not remotely true. 

In 1970 my father's sister Jane gave birth at full-term to a stillborn daughter. The way that stillbirth was handled in those days makes me cry for my aunt and uncle. Jane went into labor the usual way. During the course of it, the doctor discovered that the baby had no heartbeat. He didn't tell her that the baby was dead, thinking that she wouldn't give her best effort during the labor if she knew. Just before delivery they knocked her out. They took the baby away. I don't think she even saw her, or was able to give her a name. She said that she and my uncle were young and living in a town without family. They didn't know what to do, and there was no one to guide them. So they allowed the hospital take care of the disposal of their dead child's remains and they walked away.

I am so grateful that Balthazar was not born in 1970. I am so grateful for the women's movement. I am so grateful for the birthing revolution, which even as it gave us judgmental prenatal yoga teachers and sanctimonious home birthers also gave us compassion and acknowledgement, gave us different protocols for perinatal loss. I am so grateful that I live in Portland, because I am not sure that every babyloss mom has been treated with the sensitivity that I have.

The story of my aunt and uncle's stillborn daughter was not a secret. From the time I was old enough to ask questions I knew that they had had a baby that died. They never hid it as something to be ashamed of or secretive about, and yet, maybe because my father's family tends to be stoic and because most of what I learned about both sides of my family I learned from my mother, the tragedy of it was never emphasized. Or maybe it was, but I just wasn't equipped to grasp the enormity of it.

After Balthazar died my aunt called me, and it was clear that in some way she had been waiting for forty years to share the details of her story with someone who would understand it as fully and viscerally as I did. She wanted to help me, I know, but also she wanted to talk. I'm not sure she ever felt she got full credit for becoming a mother that day. I'm not sure anyone appreciated how much it must have hurt every time her sister, who was pregnant with her third child at the time of the stillbirth, popped out another baby. The things that people said to her, like the church member who said it was God's will that she not have children so that she could devote more time to her husband and his ministry, still burned inside of her all of these years later.

Four years after the stillbirth my aunt and uncle adopted my cousin Sara. She and I speculated together, when we were embarking on parenthood ourselves, that today whatever had killed her parents' baby would have been detected and treated, and that she would likely have survived. Which just shows that we both thought stillbirth was a tragedy that happened in the old-timey days, but certainly not now. With all the medicine!

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Around the time my mother was born, her mother Elsie's sister Annamae gave birth to a premature son who subsequently died. Annamae's husband was in Korea at the time. The child's name was Patrick and he is buried with my great-aunt and uncle. This was also not a secret. My cousin on that side, Ambie, says that when Annamae went to the doctor to ask how she could conceive another son, and quickly, he told her to "get on top." She went on to have one more child, my mother's cousin Ken, so whatever she did must have worked.

Elsie and Annamae had another sister, Patricia. She died in early childhood. My great-grandmother always maintained it was because she had eaten a banana. They were poor and living in an urban slum and I would say it was more likely to be typhus or cholera, but I don't know if they even had the money for a doctor.

My brother is married to Jenny. Jenny's brother and his wife had twins in 2007. One of the twins, Katie, developed a life-threatening complication after birth that left her permanently disabled. She died at the age of two.

 

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An older couple from the church attended Balthazar's memorial. I had not met either of them before, but they were boldfaced names; they ran committees and led prayer groups, the way my parents did, and do. They seemed familiar: the husband wore a suit and tie; the wife, a scarf clasped with a gold pin. They could have been my godparents. The wife squeezed my hands as they left and told me how sorry she was, while her husband stood diffidently behind her. A few days later a card came in the mail letting us know that they had made a donation to the March of Dimes in Balthazar's memory.

I wondered about them, later. Because they clearly weren't just two of a parade of the churchgoing elderly who have passed through my life. They were people who felt moved to attend the memorial for a stranger's dead baby. What story are they carrying that compelled them to come?

Parents who have lost children are a family. A family with millions of members. When Balthazar died, my nuclear family got smaller but my human family got much, much larger. I exchanged Christmas cards this year with six members of the perinatal loss book group I attended remotely this fall. They are part of my family now, even if we never meet. The woman who writes the blog Still Life With Circles is part of my family. The moms and dads at Glow in the Woods are too.

Two photographs in the New York Times affected me profoundly this year. The first appeared on the front page July 5. It showed the captain of the boat that capsized on Long Island Sound on July 4. His eleven year-old daughter was one of those who drowned. He is talking to a Nassau County detective and holding his hands over his face to shield it from the photographers, but you do not have to see any of his features to perceive their rictus of agony. The second was of a father in Syria holding the body of his dead son, killed by the Syrian Army in Aleppo. The composition is a classic Pieta. The son is maybe nine years old.

These men are my family, too.

If I project myself into the future I can see that I will be the one to attend the funeral of a stranger's dead baby. Like the mystery couple at church, I won't burden the grieving parents with my own story, but I will be there. Because someone has to bear witness, and the only people who really understand that are the ones who have stood there themselves. People who are members of this family.