Blue Baby

My infant daughter died fifty-three years ago last week. She was born not getting enough oxygen, which made her lips purply, the way kids look when they’ve stayed in the pool too long. Writing about Carolyn in my forthcoming memoir, White Wife/Blue Baby, has finally quieted my heart. After she died, her father and I stayed married, but we couldn’t do much for each other emotionally. Grieving a child solo, in silence, without asking for help, is a terrible idea, but it was normal for the early seventies. Before the 19^th century, one in three or four babies died in their first year, at least in Europe. But by the early 20^th century, antibiotics, maternal health care and improved hygiene had made infant deaths fairly rare in the West. Even a bit peculiar.

Grief turned me into a quiet, soft-spoken, bleeding banshee. In the early years after Carolyn’s death, screams were still coming out of the top of my head. I was not able to meet a new person without announcing that my daughter was born with heart disease and she died when she was eight months old.  I’d sputter out that sentence within a minute or two, no matter what the topic of conversation might be. At which point I’d hear the voices scream, “How horrible! Who did that happen to?” My silent reply was that it had happened to me. I was a split personality. Grief was certifiable madness.

The pain lessened over the years, but I also got better at figuring out ways to keep it from barging into the present. When other parents would ask how many children I had, I’d keep them busy by saying something like, “I have a daughter who is 12 and one who is 8.”  This was a true statement, since after Carolyn died, we went on to have two perfectly healthy girls. Today I just say, “I have a daughter who lives in New York and a daughter here in CT.” There is no need for a head count; no one needs me to add, “And I have one daughter who died.”

And these days there are real blessings that also complicate the count.  My then-husband had a child before he met me. She looks exactly like him and has the incisive style of thinking and moral courage that so attracted me to him when we met in the sixties. She is half-sister to my birth daughters and calls me “Mom,” which makes me proud. Joined across the color line, we are an American rainbow family, firmly planted in the center of American history, scars and all.