Skills for Life and Death--Guest Blog Post by Claire Donohue Roof

            My mother taught me how to go through my first childbirth and have a healthy, happy baby girl. She also taught me how to have a childbirth that ends in death. Her second born, my brother John, was born premature, in 1956. Mom had been working a lot then. John lived eight hours, and then died. My mother brought his tiny body to Coldwater, Ohio, and buried him there with a headstone. She dressed him in a lace white christening gown. He had black hair. He favored Tom. My mother had a funeral mass for John. The nurses had baptized him at the hospital. She mourned. She endured. She somehow went on. After all the pregnant women my mother had taken care of, and after all the deliveries my mother witnessed, I am sure now she had seen the whole spectrum of outcomes of births.

            My Grandma Cora had also carried and lost a baby. He was born before my mother was born in 1928. He is also buried in the Coldwater cemetery. His name was Joseph. These two generations of women would give me faith I would survive the stillbirth of my second born child, a girl, Catherine. 

In the spring of 1990, I finished my Masters Degree in English Education from Saint Joseph Catholic College for Women in West Hartford, Connecticut. I was about 24 weeks pregnant. It was a different pregnancy. I was much sicker. I was weaker. I felt a kind of green poison that was not morning sickness. I had told the ob/gyn doctor I had these feelings. She dismissed them saying I was just having morning sickness, and that I was tired because I had another child to take care of. I remember the face of that doctor always.  I had a second husband, a budding architect. My firstborn was five years old. On the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison, my second husband and I were celebrating my finishing graduate school. I stood in the bright white shower. Putting my hand on my stomach, I asked the baby to move. I tried to will the baby to move. But, the baby did not. I told myself the baby inside me was sleeping. The first stage of grief is denial. I had an appointment in a few weeks at the doctor. There were three women doctors in the group. I had my second husband come with me to that next appointment. It was late February. There was no snow in West Hartford that February day. My second husband, my four-year-old, and I lived in a second story apartment in Hartford. 

            That day in February, we went to the narrow white exam room. We had had an ultra-sound test when the baby was twenty weeks old. The baby moved on the screen. The baby was a bit small, but otherwise, just fine. I remember those words. Just fine. So, now towards twenty-eight-weeks, there was this next ultra-sound. The blonde woman doctor came into the room. She was young and smiling. It was the one doctor in the practice I had not met yet. I would never see her again. But, she was to be the witness to this jarring moment that shook my world. She put on the cold jelly on my stomach. And then she put on the wand. The screen was black and grey. And in that second, I looked at the screen, and then, at her. We knew. We both knew. The baby was not alive anymore. She stopped smiling. She told us we were going to go to the hospital. 

            My second husband drove me to Hartford Hospital. We had a silver van. We did not speak. At the hospital, the doctors confirmed that the baby had recently died. The doctors instructed me to go to my apartment and pack for my visit to the hospital the next day. I would have to be induced, go through labor, and give birth. I did not cry. I remember trying to pack a bag for my overnight stay at the hospital. While I tried to find warm socks, I simply stopped. 

I called my mother in South Bend. I told her the baby was not alive. She told me I had done my job. I had kept this life safe until that spirit could go back to heaven. She told me that this would be the hardest thing I would ever do. But that there was a way to do this. There was a road to take. She had done it. She had buried a baby. My Grandma Cora had done it. She also had buried a baby. I told her I wasn’t going to the hospital. I told her I knew that if I went to the hospital, I would die, just like my baby. She went on to say, “Yes, you will go to the hospital, and you will live.” She explained how the doctors would induce the labor. I would go through labor, and deliver this child. I would be in a twilight state. The nurses would be able to give me pain meds for the contractions. I felt blinded and stunned. My mother kept telling me I would live. I had a five-year-old little girl. I had had a regular pregnancy. Again, I thought back on when I had told that first ob/gyn doctor something was wrong with this pregnancy. And then, my second husband drove me to Hartford Hospital. 

            I would have a nineteen-hour labor in a twilight zone space. Pregnancy and labor had been a cosmic whirl for me both times. I felt, during contractions, pre-verbal, pre-human, primordial, and within and without a body. Then, I was pushing. Then, there was a child. Blond eyelashes, blond hair, and tiny fingers with tiny fingernails. Little blue baby. I held her. Part of me hovered in the space between my body and the ceiling of the room. Nurses were kind. They took the baby to be examined. My second husband and I went to order a gravestone. My mother would come after this birth. There was the Cedar Hills Cemetery. We were there, in Connecticut.         

My milk came in the next day. I had my hair cut in our apartment kitchen. It was Lent. It was the end of February. I had been working at a daycare where my daughter was attending. They sent a fruit basket that had a ham in it also. There was a funeral. My second husband and I pick out things to bury the baby girl with. We picked out a pink blanket. There was dried sage. There was a toy from my first born. Everything fit in a shoebox. I don’t remember dressing that day of the funeral. I remember the funeral home. I remember walking into the room and seeing the small, white coffin. I kind of fell back at this sight.

There was a service. We drove to the Cedar Hills Cemetery. She was named Catherine. She was buried on a hillside with other children’s graves nearby. I had lived. I had survived. We were encouraged to go to a grief support group at the hospital. Other parents who had lost their children would be there.

Three month later, we would try again. I would become pregnant with my third child. I prayed. I got a high risk pregnancy doctor this time. Later, I would find out that Catherine’s umbilical cord was very short and filled with fibroids. As she grew, the cord could no longer support the supply of life to the baby. The doctors would tell me it simply was a fluke. It was rare. It probably would never happen again. For six weeks, I did not go to work back at the day care. That autumn, I would go to a job interview at the University of Hartford to be an adjunct in the English Department. By that time, I was pregnant again. I went forward, but I never forgot.

If you would like to read other work by me, please email me at croof@ivytech.edu