This story has a happy ending. Of sorts.
Kathryn would have been 22 years old this weekend.
She was born April 23rd, 1983. Our second daughter, after Erin. We were so excited to be having kids so close together - only 14 months apart. We were sure they'd grow up to be the closest friends imaginable - almost twins. My sister and I, born 13 months apart, have that bond. My wife and her sister have about the same age spread, and the same closeness.
Kathryn was born on a Saturday, after a hellishly long and complicated labour. My wife had been plagued by nightmares in the weeks before, dreams where her baby was born but didn't cry. When Kathryn was born, she didn't cry. She was put in an incubator and whisked in one direction - to a pediatric hospital. My wife and I were taken to a room down the hall - she on a stretcher, me numbly sleepwalking beside.
What seemed like hours later - it was really only (!) 45 minutes. - a doctor we didn't know came into the room. He cleared his throat, gathering his strength, and looked us in the eyes. "There's no easy way to tell you this ..."
She had been born with severe A/V malformation, a one-in-a-million medical condition where her arteries and veins were ... I don't know, really. Too elastic? That sounds about right. Essentially, things were pretty messed up in her circulatory system, and it had led to her heart being greatly oversized. In fact, it took up most of the room in her chest cavity, leaving no room for her lungs. No wonder the poor lil mite didn't cry. She couldn't draw breath.
I hate suspense. Just tear off the bandaid, already. "So ... what's the bottom line ...?"
"She's going to die. It might be today, certainly before the weekend is out. There are no miracles to be had. Your baby is going to die. I'm very sorry." And he was. The poor man was radiating sympathy and felt as helpless in his way as we did in ours.
You don't have to work too hard to imagine how we felt. Devastated. Shocked. Utterly destroyed. Our happy life in shambles and shards around us.
Through that, my wife reached out and took the doctor's hand. "I'm sorry you had to tell us this," she said. "This must be the very worst part of your job." My God. The generosity ...? Just wow. Still, all these years later ... wow.
The next few months were pretty tough. God love 'em, people tried to say all the right things, but really ... there's not much you can say. People tried to find silver linings ... that's pretty much a no-fly zone. People talked in vague terms about God's Great Plan. Not so much buying a "Great Plan" that includes random suffering of innocent babies, thankyouverymuch. It just ... sucked in ways that only people who have gone through it can begin to understand.
We dealt. My wife stumbled through the first few weeks at home before announcing that she couldn't be around the house and deal with the empty arms, so she was going back to work. If I wanted to, I could walk away from the job I thoroughly hated and do that writing thing I'd talked about doing ... focus on it full time while taking care of our other daughter.
A year later, on April 23rd, we were back in the pit. The memories flooded over us, and it was as if it were happening all over again. Except ... my wife was pregnant. We grieved - again. But ... there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
Allison was born on September 2, 1984. It was excruciatingly stressful, waiting for the "all clear". Because of that freak condition, we were now classified as a "high risk pregnancy". But she was born, and cried lustily moments later, and the world was a little better. The next morning, as I bounced into the room, I found my wife holding our new baby, weeping disconsolately, and my heart was gripped by terror. "What? What is it?" She couldn't talk. "Tell me!"
She unrolled the blanket to show me Allison's feet. Two of her toes on each foot were joined together, webbed. "She's not perfect!" my wife said, and burst into great sobs. I laughed and cried at the same time. "She's fine. Not perfect, but just fine."
And she was.
Skip forward four years. April 28th, 1988. We were sitting at the dinner table, when my wife looked up at me, stricken. "What?"
"We forgot ..."
"I didn't forget. But ... life goes on."
And it does.
The other day, the four of us sat around the dining room table. Sunday breakfast - cooked by Dad - is an important tradition in our house, one of the few times we can get together as a family and just yak about everything that's going on in our lives.
Allison and Erin are so close now it makes me misty. Didn't always feel like they would be - three years is a big gap when they become teenagers and the hormones kick in and PMS feels like it stands for Perpetual Menstrual Syndrome and for God's sake, can you women not all get on the same damn schedule? and all they can do is fight about who borrowed what t-shirt and got a stain on it and IhateyouIhateyouIhateyou and you'renotthebossofme and on and on.
(One time, when we had company for dinner, the girls were sent off to do the dishes. I could hear an argument brewing, and was getting set to go out and pre-emptively end it when - as always happens - the conversation lagged at the same moment the music went quiet and all the appliances clicked off and in that enormous, gaping silence, all you could hear were two teenaged girls' voices:
"Bitch."
"Cunt."
"Oops."
"Girls, can I see you in the TV room for a moment?")
But now? Now they think and act as one - revelling in each others' happiness and supporting one another when life sucks and just ... being everything you'd want sisters to be.
Allison has become this wonderful, funny, kind, thoughtful, talented, generous young woman. She volunteers at the Humane Society, plays fiddle and violin at peoples' weddings, has her own CD, is a remarkably good writer and is excelling in the English Honours program at UPEI. Her teachers have adored her since she was in Kindergarten and they adore her still. The world is a better place for having her in it.
My wife and I had decided, long ago, that we were only going to have two children. That was it. Two.
We had Erin, and we had Kathryn. And Kathryn died. So we had Allison. And the world is a better place for her being in it.
Draw whatever conclusions you want about silver linings or Great Plans. I'd have never made that trade.
But I'm forever grateful for what I have.
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