Dead Baby @ MindSay

Joy was eighteen and looked fifteen. At fifteen she had gotten pregnant. First Joy's mother, herself a single parent, and then Joy’s boyfriend both demanded that Joy get an abortion. At her age, frankly, it was the only sensible thing to do, or so they said. Joy refused. They insisted. No. They implored. Still Joy said no. They argued, they pled, they persuaded and begged. But no. Joy would have the baby. It was true that she didn’t know how she would do it, how she would take care of it, how it would all work out. All she could do was stick to what she thought was right, put her trust in God, and try the very best she could. All right, then, she was on her own, they told her. She should not expect either of them to help her care for it. When things got tough—and by god they guaranteed her things would—she’d damn well better not come sniveling and crying to them. It was solely her decision. She’d made her bed. Now lie in it! Somehow Joy endured and survived this ordeal. She gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. But something was wrong. Her precious infant daughter was covered with small, pale raspberry-blue spots the size of dimes. Leukemia! My god! Joy had no insurance, no money, no job. She’d had to drop out of school. Her baby was so sick. This particular form of the disease was quite rare, and chances of long-term survival in such cases were slim. Doctors ran expensive test after expensive test. Treatments were worse than terrible, they were Frankensteinian, grotesque. First a shunt and then, when her baby was too weak to suck, a feeding tube was inserted. Monitors, medicines, chemicals, radiation. Only briefly at the very beginning of her life had Joy’s baby even been responsive, and now the knowledge of her illness made a torture of hearing her infrequent, tiny, piteous, bleating cries! She lingered in life, twice temporarily gaining strength and igniting bursts of new hope and unrealistic expectation in Joy, before her precious baby’s dwindling strength was spent and in one last silent sigh she died. How tiny and beautiful and fragile and forsaken she looked on the pink satin pillow of her casket! How much God must have needed her and wanted her and loved her to take her so soon after she was born! For Joy, writing the story of her baby's birth, illness, suffering, and death was both a gift and an agony of love.

Joy wanted me to read her narrative aloud to the class, just as I had read the early drafts of the narratives of her classmates. I was reluctant. Joy herself seemed so young, so shy, so insecure, still so vulnerable. She was still hurting so. But she had earned her high school diploma after her baby’s death, and now she was enrolled in my developmental writing class. It was still fairly early in the quarter, my students had not had much time to write, but Joy’s story had come tumbling out in a rush. Once she had started, she couldn’t stop, she said, and now she had also finished integrating every one of the corrections and suggestions I had made on her first and second drafts. But her story was so sad! Like so many of the raw, unlettered stories of naive writers, Joy’s narrative had an innocence and poignancy more powerful than the calculated and crafted fictions of professional artists. There was nothing literary about it. It belonged in the collection I called True Stories of Real Life in Plain English. Despite its untutored style, its sentimentality, and its cliches, its terrible truth touched me and moved me, and I knew it would touch and move my students too. I knew my reading it aloud would move its author, Joy, in ways she did not and could not anticipate. There would be crying, lots of crying, I was certain of that. And there was no need for this really, the paper was wonderful, an A, there was no reason at all for Joy to subject herself to this additional pain, for her to relive this awful nightmare all over again. She’d been through so much she'd been through more than enough already.

“No, please, I’m fine,” she said. “I want you to read it.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “We don’t have to do this.”

“Please do.”

So I did. And before I had read more than a few short paragraphs, Joy began to cry. I stopped and our eyes met.
 
She smiled wanly and silently mouthed the words, “Go on.”

With a look, I questioned her once more. She nodded yes, yes. I surveyed her classmates. Several women were already in pain, their faces twisted in grimaces of empathy. The young men, uncomfortable and self-conscious among other men in the presence of women and tears, hung their heads, looking at nobody, looking guilty, as if they were ashamed of themselves for not knowing how to be in this emotion, somehow disarmed, impotent, privately steeling themselves for what was to come, and I had not even gotten to the revelation of Joy’s baby’s leukemia yet! Still, seeing no objection in the faces of the few students who dared look at me, I checked Joy one more time, took a big deep breath, and read on.

Joy resumed weeping.

A second time I halted.

In the right hip pocket of my dress slacks I kept my white cotton handkerchief, right where I tucked it every morning, always, just as my mother had taught me when I started kindergarten so many years ago. Then, it was for my hay fever. Now, in the age of facial tissues, my handkerchief was always clean, used only occasionally to wipe my glasses. I reached in my pocket and offered my hanky to Joy. She sniffled and smiled, embarrassed, and shook her head slightly.

No.

I smiled and nodded slightly.

Yes.

Yes, I insisted.

“It’s clean,” I said almost whispering.

“Thank you,” she said.

Joy wiped her face of tears, and as I once more resumed reading her sad story of family, loneliness, birth, love, suffering, death, and grief she patted her tears and gently dried her weepy eyes with my white cotton hanky. We read and talked and cried and, yes, even laughed together—who knows why—for the remaining fifteen minutes of the period. Before Joy left for her next class, she walked to the front of the room and returned to me my white cotton handkerchief.

“Thank you,” she said. Her red puffy eyes still glistened. She smiled. Our eyes met.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“Sorry,” she added, smiling once more before she turned and left. “It’s kinda wet!”

“Good!” I said.

I felt good, real good. I can't explain it. I made a show of folding my moist white hanky neatly into a small soft square and of returning it to the place where it belonged in my right hip pocket. Once I had it tucked in, secure on my hip, I reached back and with the tips of my fingers lightly patted my pocket, twice, and when I did, there on my hip I felt a dampness on my skin. Joy and I waved bye-bye like little children, wiggling our fingers. When Joy had gone I returned to my gray office cubicle. When I sat down, through the thin fabric of the pocket of my trousers I felt again the dampness of Joy's tears on my skin. Though over and over each time I forgot all about it, still, all morning long, if I shifted in my chair just so, or reached back for my hanky to clean my glasses, or moved in a certain way, I felt the dampness of Joy’s tears in my white cotton hanky on my hip, and I remembered sad Joy and her dead baby and the mysterious sad glad experience her story had made for me and for my students, and a lump would form in my throat, and I would feel my own hot prickly tears rise almost to my eyes, and my eyes would ask my permission to cry, which as always I refused—all that, all that and more, impossible to express exactly even as I feel it all all over again here right now and try to write for her dead baby and for Joy and for you this blue.