First Day of Spring 1973

t.o. crow

I have stumbled onto the backwater of the River of Life.
No light glimmers on its dark surface.
No quickening stirs the fetid water.
Though its stillness appalls me,
I am compelled to stand vigilant on the shore.

“You must wake up!”
An insistent voice

beckons me back from the Valley of Shadows.
Yet, I resist the brightness that shrouds the voice in light.

Leaden,
I wander through a wilderness of sorrow
Crying: “My son! My son!”

My keening wail echoes through the valley.
Ricochets in the hollows against tall peaks of despair.
Flows back to me in great waves of lamentation.

I call once more but he does not answer.
The only sound

Is the bright, distant voice
Luring me from the valley.

“My son is gone!”

I cry in agony.

A puzzled voice asking,

“Who told you it was a boy?”
Breaks through my crest of mourning.

“He told me!”

I cry

as I flutter toward the light,

then turn abruptly,

plunging headlong back into the brackish water.

There,

I wept alone.

In the valley where there was no sun.

Original: 9/29/1986
Revised: 11 /29/2009 TOC

"First Day of Spring 1973" tells of the birth of my only son. It was one of the most traumatic events of my life - made worse by the fact that mothers were not allowed to see their stillborn babies at that time. I was kept in the hospital and not even allowed to attend his funeral.

The only comfort I received was from the nurse who was with me throughout his delivery and through most of the night when I refused to wake up. What she could not understand was how I so adamantly knew that it was my "son" when I had never been told plus, I was so deeply sedated at his birth. (At the time, we had no ultrasound or other tests to identify the sex of babies).

What I was trying to explain to her was that my son had "told" me in a vivid dream around 3:00 am on Saturday morning to "get off your stomach, you're smothering me." In the dream, I could see him curled in the birthing position in my uterus. I jolted awake but I was not on my stomach and he never moved again. It was St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1973.

At a friend's insistence, I saw my doctor on Monday. The doctor couldn't find a heartbeat and told me that he was "gone" and sent me back home. I was devastated. He induced labor on Tuesday, March 20, 1973, since I was already scheduled for that day. When my son was born, there was a knot tied in his umbilical cord which my doctor described as being: "Tighter than a knot in a plow line." My son had, indeed, "smothered to death" just as he had "told" me in the dream.

When I returned home, my well-meaning mother and husband had removed all traces of my son's being from our house. All of his things down to his crib were gone. My grief was so deep that for months after his birth, I could not sleep without dreaming of a tiny baby in a long, white christening gown. I could see tiny hands with fingers folded laying across its stomach and tiny feet with toes but under the cap where his face should be was just a blur.

That image haunted my dreams off and on for many years to come. My only guess is that it came from the nurse assuring me that there was: "Nothing wrong with him. He had all his fingers and toes and lots of black hair."

According to her, the only marks on him were where he had rested at the bottom of my womb in the amniotic fluid until he was born. Because of that, the left side of his face and his left arm were puckered like he had sat in the bathtub too long.

We did not name him. His grave is at the foot of his paternal grandfather's who died before he was ever conceived.