I happened upon it in a posthumous retrospective of Updike's New Yorker contributions, and it set me thinking about the duck-shaped ceramic planter out in the garage; an innocent object Susan and I can't bear to part with—or bring inside the house.
I was sitting at the computer desk in our bedroom when Susan came home from a routine obstetrician's appointment and told me with a quavering voice that the doctor couldn't find our baby's heartbeat.
Gina should have been our sixth daughter. Should have arrived on February14, 1986. But our precious valentine died at 20 weeks in Susan's body, and was delivered stillborn on September 19, 1985. Fully formed. Impossibly tiny. Her cord—no thicker than two twisted strands of yarn—terminating at the partially detached placenta that had caused her death. A doctor placed Gina tenderly in a white plastic bucket, and I regret to this day that I did not kiss her little head before he fixed the lid.
I can't begin to fathom Susan's grief at Gina's loss. I can only imagine an exponentially more wrenching anguish than the crushing heartache that took me completely by surprise. I'd never really wept before; and in the ensuing days and weeks found myself crying at the smallest provocation: a few bars of poignant music on the car radio; a little girl in a pink parka playing in the snow.
Friends sent cards, bouquets, and the duck-shaped planter mentioned above. Hand-painted in muted tones. Overflowing with ivy.
Three years later I wrote this in the journal I was keeping at the time:
9-19-88. I am thinking about you today, Mary Regina, on this third anniversary of the night we lost you forever. You would have been two years and seven months old by now. Toilet-trained and talking. Full of fun and mischief. An angel when asleep. An angel when awake. In my mind I can see me doing for you the things a daddy should do. Holding you on my lap in my corduroy chair. Strapping you into your car seat. Hoisting you into the shopping cart at Farmer Jack, while saying, "Such a big girl!" I always think of you as having reddish-blond hair like your sister Thea's. Blue eyes, of course. There, at the end of the hall, by the clothes hamper, you sit on the floor wailing about the toy Kelly grabbed from you. I come, full of sympathy, lift you and hold you near, feel the cool skin of your cheek against mine and the wet trace of your tears. God bless you, my daughter.
Well, that journal entry was about 20 years old when I was viewing an episode of Medium one Monday night and got weepy all over again for Gina.
The principal character, Allison DuBois, was dreaming that she and her grown-up son—who had died as a child—were driving somewhere in a car. And as I was looking at that vivacious young man, I began envisioning Baby Gina as a vibrant young woman of around 22, and completely lost it.
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