Delmarva Review: The Baby in the Corner by Anne Moul

Author’s Note: I recently discovered that the gravestone of my brother, who died shortly after birth in 1960, is marked only by the word BABY, instead of his name. Seeing those four stark letters evoked memories of how his very existence was erased from our family’s reality. The forced repression of loss and grief had far-reaching implications, not only for my parents, but it impacted my own choices about motherhood.

The Baby in the Corner

I WAS AROUND ELEVEN OR TWELVE when sitting in church one Sunday, I saw a family name I didn’t recognize listed in the bulletin for the altar flowers. I leaned over to my dad and whispered, “Who was that?” He whispered back, “That was your little brother. He was born too early and didn’t live long. Don’t say anything to your mother about it.” No further explanation was given. I was left to ponder the fact that I was not always an only child.

I found this news intriguing from a preadolescent’s perspective. I tried to picture what my brother might have looked like or where his bedroom would have been in our house. I told close friends, and a few would share that their mother, too, had lost or miscarried a baby at some point. It was not an uncommon occurrence in those days before NICUs. I was a curious child, and I had so many questions for my parents. But I knew better than to ask. I had been well-schooled in keeping quiet about things that were painful or messy. 

That sense of never loosening the ties that bound the pain in our lives was strongly communicated to my family and perhaps, most tragically, to my mother by my paternal grandmother. A product of the late Victorian era, my grandmother hoisted on a girdle every morning and never left the house without a pair of white gloves somewhere on her person. Propriety ruled. When my grandfather’s declining health began to require frequent ambulance calls, she would not allow the drivers to sound the siren and “make a scene.” Until the day my grandfather died, I never saw her shed a tear. She insisted on keeping the unsavory side of life well-hidden and as a result, secrets festered in my family to the point that they formed a sort of mushroom cloud, with spores of toxicity floating down on us for years afterward.  

I was an adult for a long time before I knew my grandfather, a wise and kindly small-town physician, saved my young life when I was convulsing with fever from measles. I never realized the hump on my father’s back that “he got from polio” was a condition called scoliosis until I was diagnosed with it myself. I never knew my mother was once engaged to a man killed in World War II until a much older cousin mentioned him at a family reunion several years ago. It’s not surprising that the loss of a premature baby was kept secret from a young child, but the fact that it was neither discussed nor explained when I reached the age of understanding cast a long and dark shadow on my perception of motherhood.

Decades later, after my mother died, my dad would sit across from me in a restaurant, sip his Manhattan and say, “You know, she was never the same after we lost the baby.” Or “I think the drinking started with losing that baby, and Mam (his mother) never really forgave her.” Jesus. He refers to his son as “that baby,” and I certainly didn’t want to believe the grandmother I adored could be so cruel. These conversations felt awkward and cringeworthy, like I was party to some dark intimacy between my parents that was none of my business. “Lost the baby” always made it sound as though my parents were somehow at fault for misplacing a valuable object. My dad never called his son by name or referred to him as “your brother.” He was an entity—something to blame for my mother’s alcoholism and depression—which, following family tradition, was never acknowledged, let alone appropriately treated.

I seldom thought about my brother except during the last months of my dad’s life when I occasionally wondered what it would have been like to have a sibling to share the burden of his care. But until this past December, when my husband and I visited the cemetery where many of my paternal ancestors are buried, I never realized my brother’s grave only says BABY. His small, flat headstone is nestled in the far corner of the plot and almost obscured by overgrown grasses the weed-eater never touches. Names and birth and death dates of even the youngest of those who came before me are engraved on a large memorial stone in the center of the plot, but not the one who came after.

My brother was born prematurely on a January night in 1960, long before the medical advances that could have saved him today. He was named John after his father and grandfather, and he survived for two days. My mother used to refer to certain topics as “house talk”—that which should not be discussed outside the walls of our home. But the brief life of my brother was beyond house talk. He was obliterated, expunged, erased. Even now, I feel twinges of guilt writing about this tiny child, knowing that by giving voice to a forbidden story, I’m breaching a sacred boundary put in place by my parents to shield them from pain. That even these many years after their deaths, I am disrespecting their wishes.

Had I not seen that church bulletin, I don’t know when or if I would ever have been told of the existence of another human being who shared my DNA and whose presence would have changed my life. My dad was an inveterate photographer, documenting our lives with his various 35mm cameras, but in all the boxes of slides sitting on a shelf in our guest room closet, I have not found a single picture of my mother pregnant with John. Nor is there a birth or death certificate for him anywhere in my father’s voluminous collection of family papers.

I would have been almost three at the time John was born, and although I remember a surprising amount from my early childhood, I have absolutely no memory of this time period. I didn’t hear my mother crying behind closed doors until years later, nor do I remember a room set up as a nursery and then quietly disassembled. My mother would have been thirty-seven, considered ancient for pregnancy in those days. There would be no rainbow baby.

A baby’s death was a shadow tragedy—whispered about with pained looks and raised eyebrows but not publicly acknowledged. As quickly as possible, infant loss was sealed up in boxes and packed away in the attic along with the baby paraphernalia. Support groups for families grieving the loss of an infant didn’t exist. The acronym SIDS had yet to be coined. No brief obituaries appeared in the newspaper describing a child gently borne into heaven by the angels. 

How different my mother’s life might have been had her bridge club friends shown up at the door, enfolded her in their arms, and said, “Oh, my God, we’re so sorry. What can we do?” How devastating that my parents’ grief, and perhaps even shame, drove them to bury John in the far corner of the family plot without identifying him beyond those four stark letters. As a person of faith, I wonder if he was baptized, although I suspect he may have been. Was the rector there when that tiny coffin was lowered into the ground on a cold January day? Were my parents there, or was his committal to the earth so heartbreaking a task that it was left to be accomplished by others as discreetly and efficiently as possible, perhaps by decree from my grandmother?

If she were alive today, my mother would be horrified at the airing of what she deemed house talk on social media and even more horrified that I’m writing about my brother. And yet, in a 1960s small town, she was never offered a safe space in which to grieve. A place where light was allowed to enter the darkness. Where another person said, “This happened to me, too, and here’s how I am coping,” or “Let’s find a way for you to get help.”  My parents felt constrained to keep the death of my brother so intensely private, even within our immediate family that the only way their surviving child found out was by accident.

Seeing that nearly hidden stone in the cemetery reignited the twelve-year-old’s curiosity, and my mind occasionally wanders down the path of what it would have been like to have a brother. Would we have gotten along as kids? What would we find irritating about each other as adults? Would John have possessed my dad’s dry wit and sense of humor, his passion for trains and railroad history? Might he have gone into medicine like our grandfather? Or would he have been more like my mother—someone gregarious, loving, and kind but who occasionally sat for hours alone in a darkened room, chain-smoking, and sipping Carling Black Label beer from a tiny glass? 

Hearing other people talk about their siblings is like listening to a foreign language that I will never fully comprehend. Even writing the words “my brother” feels somehow wrong.  I have no business using those words. I look at having a sibling as a scientist would study an interesting specimen under the microscope. Fascinating, but with no personal connection to me. 

I believe that we are not only shaped by those who touch our lives but by those who did not and should have. That we hold places within us like abandoned highways—those roads to nowhere overgrown with vegetation and long forgotten but where the outline of what might have been still remains. Places where we’re allowed to miss someone we never knew. The absence of my brother, along with the extreme measures taken to all but deny his existence, influenced who I became and the choices I made, perhaps more than I realized. 

I inherited my grandmother’s capacity for stoicism and maintaining decorum in the face of a crisis (minus the white gloves and girdles), and many times, it has served me well. But my ability to stand calm above the fray is also my default mechanism for avoiding overwhelming feelings and prevents me from stepping into waters that carry too much emotional undertow. 

I am not a mother for a number of reasons, many of which were beyond my control. But sometimes I wonder if I would have fought harder to find a way to parent, had I grown up with a sibling. If I hadn’t associated parenthood with something tragic, to be whispered about with furtive looks and hushed voices during a Sunday church service. If I had come to associate having a child in the house with love and normalcy instead of something to be feared, would I have responded to my husband’s “Maybe we could give a kid a life?” question with something other than, “I’m not sure I can do that.” Somehow, I absorbed the idea that having a child means risking incalculable pain and loss to the point that you refer to your own son as “that baby.”  

Although I have a wonderful spouse and close friends who are like sisters, there are times when I’ve longed for the life of the BABY buried in the corner of the cemetery plot. I would love to know another person who navigates the world after starting from the same point. Who looks a little bit like me or in whose eyes or expressions, I catch a glimpse of one of my parents. Who connects me to a past that I can only access through words, pictures, and gradually fading memories. 

Next December, my husband and I will take two Christmas wreaths to the burial plot of my paternal ancestors. I will place one in front of the large stone recognizing my great-great-grandfather and his descendants. I will walk to the far corner of the plot, move the grasses aside to expose the stone and carefully anchor a wreath in front of my brother’s grave. I will position the wreath so that passersby can easily see it and know that someone remembers the BABY in the corner. 

♦

Anne Moul is a retired music educator from York, Pennsylvania and is pursuing her second act as a writer. She has had work published in Hippocampus, Episcopal Café, Thread, AARP’s The Girlfriend, and others. Moul has won several awards in Pennwriters Annual Writing Contest and third place in Medium’s Fall 2022 Tell Your Story contest. Anne blogs at www.secondactstories.com.

The Delmarva Review is a national literary journal published locally,  in St. Michaels, Maryland. The journal was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) presenting their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org