The Chimera’s Child
The dead live in our hearts. Some of them live in our bodies, too
The dead live in our hearts. Some of them live in our bodies, too.
When we learned our first child couldn’t survive her own gestation and birth, the choice was simple: abortion. Agonizing, painful, and deeply sad, but uncomplicated. Her brain wasn’t developing, her intestines were growing outside of her open abdomen, and her heart had only three chambers. There was no saving this baby, no intervention that could undo such dramatic developmental anomalies, but there might be a way forward when it was over. We scheduled the abortion. We wanted to make sure she wouldn’t live long enough to suffer. We suffered. But we did the right thing. Three months later, I was pregnant with her brother.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion tells us to go to the literature, so that’s what I did. I read about Trisomy 13, about chromosomes, about disruptions to fetal development. I read that T13 babies are extraordinarily rare in documentation, though their conception may be more common than we know, because almost all of them are miscarried in the early weeks of pregnancy. Our genetic counselor had assured us that nothing we had done caused our daughter’s horrific series of malformations, and nothing could have prevented it. It was an accident of cell division…
