Member-only story
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, she told us. Nothing more, nothing less.
I read throughout my second pregnancy. This baby, formed in the standard, excellent, miraculous configurations we all recognize as healthy, grew. An “accident of cell division” is a reassuring concept after a loss, but terrifying when everything seems fine. The phrase lifted our blame, but left us powerless, too. A true accident, by definition, can’t be fully anticipated or prohibited. Cancer is an accident of cell division, as are all of our most human qualities, when seen through a longer evolutionary lens. I read, filled with fear, but from a distance I appeared calm. It’s possible to appear calm when the worst has already happened and you have survived.
At ten weeks, I presented my arm for a blood draw for the same genetic test that delivered our devastating news in the first pregnancy. The vials were sent to a lab in San Diego, spun in a centrifuge, analyzed by machines I cannot possibly…
