My niece asked for a Baby Dead doll for Christmas. Baby Alive dolls were the big thing that year, and J., who at 8 was already a master of sardonic humor, did not know any real dead babies. The adults laughed every time she named Baby Dead at the top of her list, even Santa, but we knew we lived in a different world. We all knew dead babies. Twenty-five years earlier, I was born during a polio epidemic, surrounded by great care and anxiety. The day we were able to be vaccinated against this dread disease that crippled and killed many children opened us to a new freedom from those carefully proscribed limits. Twenty-five years before that, my father was born soon after an elder baby brother died. He told me once that he became a pediatrician to save mothers from the great sorrow of losing a baby. My mother often told the story of her baby sister dying at the age of three of measles and whooping cough, which most of the children in their small town caught at the town Christmas celebration. Mom was the first in line to have her babies vaccinated against whooping cough. For her, those shots were freedom from remembered sorrow and present anxiety. My niece had had all those shots. She was free to make jokes about Baby Dead dolls.
For most of human history, birth and death were two sides of the same coin. The Christmas story is about both new birth and dead babies. Listening to the story this year, I had sensate memories of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. There, one climbs down below the sparkling marble and gold baroque circle that marks the ‘birth of Jesus’ to a dirt cellar where the guide points out a spot that Mary lay when she gave birth and, under an overhang that feels very tight, the location where the baby was placed in the manger. Lines of women were touching the spot where Mary gave birth, and the dirt was burnished smooth as the highly polished marble upstairs. My memory could feel those hands stroking the dirt, tenderly smoothing away personnel memories of past sorrows, present pain, and anxieties for what was yet to come.
Next, we went to a part of the cellar with more of a ‘finished basement’ vibe. We were told that this was the room where St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin starting in the late 300’s. From his simple monks’ cell was a view of more dirt cellar protected by glass. There, we were told, were the graves of some of the dead babies killed during the Massacre of the Innocents at the order of King Herod, hoping to destroy the one baby who was predicted to become a king. In this dirt cellar where early Christians spun mythic stories that brought Christianity alive for centuries to come, the awesome realities of birth and death literally sit next door to one another.
When I first attended a progressive Christian Universalist Church some 1500 years later, I was told a more recent story that suggested that this near unity of birth and death had not changed for a long time. Jack Lane was the president of the Universalist Society; he had been so for decades. He told us why his family raised him in that very church. His grandmother had attended the much bigger Puritan church across the street. She, like most mothers of the time, had given birth to a baby who soon died. Afterward, one of the hymns that they sang disturbed her with lyrics picturing the streets of hell paved with unbaptized babies’ skulls. She had decided if they ever sang that song again, she would leave. That Sunday did come. She stomped out of the church and walked right into the church across the street, where they did not believe such nonsense.
Times have changed. Very few people are raising their babies in either church; that old Puritan church now sings a lot more about love than hell. Most of us who had WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) upbringings are now privileged to have better health care than some of our black and brown neighbors and rarely know someone who’s baby died. We consider it a tragedy when we do. We do not accept it. Some of us even blame vaccinations for those rare deaths.
Children are again living under reasonable proscribed limits created by anxiety and loving care during the present pandemic. No big public holiday parties for them this year. Some of us are looking forward to the freedoms from those limits and anxieties that vaccination can bring. Others are not. My feelings on the subject have been shaped by my family history, race, class, religious and spiritual views about birth and death. How do your experiences affect your thoughts about birth and death? How do your perspectives on life and death affect the medical decisions you make for yourself, your loved ones, and your community?