Barbara Kelly's Reflections on Life - Entry One

Life can be quite coincidental. In February of 1978, I entered the only hospital that was located in Osceola, Arkansas having a miscarriage. It was a sad occasion indeed made more so by our excitement and readiness for a baby. The hospital was extremely small, and while private rooms had not yet been conceived of in that part of the world, my first night there I was fortunate enough not to have a roommate. Shortly after that first night, the life that might have been was gone and we were left to deal with the loss in the best way that our young hearts could. I had plenty of Job’s comforters to come by with “comfort” and advice telling me such things as, “it’s for the best, you know, after all it might have been deformed in some way”. (My husband has always told me, and I quite agree with him, that people need to have lessons on hospital visitation and what not to say when visiting patients). Nevertheless, we each have our own unique ways of dealing with sadness and anxiety and the best way for me then, and even now to some extent, is to be alone. And when I say alone, that doesn’t exclude my husband. Even then, we were such a part of each other that it didn’t feel right when we weren’t together. By the second day, after a D & C and with the help of drugs that made the room spin, I was doing all right with my sadness and frustration. By late afternoon, nurses rushed into the room rolling a bed with a woman on it. Oh no, a roommate! That was the last thing in the world that I wanted! But ready or not, and whether I wanted it or not, here she came. She was a very young black woman and she was exhausted having just given birth. After nurses got her settled in, we were alone. This had really messed things up for me because now my husband couldn’t stay with me tonight. And to be honest, the last thing that I wanted was someone happily talking about the baby they had just given birth to, although she had every right in the world to be happy. One of the first questions from her was, “what did you have?” I told her a miscarriage. She just said, “Oh”. What else was there to say? A few moments elapsed and I said, “And you?” She told me she had had a little boy. This short attempt at conversation seemed to break the awkward silence between us and we engaged in amiable conversation thereafter. Time passed and eventually, the door of the room opened. A nurse entered bringing the woman’s baby for her to hold, feed and get to know. I remember thinking he was the cutest thing I thought I’d ever seen. Plump little cheeks, dark eyes and the prettiest shade of skin a baby could have. I asked the girl what his name was to which she replied, “I don’t know; I haven’t named him.”
The following day, during one of the baby’s several visits to our room, the mother asked if I wanted to hold him. I told her that I’d love to. He was so sweet and it felt so good to hold him. I remember thinking; one day… I gave the baby back after a while and the mother looked at me and surprised me with a question, “What’s a good name for a boy?” It took me by surprise and I just looked at her for a moment wondering if she was seriously asking me what to name her baby. After I concluded that she was, I replied, “I don’t know…I’ve always sort of liked the name Christopher.” She repeated the name a couple of times and looked down at the baby and said, “How do you like the name Christopher?” She looked back up at me smiling and said, “I really like that name. That’s what I am going to call him”.
As I write this, I wonder what has happened to that Christopher that I only knew for a short couple of days. Did he live all of his life in that small Arkansas town; did he play sports when he was in high school; did he go to college? Did he grow up and have a family of his own? It has been thirty years since I held and helped name that baby boy. My Christopher, our third child, celebrated his twentieth birthday last week.