The Girls from Ames (30 page)

“Those poor kids,” Karla answered. “They’ve got so much to handle.”

“It’ll get easier,” Marilyn told her.

“It’s got to get easier,” Karla responded, “because I can’t imagine living like this forever.”

At one point, the conversation turned to Marilyn’s dad and his memorial service in Ames after he died in 2004. Dr. McCormack was seventy-nine. “It really was a celebration of his life,” Kelly said of the service. “He lived such a full life.” That got Karla thinking about her own father’s death in 1990.

“I used to think that my father died young,” she said. “I used to think, ‘Oh my God, he missed out on so much. He was just sixty-eight. His life was so short.’ I don’t think that way anymore. Now I think that my father lived a long time. I have this totally new perspective. The way I think now, any life that lasts longer than fourteen years, well, that feels like a full life to me.”

 

 

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heila’s death was the major loss that all of the Ames girls shared in their early twenties. But as they aged, each of them experienced deaths in her own family. By their thirties and forties, they all had endured grief that would inform the rest of their lives. No one ever wanted to compare the magnitude of their various sorrows. But they came to have a shorthand sense of grief that helped them comfort and buoy each other—especially Karla.

Like Karla, Karen had insights into the pain of losing a child.

Her first son was born in 1992, and nine months later, she found herself unexpectedly pregnant again. It was a shock to her that she became pregnant so soon, and she was less than overjoyed at the news. It was a difficult pregnancy, too. She spent much of the first trimester vomiting. In time, however, she embraced the idea of having another child. When she and her husband learned they would be having a little girl, they selected the name Emily.

Five months into the pregnancy, however, when Karen was already in maternity clothes, she had an amniocentesis that showed the baby had severe spina bifida. The baby’s brain was actually growing outside of her head. (Spina bifida, which means “split spine,” occurs when a baby’s spinal column doesn’t close completely in the womb. Scientists suspect that genetic and environmental factors conspire to cause it. Seven out of every ten thousand babies born have spina bifida; those with less serious forms of this birth defect can live a normal life.)

In Karen’s case, the situation was dire, and one of the doctors who made the diagnosis got right to the point. “You have to decide whether to terminate the pregnancy or go through with it,” he said. “Think about what is right for you and your family.”

Her primary care physician, who happened to be pregnant herself, was furious that this doctor had phrased it that way. “Listen, Karen,” her doctor said, “you do not have a choice. If you go the full nine-month term, your baby will die within minutes of being born. She will not live. You have a year-old child at home. I don’t want you waiting four more months to deliver a baby who will not live. End this pregnancy now and move on with your life.”

It was December 1993, and Karen was planning to return to Ames for Christmas, then fly to Hawaii with her family for vacation. She called Jane and Cathy, both of whom took the news calmly and weighed in supportively. But it was Jane who first uttered a word that Karen hadn’t heard from her doctors and hadn’t even contemplated. “You have to do it,” Jane said. “You have to have the abortion.” Karen hadn’t allowed herself to think that the “procedure” being talked about was an abortion. So Jane’s comment was sobering and haunting, especially since Karen was Catholic. It put everything in a new and awful light.

Karen told Jane and Cathy how guilty she felt. “I hadn’t wanted to be pregnant again so soon,” she said. “Maybe this was punishment for not being happy when I learned I was pregnant.” Both girls reassured her that she had nothing to feel guilty about. “It’s a genetic disorder,” Jane said. “That’s it.”

Karen decided to take the vacation in Hawaii as planned and then have “the procedure” when she returned. Her week away would allow her moments to say good-bye. At night in Hawaii, her hands on her belly, she’d talk to the little girl she felt moving inside of her, offering words of love and apology.

When she returned home, she went to the hospital, where labor was induced. “I was in the maternity ward,” she told Cathy, “but they didn’t want me near the other moms and babies. They had me way down the hall, where I wouldn’t be seen or heard.”

She was in a room without any clocks, which led her to think: “They don’t want me to know what time I deliver my baby.”

Her husband, Kevin, stood by her side, devastated but trying to stay strong. When the tiny baby was delivered, Kevin felt it would be best if they didn’t look at her. “They had her in a blanket, and they took her out of the room,” Karen told Cathy. “I kept saying I wanted to see her, and Kevin said, ‘No you don’t.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do. I do!’ and then I fell asleep.”

Karen understands and appreciates that her husband was acting out of love, but she still regrets not taking a look at the little girl she would have named Emily. And she wonders where the nurses took her when they carried her away. There was no burial, no funeral.

In memory of Emily, Karen has long worn a “mother and child” charm on a gold chain around her neck. It was given to her by her husband in the days after Emily was delivered. Karen rarely takes it off.

One summer back in Ames, Karen met up with some of the other girls, and Kelly watched her as she held that charm between her fingers. “I can only imagine the pain of that,” Kelly thought.

Karen went on to have two more children, a son and a daughter. And after Jenny had two miscarriages of her own, Karen helped her by talking about her experience losing a child she never got to know. Jenny and Karen also found strength in the knowledge that fully half of the Ames girls had had miscarriages, and all of them later gave birth to more children.

After Christie died, however, Karen never tried to tell Karla that she empathized. “It has to be so much worse to really know and love the child you’ve lost,” she thought. “I can’t tell Karla, ‘I know how you feel.’ I’m not sure any of us can know how she feels.”

 

 

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n the back porch of Angela’s house, as some of the girls sip their morning coffee, Cathy and Angela happen to be seated on the so-called crying couch. Within fifteen minutes, there are tears.

First, Angela gets to talking about how her brother learned he was HIV-positive and about his 1999 death, offering details she has never shared before. “Growing up, he knew he was different.” she says. “He once told me that in Sunday school, when he was eight or nine years old, he’d pray that he wouldn’t have the feelings he had.” As he got older and more comfortable about being gay, Angela’s parents would talk to their minister about him. “The minister said, ‘If you pray really hard, it’ll go away,’ ” Angela says. When her brother was near death, this minister came to the hospital to suggest that he seek forgiveness for his sins. As Angela recalls it, the minister’s basic message was “You can still change. You can still say you were wrong.”

Angela’s mom had passed away four years earlier from breast cancer, and her dad had remarried. Angela says she is so grateful for her stepmother, who turned to the minister that day and politely asked him to stop. Deftly but respectfully, in so many words, she gave the message: “This young man feels like he’s going to hell because people like you have told him this. It’s time for you to leave this room.” When the minister left, Angela’s stepmother went over to Angela’s brother, held his hand and comforted him.

“Thank God she did that,” Cathy says.

Angela gets tearful at the memory, and Cathy moves closer to her, wrapping her arm around her. After Angela composes herself, she says, “My stepmother later told me that maybe her purpose in life was to help my brother die.”

Angela’s story triggers memories in Cathy, who offers details of her mother’s last moments before she died in 2005. She was seventy-seven and had leukemia. Cathy and five of her six siblings were there at the end. Her mother was home, on a rented hospital bed with a special air mattress. She was lucid, talking to everyone until 4 A.M. She passed away later that day.

“Just after she died, my brother said a lovely prayer. It was helpful. I felt this kind of calm numbness,” Cathy tells the other girls. She describes the scene in the room. “My mom had been on oxygen, and the machine was kind of loud. So we turned it off. But there was still this whirring noise in the room. It seemed to be coming from that hospital bed. So my brother-in-law kneeled down next to my dad, who was praying, and he decided to reach over and turn the switch for the air mattress on the bed. Suddenly, the air in the mattress started going out really fast with this big whoosh, and my mom’s body started getting lower and lower . . .”

Cathy makes the sound of the bed deflating. “. . . and so my father turned to my brother-in-law and said, ‘Why did you do that?’ And my brother-in-law, you could see on his face that he was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know why I did that!’ So he turned the bed back on, and my mother started rising up . . .”

Cathy is laughing now, and so are the other Ames girls. “My mom would have thought that was hysterical.”

“Your mom had the best sense of humor,” Karen says. All the girls remember Cathy’s mom as perhaps the friendliest of the mothers. Whenever they came to Cathy’s house, she wouldn’t head into another room, like most mothers did. As Cathy always said, “She loved to yuck it up with you guys.” She’d sit down with the girls to get the scoop on their lives. And she loved being dolled up. She wasn’t very tall, so she liked to wear shoes that gave her a few more inches. The girls remember her looking great, vacuuming her house in her high heels.

“For the funeral, my dad wanted to make sure my mother looked good,” Cathy tells the girls, “because, of course, she always wanted to look her best.” And so her dad asked Cathy, the well-known makeup artist, if she’d apply her mom’s makeup.

Cathy tells the girls of going through her mom’s things with her siblings, picking out clothing in just the right colors, and then taking her makeup kit to the mortuary. She stood over her mom’s body. “I thought I would be really freaked out, but it was just an act of love. It turned out to be a gift, that I had this chance to do that.”

Her mother had really full lips, so Cathy made sure to give her the right shade of lipstick. She worked on her mother’s face for about fifteen minutes, and the woman in charge of doing makeup at the mortuary was very impressed. “She asked me if I wanted a job there,” Cathy says.

Kelly, Sally and Karla had made it to the funeral for Cathy’s mom, which was held in Kansas City. It was a year after Christie’s death, and it was not an easy journey for Karla to drive down for it.

The talk on the porch turns to the girls’ recollections of that funeral.

“There was that procession, when the whole family was walking out of the sanctuary,” Kelly recalls. “It was very emotional.”

“I felt so weak. Kelly, you were holding me up,” Karla says.

“And we were crying,” Kelly says. “People thought we were crying for Cathy’s mom, and we were. But it was more than that. We were crying for Karla and for Christie. We were crying for ourselves and our friendship.”

It was at that funeral that they saw Sheila’s mom after all those years, and asked her about Sheila’s death. So that particular day was overwhelming, and unforgettable, on several fronts.

Kelly tries to describe for the other girls what happened after the service. “We ran to the bathroom, Sally, Karla and I, just like we used to do in high school. That’s the refuge. And we cried. Horrible, awful crying. And I looked at Sally and said, ‘You know, we’ve done so many important things in ladies’ rooms, haven’t we?’ We smiled at each other. I think Karla smiled, too. And then we hugged Karla, and she cried and I cried and Sally cried. And being together like that, together in that ladies’ room, it was just a nice moment for us. A nice moment at a very hard time.”

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even of the girls are power walking around Angela’s North

Carolina neighborhood, and the conversation has turned to parenting.

“Cooperation and appreciation,” says Jane. “That’s my mantra.” Jane says that she keeps repeating the same words to her children. “I tell them all the time: I want them to cooperate and I want them to appreciate. Cooperation and appreciation.”

All the girls are now raising their children with a higher standard of living than they knew growing up in Ames. Part of this is because American culture in general is more acquisitive and self-indulgent. And part of it is due to the fact that almost all of the girls have risen into the upper middle class. They’ve taken a step up from what their parents had—in family incomes, in the size of their homes, in the toys and accoutrements that clutter their kids’ lives.

Karen says her fourteen-year-old son thinks nothing of asking for a $160 hockey stick, and he’ll want it within minutes of eyeing it in a store. “When I was his age, I was detasseling corn, saving up money, and using the money to buy my own clothes,” she says. “I’m not sure kids today understand what that was like. There were things I wanted as a kid but would never ask for. I knew there was no reason to ask, because it wasn’t in the realm of possibility. My parents wouldn’t get it for me anyway.”