Lissa On: Is This My Family Legacy?

Anxieties unearthed after loss

A couple of months ago, I was sitting in a Starbucks with my sisters, Christina and Roseann, and our cousin, Lyndsey. It had been a long while since we’d all been together, and the coffee shop was our way of closing out a great night spent having dinner with our niece/first cousin once removed (what a mouthful!) and her daughter. The conversation inevitably turned to Carrie, our favourite memories and what we missed about her. It was the first time I shared my idea to create this Substack and also the first time I shared a specific worry that Carrie’s death unearthed, one I’m finding it difficult to type lest the act of doing so wakes some evil cosmic power that will make it come true. One sec, just let me cross my fingers and toes. Ok, here goes: I am terrified I will (have to) survive one of my children.

Now, I realize this fear is universal. Out comes the baby, out comes the placenta, and in comes the abject fear. If we thought about it too much, focused on it, I’m not sure any of us would take the risk of having a child. When I look back on the birth of my first daughter, I wonder at how we managed to have two more children. That first night, after my husband went home, I fell into an exhausted sleep, new baby snug in the weird clear plastic hospital bassinet at the foot of the bed. Soon I was awoken by a nurse who told me she was going to take my baby to see the doctor, but I wasn’t the least bit worried. Everyone knows hospitals have a pathological need to wake patients at all hours and, besides, what did I know about the hours hospital obstetricians kept? Maybe a midnight exam was de rigeur.

It turns out it wasn’t, and the nurse came back to tell me to call my husband back to the hospital because there was ‘something wrong’ with my baby. The next time we saw our daughter, she was lying in the middle of a hospital bed, tiny in its giant white-sheeted expanse, oxygen tube in her nostril, wires connecting her to a machine that glowed meaningless green lines and numbers at us. The transport team from Sick Kids Hospital was on their way, and we were allowed to quickly kiss her goodbye and then drive ourselves down to meet her there. A few hours later, we sat in front of a bespectacled man who showed us a sketch of the procedure he planned to do to fix our daughter’s congenital heart defect and then handed us consent papers to sign. It was a scary time but it was over quickly and two weeks later we were home with our daughter, with neither time nor inclination to fret about alternate endings.

Less than three years later, when our second daughter was born, she refused to take a breath despite all the suctioning and vigorous blanket rubs and kneading of her tiny feet. There was a buzz in the room, and then a petite nurse with a dimpled smile scooped her up, held an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, and encouraged her to breathe, which she eventually did. Soon enough, we were sent upstairs to fret about nothing more serious than the baby that wouldn’t stop crying on the other side of the curtain of our shared room.

Despite our luck, and the same luck we had when our son came and grasped the OB’s ID badge with one wrinkly hand and wouldn’t let go three years later, the fear that some catastrophic…something will come for one of my kids is always lurking. Which is normal, right? (er…right?) Maybe even nature’s way of keeping parents vigilant. After Carrie died, though, after grief had morphed from acute and unremitting to dull and intermittent, that fear morphed, too.

Would Grandma like this cartoonified image of herself on her 100th Birthday?

Since both my grandmothers lived to the age of 100, I figured that meant I got a double helping of longevity genes. Figured I’d enjoy a long life, too, barring a fluke accident or random act of violence. But the more time went on, the more I began to wonder if this genetic blessing, theoretical though it was, might actually be a curse. Because while both of my grandmothers lived sixteen years longer than the average Canadian woman (!), some of those years were lived after the death of one or more of their children. My mother, of course, is living those years now. Which makes me worry that will be my fate, too. And I don’t want any part of it.

That night in Starbucks with my sisters and cousin was the first time I’d ever vocalized that fear, maybe even the first time I let it solidify in my brain. I felt foolish, selfish. I don’t believe in destiny, I know it makes no sense to think I will outlive one of my kids just because my mom and grandmothers have. Did I think I was so special the universe had a plan just for me and my family? But then there were nods around the table and I found out I wasn’t the only one who had looked at two generations of family history and wondered what it meant for me. The thing is, knowing my fear is shared by others neither reinforced it nor made it disappear. But it did lessen it. Made it fade a little. Which I guess is the point of sharing, isn’t it?