Billy

Note - this is one of the most difficult and emotionally painful posts I've written. Sadly it had a profound impact on my childhood, so I include it here. You may choose not to read it.

May 1958 - Excerpted from my mother's journal and letters

My parents received a call from the Elizabeth Lund Home (where I was born) in Burlington, VT telling them that they could pick up their son! They were hoping that their second child would be a boy, and eventually agreed on the name "William August". "August" was my father's grandfather's name. Bill was born on April 22, 1958 and was most likely premature. He slept and ate for a month before he really woke up.

In the spring of 1959 my parents moved to a house in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts from their tiny apartment in Cambridge, MA. Manchester is a lovely, small coastal town north of Boston.

In the summer of 1960 my mom was about to take us to the beach when she heard Bill yell. Being his eternally curious self, he had gotten onto a chair, managed to turn on the large electric ironing machine (sometimes called a "mangle") and put his hand inside and got badly burned. The doctors decided to debride the burned tissue so that he could heal better. Bill came home with a fat white bandage which he called "Me bazeball". The bandage could not get wet, and the hot and humid month of August didn't help the situation one bit.

After a week my parents took Bill back to the hospital to have the bandage removed. The surgeon decided that his hand needed a small skin graft since Bill was growing so quickly. Mom was waiting at home for the surgery to be completed when she got a call from the hospital that something was wrong. The doctor explained that that Bill's heart had stopped during the surgery. The young Swiss surgeon had made a quick single incision in Bill's chest and massaged the heart, which had restarted. Bill was now in a coma.

I won't share the details of the following week - they are literally too painful, and reading my mom's journal is almost unbearable. I remember that I wasn't allowed to go into the hospital to visit my brother, so I would wait downstairs in the waiting room and read books.

My parents gave the hospital permission to do an autopsy. Bill's brain stem was so badly damaged that he never could have lived. Basically it was the anesthesia that killed him and nobody understood why he didn't die during the first surgery. Years later, when my son was about to have surgery for appendicitis (in the same hospital that Bill died in) I talked with the anesthesiologist about Bill's death. He said that at that time there was little known about the interaction of anesthesia with burn victims, and tragically it had sometimes caused cardiac arrest.

I was almost four years old at the time of his death and I still have memories of him. The loss was unbearable for our family. I wasn't allowed to go to his funeral. It started raining that afternoon and I remember asking my babysitter why God would let it rain on Billy's funeral. She said it was God crying for Billy, which I'll never forget. I'm not much into organized religion, but am very spiritual. Billy has always been my guardian angel.

So much loss at a young age has played a huge part in my life. Losing my brother after my own adoption intensified my fear of losing people, and being alone.

By the way, my mom in later years would get riled with me when I talked about my brother "Billy" - she said no one ever called him that...but he'll always be Billy to me.