Alandra's Lilacs: The Story of a Mother and Her Deaf Daughter

1. Reconciliation

CHAPTER ONE ReconciLiation The door to my hospital room banged open, startling me awake. I had dozed off. I hadn't wanted to fall asleep but had anyway. My husband Sug (short for Sugar) was next to my bed crying, two nurses stood behind him. In panic, I asked, "What's wrong?" but I already knew what had happened . Sometimes you have a sense of things that are about to go wrong, even when you have never experienced something . You just know. Sug took my hand, gripping it too tightly, and said, "The baby died." I began to cry, sobs racking my body. I curled into a tight ball to stop the empty feeling in the space where my baby had been just six hours before. I could feel the sounds as they burst from somewhere deep inside me-from a place I didn't even know existed. There was a flurry of activity around my bed as the nurses tried to calm me. One of them took my arm, and I felt a needle stick as she gave me a shot to put me to sleep. I awoke during the night to hear a baby crying down the hall. Reaching for the buzzer I pressed the button to call a nurse. When she entered the room I said, "Please, can someone pick up that poor baby, it's been crying for a long time." The nurse looked at me sadly and said, "There's no baby crying. You've been dreaming, go back to sleep." As she prepared to give me another shot I said, "Of course there is, please go take care of that baby." Just before I I Reconciliation blacked out from the shot, the nurse attempted to comfort me: "The only baby in the nursery today was your baby. He didn't live." When I awoke again I was on a different floor in the main part of the hospital-off the maternity ward. A nurse came in to fill out the forms to register my son's birth and death. When I filled out his name as Lyn Alan, and the nurse gently said, "Mrs. Benjamin, when women lose a baby they often choose a different name so they can keep their favorite name for another baby." I refused. His name had always been Lyn Alan, it couldn't be anything else. I kept floating in and out of consciousness. I dreamed of my family, although I knew they couldn't come to the hospital. I was born in Wood River, Illinois in I949. I had been dating Sug, whose full name was Lyndle Paul Benjamin, Jr., for a while. But when I gotpregnant at sixteen, myfather and I had a horrible fight. Daddy told me he never wanted to see me again. He instructed my mother that she was not to call me or see me. Even my younger sister and brother were forbidden to see me agatn. After getting married, Sug and I went to live with his mother in Pleasant Hill, Illinois, a tiny rural community seventy milesfrom my hometown. As typical during that time, both towns were segregated-but this was the only thing the two towns had in common. Pleasant Hill's population was only a thousand people, most of them farmers who had known each other all their lives; Wood River was a rifinery town, surrounded by heavy industry. Although Pleasant Hill dijJered 2 Reconciliation greatly from my hometown, I loved the peacefulness of the country. I was often homesick for my estranged family. We would occasionally sneak in a visit. Mom, Lisa, and Toby drove up once and we were able to spend about an hour together before they had to turn around and go home. It was always a hasty visit but we knew ifmyfather found out there would be hell to pay. The next time I woke up, Sug and a nurse were standing next to my bed. He was holding my left hand with both of his. Sug was saying something to the nurse, something about taking the baby home to bury. "I want to see my baby," I begged. Sug turned to the nurse and she nodded and left my room. The nurse re-entered carrying a tiny bundle . The body of my baby was wrapped in a rag. It was a receiving blanket that during past uses had been torn in...