Ghosts in My Nursery: How do you mourn a brother you never knew?

55 photo taken at a backyard wedding in 1972 shows my older sister Liza—a skinny three-yearold , short on hair—holding a large pink balloon near her face. As a kid I remember believing that the balloon was a giant chewing -gum bubble. I wondered why I could never manage to blow bubbles that large. My parents had one child at the time, but my mother was pregnant with their second. They were young, or so it seems to me: my mother twenty-seven, my father thirty-two. They had already been married for nearly six years, and they lived in an apartment in Watertown, Massachusetts, a small city next to Cambridge, where later, when I was in college, I would go with friends to eat at a diner with socially conscious co≠ee and long lines, driving there in a borrowed, wood-paneled car from my parents’ era, inhabiting Ghosts in My Nursery How do you mourn a brother you never knew? Miranda Featherstone essay A 56 | MIRANDA FEATHERSTONE my world and theirs simultaneously, looping through the streets and the years. My brother, Jody—his given name was Joseph—was born a month early, in the early summer of 1972, but he was healthy looking , with a full head of red hair, and nothing seemed amiss. In photos taken near the time of his birth, my parents have smooth skin, ironic smiles, and a seemingly limitless collection of attractive woolen knitwear. Mostly, in pictures, they are on vacation: relaxed. They are obviously recognizable, and yet entirely di≠erent from the middle-aged people who became my parents in the eighties. Then they were early in their careers: my father was a journalist, an educator, and a sometime poet; my mother had left the first grade classroom to become an education scholar and was finishing her doctoral dissertation. They didn’t have much money, but they managed. My mother came from Baltimore and money; my father came from a less well-o≠ family in northeastern Pennsylvania but certainly from professional-class comforts (Japanese woodprints, well-maintained Victorian houses) accumulated in sharp contrast to the previous generation’s working-class Irish roots, all crucifixes and rowhouses. My parents were on the way to doing well for themselves. A week after Jody’s birth, though, the doctors found toxoplasmosis —a parasitic disease that exists benignly in many people—in a routine examination of the placenta. T. gondii, the parasite, lurks in various household and farm animals—cats excrete it in their waste, and it can be found in rare meat. In infected rodents, the wily parasite creates a phenomenon known as “fatal attraction,” wherein the smell of cat urine becomes appealing to the unfortunate mice and rats, who then seek out their own predators, thus ensuring the disease’s spread through unwitting felines. T. gondii’s implications for infected adults are as yet unclear but not particularly dramatic; it is anything but benign for fetuses, however. To avoid infection and the devastation that can ensue, pregnant women are warned against consuming rare steaks, changing kitty litter, or gardening, lest they pass the infection along to their unborn baby. It is possible GHOSTS IN MY NURSERY | 57 for a pregnant woman to contract the infection without transmitting it, but my mother was not so lucky. In the early 1970s, the disease in infants was catastrophic. In the weeks and months that followed my brother’s diagnosis, my parents would learn that he was blind, severely cognitively impaired, and hydrocephalic, and he su≠ered from both seizures and cerebral palsy. They wrestled with the new reality of caring for an infant whose needs would be large and unending. They chose to keep him at home and to try for another baby: my sister Caitlin, born healthy and comically fat, arrived two years after Jody’s birth. I learned some of these facts as family lore, from stories told in passing at the dinner table or carefully imparted as the family station wagon traversed the broad streets of the Michigan town to which we decamped when I was four. But some I learned from the pages of my mother’s book, A Di≠erence...