Katherine would have been thirty-two today, and all those days on the calendar that should have been joyous celebrations have instead been the echoes of a dismal dirge.
Figure 1: Katherine, Queen of the Tot Fairies
Katherine so desperately wanted to have or to adopt a baby herself – so that she could “watch it grow.” The way to make her smile was to evoke pictures of sweet little babies: “baby cakes.” She never got to meet Katya and Nikita, her two younger siblings whom we adopted from Russia two years after she died. She would have loved them so much, just like she did her younger brother David: "the happiest day of my life was when David was born, because he brought joy into my life." She would have doted on them as adorable toddlers. Even while we thought Katherine would live, we had been planned on adopting, knowing that we had all been exposed to the pesticides that we believe caused Katherine’s cancer, and that those exposures would have put further biological children at risk. And we knew there were children already alive who needed a home.
After she died, it felt like everything would and should end. But David, left bereft by Katherine’s death, was not meant to be an only child. And so, honoring Katherine’s desire to adopt, we decided to go through with those plans. We could, we thought, give a good home to a couple of children. Or we could choose to wallow in our grief, and two more children in the world would grow up without parents.
Once or twice at Christmas, we took pictures with our three surviving children, leaving a space where we later photoshopped in Katherine’s picture. Those are the only pictures of my children together I will ever have.
Katherine so loved babies that I am sure I would have been a grandmother by now, perhaps a couple times over. My surviving children are unsure they want to bring children into a world like this one, and I cannot blame them. In future blogs, I will describe all that the Trump administration is doing to hasten our plummet into a climate-change induced hellscape, including, today, rescinding the Endangerment Finding – the 2009 scientific and legal finding that higher levels of greenhouse gases endanger human health.
But today I am just mourning my child, my Queen of the Tot Fairies.
Some people say a book is like a baby. And I totally get why they say that. A book is a creation, part of oneself, and gestation is sometimes long, sometimes very long, as in the case for Poisoning Our Children, my next book, under final revisions with Hopkins Press. This book is the best voice I could put to the pain not only of our own loss, but of the loss of so many other children experiencing environmental impacts like cancer, birth defects, diabetes, and climate change. And I hope sharing these stories with the world may make a difference.
But take my word for it. A book is no substitute for a child. Nothing and no one could ever replace my Katherine.
