Little girl lost, little girl found

I never thought I'd be able to enjoy Mother's Day again. Then, life brought me Annabelle.

Editor's note: The following is excerpted with permission from "Comfort: A Journey Through Grief" (WW Norton, 2008).

By Ann Hood

Read more: Life Features, Death, Children, China, Adoption, Mother's Day, Life

May 10, 2008 | My daughter Grace was born in the year of the rat. "Very clever," our Chinese nanny, Ju Hua, told us. "Very special." Those born in the year of the rat are sharp witted and funny. They are charming too, and considered good luck. The Christmas that Ju Hua was with our family, she had her husband in Beijing send Grace a gold charm of a small rat hanging on a chain. "Very special," Ju Hua explained. "Special present for a special girl."

Four months later, Grace died from a virulent form of strep. She was five years old. Ju Hua and her daughter had moved into their own apartment by then. When they heard the news, they came immediately. Ju Hua's face was stricken, her crying uncontrollable. "That girl," she said. "So special."

Grace was studying Chinese at school, and even after Ju Hua left us, Grace would visit her and practice Chinese. "Her pronunciation so good!" Ju Hua would tell me when I picked Grace up. They had cooked together, fried rice and dumplings and the pork dish Grace liked so much. Smelling of garlic and sesame, Grace would wave goodbye to Ju Hua as we drove away. Then she would sing me a Chinese song, or count to twenty in Chinese.

That April day when Grace got sick and I rushed her to the emergency room, as they whisked her to the ICU, the doctor ordered me to help keep the oxygen mask on her face. "Grace," I said, trying to hide the fear that had gripped me, "count to ten and then you'll be in room where the doctor can make you better."

Squirming under the oxygen mask, Grace began to count: "Yee, uhr, sahn," she said in perfect Chinese, "sah, woo, lyo…"

When Ju Hua visited us after Grace died, she told us that her own mother had lost a child, a six year old boy. He got sick very suddenly, like Grace, and he died in her mother's arm as she walked miles to the doctor. "My mother never forget this," Ju Hua said. "But if he didn't die, I would never be born."

There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens. They needed clothes to bury her in, and I carefully removed the tags from the new Capri pants with the ruffled hem and the pink shirt that Grace had picked out but never got a chance to wear. We could, we were told, place anything we wanted in her coffin, so my husband Lorne and I gathered her favorite things, the things that comforted her: Biff, her favorite stuffed animal; Cow, the green blanket decorated with cows; her purple leopard lunch box; her glasses; notes from each of us; crayons and paints; and the gold rat on the chain that Ju Hua had sent for her from China.

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I cannot say for certain when the decision to have another child happened. I do remember sitting alone on a summer afternoon in the room we called the Puzzle Room, a room where Grace and my son Sam and I spent many afternoons listening to Nanci Griffith CDs and working on jigsaw puzzles, sitting there as the hot afternoon stretched endlessly and hopelessly before me, and thinking about how my arms ached to hold Grace and my entire body longed for the buzz of activity that used to surround me just a few short months earlier. It was that same summer that my husband and I camped out together on a beach in Maine and he said, "I have the craziest idea." "So do I," I told him. That was when I put words to it. "Let's have another baby," I said. And he said yes. Then we cried. A light from a lighthouse kept swinging past us, illuminating everything.

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First, my husband had to have his vasectomy reversed. Then, I had to have my hormone levels checked. I was 44 years old, and I did not expect good news. But the doctor who everyone told us could help make it happen said that although I might need a little hormonal help, I could indeed get pregnant.

Once a month, my husband and I drove to New York City to the doctor's Park Avenue office where Lorne masturbated into a cup and I was then inseminated with his sperm. Each time, the doctor was optimistic. Lorne's sperm were great -- good swimmers and plentiful. I ovulated on schedule and had good mucous. We'd had babies before. We could do it again.

But after four months without a pregnancy, the doctor added Clomid to the protocol. Now I went for an intravaginal sonogram, my follicles were counted, and then we went to New York. Four eggs. Six. But no baby.

By March, I was having tests to see if something was going on. In June I had surgery to remove a benign polyp. By fall Lorne was injecting me with Pergonal at almost $2,000 a month, and it was producing less follicles than the Clomid, and I wasn't getting pregnant. Everyone has read about or knows someone who has gone through fertility treatments. It is an emotional nightmare, fueled by false hope and the promise of a treatment that will work. Add grief to that, and the cycle gets even worse.

One day, a friend told me that she knew how to get a baby in Russia, fast. It involved spending time in Finland. It would cost around $40,000, before bribes. The baby was a girl. She had red hair.

Another friend stopped by and told me that she could get children from Hungary. Not babies, but two or three year olds. She could even get twins. Or siblings. It would cost $60,000. Plus donations to various people who would help along the way.

Some people urged me to give up the idea altogether. I heard stories of women who had a child after losing one and forced that new child into the roles of the dead one. I heard of mothers dressing their new baby in their dead child's clothes, making them swim or dance or whatever the other had done. It isn't fair, I was told. Fairness was not something I believed in very much then. If things were fair, a healthy intelligent five year old girl wouldn't die. If things were fair, a family who helped others, who lived a good life together, who love each other, wouldn't be torn apart like this.

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