A Steady White Noise

On a single street in a quiet suburb of Bowling Green, Kentucky, seven children died when a tornado fixed its path through their neighborhood a few weeks before Christmas 2021. This story was the featured “Editor’s Pick” of some online newspaper, and I recall thinking what shameful exploitation of a tragedy, even as I clicked on the headline to read more. There is a certain magnetism to misfortune.

Closer to home, on my own block, two young people have died in recent years—one, my children’s former babysitter; the other, their friend. The tragedies came three years apart, but the lingering grief over the first death only compounded and expanded when the second one arrived, and to picture five more children gone in an instant, picked up by a violent wind and ferried away forever, is unthinkable. Even in my darkest moments, in my most cataclysmic ruminations, such a scenario has never occurred to me.

No one thought to tell me before I became a mother that love and fear would be inextricably linked the moment I gave birth, that the threat of loss would form a steady white noise to my life that I would never fully be able to quiet. When the neighbor’s boy died in an accident while on vacation, my husband—along with everyone who knew this family—was stricken.

“No one ever thinks of losing a child like this,” he said.

I stared blankly in response, wondering to myself if he truly could not see—

There are many days when I can think of little else.

~

Even amid my endless worry, I know that I am already lucky to have ushered my children through their first years of life unscathed. Prior generations were not so fortunate. At the turn of the twentieth century, the global infant mortality rate hovered around forty percent. Expand that number to include young people into their early adolescence and the rate only increased—living to adulthood was far from guaranteed. We enjoy a life span that is significantly higher than that of our ancestors who came before us just several generations ago, and every time I begin digging into my family history, I am reminded of how short our cultural memory of hardship has become and how thoroughly we have sanitized our modern lives of death.

Women knew death more intimately than most, particularly before effective contraception became widely available. Until that time, they would have been almost continuously pregnant throughout their reproductive years, and in the face of such statistics, the sheer number of children they birthed into the world almost assured them of experiencing the loss of at least one.

That grim reality is highlighted in the historical records. In both the 1900 and 1910 federal censuses, women were required to list the number of children they gave birth to as well as the number of those who were still living. These birth statistics caught my eye as I was looking at a census record from Mingo County, West Virginia, where my second great-grandmother Mary had just settled with her new husband James in 1900. If Mary had looked forward to having children (or even if she hadn’t—barring infertility, they would have been an inevitable result of her marriage) the losses her neighbors experienced might have filled her with some amount of foreboding:

Nancy Simpkins, 11 children born, 9 living

Lottie Simpkins, 11 children born, 9 living

Emma Steele, 7 children born, 4 living

Jane Hatfield, 13 children born, 10 living

Sarah Williamson, 9 children born, 8 living

Eliza Ferrell, 6 children born, 4 living

Amanda Mayhorne, 4 children born, 3 living

Brooke Mayhorne, one child born, none living

Losing children was so common among these women that I found myself thinking she’s lucky to have lost only one when I’d encounter the Sarah Williamsons and Amanda Mayhornes in the records, as if luck and loss could ever coexist, as if the death of a single child did not fracture the entire world and threaten to swallow these women whole.

I once read—though this might be a piece of internet apocrypha—that in some primitive cultures, where infant mortality remains high, children are not named until their first birthday has passed, as if to avoid tempting fate. Whether or not this is true, it would be an understandable impulse. Mother-love as we know it today, that head-over-heels infatuation with babies from the moment of their birth, seems foolish in places where infants’ lives are so precarious. Did those women in West Virginia allow themselves to feel that love, or did they steel themselves in some way, too, ever prepared to give back whatever blessings the Lord had bestowed upon them, those faithful students of Job?

It’s almost impossible to fathom that the greatest fear of the modern parent was a near inevitability for most of human history. So often I hear people lamenting how soft we’ve grown compared to our forebears. But no one is left who can remember the awful scrape of the whetstone that once sharpened us.