I have a picture of my great grandmother, Grace Streelman, and her brothers, sisters, and parents, taken in 1900. It's one of these formal shots that always seem to me strangely haunting. They were people of modest means, but they traveled to Chicago to have a portrait taken.
Last time I was home I asked Grandma P. to help me put names on those faces. She mentioned that there were three other children--or maybe four--who didn't live past their early childhood. Girls. She didn't know what they'd died of. Nothing particular, she said.
She points out where they would have stood, in the black spaces of all those dark skirts, runs her fingers down the folds as if she can feel things under the slick glass: velvet and jersey, who knows what.
She says the lost girls were all named Helen.
I cannot imagine giving a child the name of a dead sibling. I also cannot imagine the world--which is still most of the world--where children die because some do, and don't even leave a story.
The most startling piece of history I ever read was an Elizabethian woman's letter, which contains the line "I myself having lost three or four little ones, not yet weaned."
That or.
Erin, I teach a senior seminar in early modern family history. We tackled some of the questions about parent-child affection in an age of high mortality. It's shocking to realize how everpresent death was in and around the childbed.
My students read a modern scholar's offhand assertion that there could hardly be true affection in those parlous times and offered as evidence the cases of repeated Christian names for the many dead children.
Then we read a diary excerpt, where the parent commented that using the name again helped keep the memory of their elder siblings alive. In a day before photographs, when paintings were the purview of the rich, is that so alien after all?
Don't dispair. Each child is valuable, whether she lives a full life of 80 years, or just a few hours. God enfolds each one in His heart when their Earthly suffering is over. Perhaps we are beginning to understand why our ancestors had such strong faith.
In my family it's still an uncertain rumour of how many miscarriages my mother had, 3 or 5. Death still occurs, but life goes on, as difficult as it seems.