Love and loss bind my ‘other mother’ and me

Linda Dahlstrom MSNBC.com Health editor • E-mail

More than 40 years ago, my mother and one of her best friends struck an unconventional deal: They would share me.

My mom, Beth Dahlstrom, met Isabel Peterson when they were both nurses at a Southern California hospital. They became even closer friends when both became pregnant with their first child in their late 30s, later in life than many women at the time, and gave birth the same year.

I was 5 months old in July 1967 when Isabel’s son, Wendell, was born. My mom still cries when she recounts that phone call. Something was wrong with the baby, Isabel told her. He’d been having convulsions and was severely brain damaged. The doctors didn’t expect him to live.

“She was crying and I was crying and I said, ‘We’ll share Linda with you,’” my mom would later tell me. “I couldn’t imagine losing you, or truly knowing Isabel’s pain — the only thing I had to offer was sharing you.”

From that moment and through all the years since, Isabel has been my “other mother.” She’s always loved me in the deep, completely-in-your-corner, unconditional and yet no-nonsense way that great mothers do.

As a child, I played in the lemon grove behind her house, tussled with her dog and looked up to her stepchildren, LaDona, Scott and Greg, who were older and seemed so much more sophisticated. If I got frustrated with my parents, I’d threaten to go live with Isabel.

Years later, after my family moved to another state, she made my favorite chocolate chip oatmeal cookies and mailed them to my college. Later still, when my mother was battling breast cancer and my father was dying of heart disease, Isabel sought me out to remind me she was still here; I could count on her.

Our relationship has changed from my being her little girl into one of adult friendship as we've navigated life’s turns. And more recently, Isabel and I have become bound by something else — we’ve each learned what it means for a mother to lose a child.

A world upside down

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Like Isabel and my mother, I also did not have my first child until my late 30s. Phoenix was a joyful, curious and gregarious little boy who loved to cuddle and be read to and who seemed so eager to embrace the world he’d come into.

But on July 7, 2005, when Phoenix was 7 months old, I woke in the dark to hear him making low moaning sounds. My husband, Mike, swept our son into his arms as I leapt for the thermometer. His fever was 102.

Even though we suspected we were overreacting, we headed straight to the emergency room. Phoenix, strong and sturdy, had always been astoundingly healthy; while his baby friends seemed to catch regular colds and flus, he’d never even had so much as the sniffles.

In the emergency room, the doctor diagnosed him with the flu and sent us home. But a few hours later he seemed worse, so we took him to his pediatrician. In her office, Phoenix suddenly went limp.

I could barely breathe when the doctor pulled up his shirt and revealed a sudden rash that indicated bacterial meningitis, a rare but deadly infection of the brain and spinal cord that kills 10 percent of those it strikes.

That was the last moment of the life I had known.

Phoenix died two hours later, surrounded by hospital staff administering CPR as my husband and I sang lullabies to him, stroked his head and begged him not to leave us.

The instant Phoenix died, I tried to will my body to go with him. I didn’t want to be here without him. Years ago, a professor and father of two told me a parent’s main job is simply to protect and keep your child safe. At that, I had failed.

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In the hours after Phoenix died, as I held his body in the twilight of the hospital room, I stripped off his clothes and pressed him against the skin of my stomach, trying to infuse my life into him, trade my life for his. To bring him back.

Phoenix was with God, I knew. Ultimately he was OK. But I was in agony.

In the months that followed, sometimes I was certain I heard him cooing in another part of the house and went looking for him. I thought I might be going crazy and wondered what would be better — to be insane and think he was still alive or to be lucid and know he wasn’t?

During the infrequent nights I slept, I always dreamed I was trying to save him. In some dreams he was brain damaged. In others his limbs were twisted. I woke from one horror into a worse one.

Those who do survive bacterial meningitis often suffer catastrophic injuries. Many lose limbs and are mentally impaired. When a nurse suggested that perhaps it was better he had died, I told her I would have given anything to have Phoenix in any condition. It might have been harder for my vibrant, joyful son if he had survived — but easier for me, I told her.

“Maybe at first,” she said. “But not later on.”

But truly loving your child unconditionally, I knew, meant loving him fiercely in whatever state he’s in. Isabel had shown me that.

The color of a mother's love
Wendell did not die when he was a baby as doctors had predicted. Isabel fought to bring him home, despite their recommendations that she put him in a facility. He would never learn to talk, walk or sit up by himself. The doctors warned Isabel and her husband, Joel, that Wendell would probably never even recognize them. None of that tempered Isabel’s love for her son.

“He was a joy to care for, he was just a darling little boy,” she says. 

When he was 3, and still only had the motor skills of an infant, he became too big for Isabel to care for at home. He was moved to Fairview Developmental Center where Isabel knew her growing son would get the care she could no longer provide. She nearly moved in too. “I couldn’t stay away,” she said. “I always had to see him.”

If I was in California visiting Isabel, I’d go with her. Her routine for decades was to bring him his favorite foods, pureed, for lunch, along with his favorite kinds of ice cream for dessert. She always seemed as excited to see Wendell as if she were reuniting with a long-lost love. Her pace would quicken as she got closer to his room.

From the hallway, she’d call out, “Hello, Angel, I’m here,” and this young man, who supposedly was never to recognize his mother, would beam and turn his face to her like she was the sun. She rocked him in her lap, which she knew he loved, until she was in her late 60s and physically couldn’t bear the weight.

“Isn’t he beautiful?,” Isabel would always say, seeming never to see his twisted limbs.

As a mother, love washes over and colors everything that has to do with your child. You find strength in yourself to do things you never could have imagined, whether it’s changing the dirtiest diaper or giving a eulogy standing in front of a miniature casket. You do whatever is required to take care of your child.

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