Author Carol Smith Finds Her Way Back Across The River

Carol Smith’s memoir “Crossing the River: Seven Stories That Saved My Life” is available here.

In the mid 80s Carol Smith and her husband were newlyweds traveling through Europe. One night they stopped in a small cafe in Provence for bouillabaisse, when Carol noticed a family sitting across from them. 

CAROL: I saw this young woman who didn't look any older than I was. And she had these four children around her and she just, she just radiated, she had this kind of serenity and her kids were like orbiting around her. And I had this very visceral response that I was like, I wanted to belong to someone the way she belonged to those kids. 

Carol would come to feel that sense of belonging but it was a hard road to get there. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.  

A year after their trip to Europe Carol was pregnant, two weeks from her due date she went in for a regular visit with her doctor. She didn’t think she was as big as she should be. She measured and remeasured her belly then decided to schedule an ultrasound. They weren’t common then for low-risk pregnancies. So this would be Carol’s first.

CAROL: I went to the ultrasound and was in this darkened room and there were these, all these techs. And then the techs asked more techs to come in and they were standing around the screen and they were all murmuring and nobody was telling me anything. And I could hear one of them say kidneys and point and say, look how big this is. And, and then, and I was pleading with them to tell me what was wrong. 

They told her she had to wait for her doctor to explain. Finally that night her doctor called and told Carol there’s a problem: her baby had a congenital birth defect that caused a blockage in his urinary tract system. 

This caused a cascade of effects. In utero the baby’s urine typically creates amniotic fluid. But because of the blockage Carol had very little fluid, which explains why she wasn’t very big. But that It also meant the baby’s lungs had not developed because the baby needs to push against the amniotic fluid to build up his lungs.

CAROL: I kept saying, what does it mean? What does it mean? And she said, well, uh, normally babies survive this, but your case is severe enough that we don't think the baby will live outside the womb. And I, I could not process that information. I just kept asking her again, well, well, will it be okay? You know, and she's like telling me, I don't think you're going to survive as birth and it's well, will it be okay? You know, and I just wanted to hear something different. Right. But I didn't…

Her doctor finally said, most babies with this severe case die in utero. Carol’s whole world suddenly turned upside down. The doctors decided the best course would be to wait beyond full term to give the baby a chance to develop his lungs.

On the day the doctors induced, the labor pains were strong but Carol welcomed them because she says pain left no room for fear. And finally Carol’s son Christopher was born.

CAROL: He was so beautiful, you know, he had this dark hair and he had really long, beautiful fingers. And I remember thinking to myself, um, that he was going to be a piano player, and it really wasn't registering to me that he wasn't crying. 

For months she’d imagined this moment. When her baby was born they’d place him on her breast. In all of the parenting books she’d read, Carol recalled how important it was for her to bond with the newborn. But the medical team gave Carol a quick glimpse of her son before whisking him off to the neonatal intensive care unit.

CAROL: I had this kind of panicky feeling that already I was failing him because I couldn't have him against my breasts and on my skin. And I was, I wasn't clear at all that I was going to be able to nurse him. 

Christopher couldn’t go home until his lungs were more developed so Carol and her husband Frank took turns staying with him so one of them would always be there. 

CAROL:  I remember he was in this sea of isolettes and most of the babies were premature and they were so, so tiny. You know, you just couldn't even imagine they were just not even bigger than a hand. And, and my baby was almost seven pounds, you know, so he was like this giant. 

Carol who was a reporter for the Seattle Post Intelligencer would slip into reporter mode asking lots of questions establishing a rapport with the doctors to gather information. So often they shared more than they might normally with a parent. 

The first weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit were touch and go and Carol was terrified but doctors told her Christopher was a fighter. 

CAROL: I was really concerned that he might not live. And so that was really, really hard. 

For many weeks they couldn’t hold him. The only way to connect was to reach in his isolette between on the tubes and monitors and pat him on the back. So on the day when the nurses told her they were going to take him out of the isolette, that she could finally hold him, Carol was overjoyed.

CAROL: It was really huge day when they finally extricated him from there. And the nurse helped me hold them in the rocker next to the isolet and he was still on the ventilator. You could hear the pump and, uh, he had all the monitors, electrodes and and yet here he was my little, little baby boy.

He had his first milestones in the hospital -- first smile, first time sitting up...

CAROL: There was a moment when I realized that he could, he recognized who I was, that I was not a nurse, that I was his mom. Um, and I felt it in my bones. I felt, oh, you know, he, he knows me. And that was a really a wonderful feeling. I remember I called the nurses over. He smiled, he smiled, and they gave me a hug.

Over the following months many specialists came to see him. Christopher was so sweet and would charm the doctors so much that at the end of the day his bed would be filled with their watches, pens, and stethoscopes that they’d left for him to play with. 

CAROL: I always, I used to joke that that was his little racket. He ran from his hospital room.

But each time Carol would look at the chart. And it would say things like “incompatible with life” and “failure to thrive” because he wasn’t growing or gaining weight.

CAROL: But he declared, he was compatible with life and he declared he was going to thrive! LAUREL: So he just kept defying the odds. CAROL: He did.

Finally after five months in the hospital the day came when Carol and Frank could bring him home. Carol’s parents were there with balloons when they arrived.

CAROL: It was this combination of this sheer joy... It was like, just this delayed welcoming of the new baby. So that was super exciting. And then I remember the first time I was sort of alone in the house with him and suddenly it hit me there, there is no medical team next door that I can call in.

The first time Carol gave him a bath she was terrified he’d squirm out of her hands, not to mention the first time she had to feed him through his gastrostomy tube attached to his stomach. 

His nursery was equipped like a hospital room complete with a big oxygen tank and a feeding pump.

Christopher had physical therapy to build up his strength. One day during an appointment the physical therapist was on the floor with Christopher and Carol was sitting behind him on the couch.

CAROL: I sort of felt this little tap, tap, tap, and I looked down and he was patting my leg. And it was like this really powerful moment for me of realizing that again, that he felt me there. And that, that was how he, he experienced, you know, he was expressing his love for me in the same way that I had expressed to him. And that was really especially powerful for me because, um, he still, at that point, didn't like to be held so much, which again, is something that's common for long, uh, babysit been hospitalized for for some time. Um, they, they don't, they don't like to be held.

Carol was sitting in the backyard one day with him  under the pink blooming magnolia tree. And Carol watched him play with the stethoscope. He had the earpieces in, and he kept banging the other end on the ground–the end that doctors use to listen.

CAROL: And I had this moment of like, that's weird. MUSIC And I, um, I took the earpieces out and put them in my own ear to see if they worked and I banged them on the ground. And I like I jumped 

The sound was loud and clear in Carol’s ears.

CAROL: and he hadn't been reacting at all to the, to the sound. And I had this like really sinking feeling of, um, something I did want, again, that I didn't want to know. 

Turns out Christopher was deaf … possibly as a result of one of the medications or hospitalizations… So the family learned sign language. 

When he turned three they moved to Pasadena so he could attend a special school where children were taught by deaf and hearing teachers. For Carol, each birthday was a small miracle -- almost an act of defiance against what the doctors initially told her. Christopher was turning into this stubborn but joyful toddler. 

He loved school. He loved meeting and playing with other kids. He spent so much of his young life in and out of hospitals, so any opportunity to be a regular kid -- even carrying a lunchbox -- he relished. 

CAROL: Being able to ride on a yellow school bus, like other kids, uh, was a really big thing after a lot of transferring…

But there were times Carol still worried that Christopher felt like he didn’t belong to the hearing world… or like they didn’t belong to one another, like her sign language would never be good enough to communicate with him the way she wanted. 

But for Christopher nothing had changed. He experienced the world joyfully. Then kindergarten graduation day arrived. Carol remembers standing next to Christopher who was talking to one of his friends. 

CAROL: This is my mom and, um, which was like, um, mom, my, and then he's signed, uh, that her, her hearing, the see her hearing is closed, which is the sign for deaf. And that, um, uh, that we were the same that my mom and we were the same. And so the interpretation was that, um, um, my mom is deaf. Like I am. So the fact that he saw our worlds were not different at all, you know, that we were part of the same world. That was, that was my graduation. 

MUSIC

But Christopher’s health was unpredictable. He dealt with seizures. The bigger he got the more his kidneys failed. He was losing muscle so wasn’t strong enough to bear his own weight and he had to use a wheelchair. Christopher took it in stride. 

They learned early on he needed a transplant so everyone in the family got tested to see if they were a kidney match.

CAROL: It turned out that, uh, my husband's kidney was the better match. Um, and so I remember feeling initially kind of like, uh, this mixture of, um, disappointment that I couldn't make this up to Christopher somehow by giving him the kidney, but also just elation that we did have a match.

Christopher had to grow enough for his body to accept an adult organ. The year Christopher turned six, he was finally big enough. On the day he went into surgery where he would get one of his dad’s kidneys, he sat up on his gurney and made the sign for courage to himself so he’d remember to be brave.

When they came out of surgery the kidney wasn’t working. Christopher’s blood circulated outside his body through a machine. Carol remembers holding his hand in the ICU while her father held hers. 

CAROL: We were really worried that it was going to fail, um, because, and he spent another few dicey weeks in an ICU and he came home with more problems.

And then after several months of darkness and hand wringing when his body tried to reject the kidney, Christopher woke up feeling better, the brightness returned to his eyes.

CAROL:  Improvement was just amazingly fast and, and truly miraculous. He was able to get back out of a wheelchair and walk, and then he was able to, to run. He had this kind of like little, um, little bit of an uneven gait and he'd run. 

Christopher’s grandfather, Carol’s dad, called it his happy Hops.

CAROL: And we were finally able to trust that he could take enough nutrition by mouth to remove his gastrostomy tube. So that was another huge milestone to have, to be able to look at his stomach. And there were, there were no, appliances attached to it. And, um, so, and I remember we would drive by sometimes we'd be in the car and we would drive by these, um, playgrounds. And he would look out at the playground and there'd be all the kids playing. And he would, he would sign to me, um, saying, you know, that he was the same as those kids. PAUSE

And Christopher did get to play with those kids. The year following the transplant was blissful. 

The first time Carol saw Christopher signing in a room full of other deaf children was powerful. For Carol, watching Christopher feel a sense of belonging among his peers was such a relief. 

CAROL: I was sort of starting to let my guard down and feel like the hard parts were behind us.

Life took on a predictable, everyday pattern. Carol would take Christopher to school, pick him up in the afternoon. On the ride home they imagined taking a trip on an old steam train. He was learning to ride a horse. He’d sign to Carol, “no hands.”

By that point she and Frank had split up. The stress over Christopher’s medical care had been too hard on their marriage. But they collaborated as co-parents. Then one weekend Frank picked up Christopher to go to his grandparents in southern California. The following morning Carol got a phone call from Christopher’s grandmother.

CAROL: She sounded really frantic. It was sort of hard to understand her, but what I was able to determine is that Christopher was in an ambulance... 

So Carol called Frank right away.

CAROL: And his dad just sounded like not himself at all, just kind of stunned and bewildered. I'm asking what's happening. And he said, I don't know, they won't let me see him. And that was when my heart started to race because we always were, uh, allowed in with Christopher.

Carol hung up and called Christopher’s regular doctors who were part of his transplant team. She asked if he could be transferred to UCLA where they knew his medical issues. She’s calling and calling and not getting any answers. 

CAROL: His doctor called me back his main doctor. And, I remember he said, what do you know? And I said, well, not much. And went into my speech about, we gotta get him back up here. And he said, here's my home phone, call me back when you know, more. And I remember at that registering as odd because he never gave me, you know, his home phone. And then I hung up and a few minutes later I got a call and, um, and, uh, Frank said he died and I couldn't absorb the words. I mean, it just, it didn't make sense. And I, I just, I don't remember much after that. It's sort of this blackout, you know, but sure. But I, I realized later that, his doctor who loved him, didn't want to be the one to tell me, I think he already knew, but he didn't want to be the one to tell me.

It turns out even though he had survived one medical crisis after another, in the end Christopher  died from an abdominal obstruction. For a long time Carol blamed herself.

CAROL: I thought somehow if I had been there, I would have been able to comfort him. I would have been able to, um, somehow change the outcome.

Friends suggested she move back to Seattle to be near family. But Carol didn’t want to face packing up his room. 

When Christopher was little, Carol would sometimes discover her watch missing and later find it in a secret hiding place in Christopher’s room. Psychologists call this a “linking object,” something that helps kids deal with being away from mom or dad. 

Now with Christopher gone, Carol says she needed a linking object. She couldn’t part with any of his belongings. She held onto his batman band-aids, his wind up toys, his busy bee.  

SFX: Rattle CAROL: This was one of his favorite toys...Being able to have that object is, was a way to kind of reenter his, his world. It was like a portal in a way. And, um, and so at first I wanted to hold all of them because I was so afraid of losing all the memories. And, um, and of course you don't really lose any of the memories, but they don't all, they aren't always all accessible to you at all, all the time.

Carol moved back to Seattle and threw herself into her work. The Seattle Post Intelligencer had her writing features on the health beat. Few people knew about Christopher and Carol liked it that way. She didn’t know how to talk about him or deal with her grief. When colleagues invited her to lunch she’d skip out and go for a swim.

It went on like that for years. Carol didn’t talk about him, didn’t speak his name, not with coworkers, not with her family. Her days consisted of work, dinner from the deli or a frozen dinner heated up and sitting in front of the news, that served as background noise and a continuation of the newsroom.  

CAROL SMITH: I had become very isolated. I just really retreated. Um, a lot of my old friends had, you know, had, had their families around the time I did. And it was, it was too painful to be with them. And, um, it was, I was cutting myself off from new people because I didn't want to disclose that I had lost the child because that tended to alienate people. And I, I sort of, that was how I experienced it, that they sort of pulled away. Um, I just felt, I think losing a child, there's such a stigma attached to it and it, and it taps so many fears and other people and their other, especially other parents that there's a natural desire to retreat. 

On February 10 Christopher’s birthday -- Carol’s mom would send her favorite memories of her grandson and on Mother’s Day her brothers sent cards. But Carol wasn’t sure whether she really could still be considered a mom if she didn’t have a child.

CAROL SMITH: I had this question that came up for me a lot in the beginning, which is, you know, Christopher was my only child. And, um, when he died, it was like, who am I, if I'm not a mother anymore? 

MUSIC

Her hairdresser would ask, do you have kids? And Carol wouldn’t know how to answer. A friend urged her to go to a grief counseling group for parents who’d lost children. 

CAROL SMITH:  It didn’t feel comfortable to me because I was still trying to shunt my pain. And to sit in a room filled with that much pain, uh, of, of these other mothers, who'd had the same experience, um, was, um, felt unbearable to me. 

It took her many years to find the words to talk about his life. 

CAROL SMITH: I was so focused on his death. The fact that he died, that I sort of then started to think that Christopher had been worried about his death and focused on his death and, and afraid of dying, you know?

Months passed… then years...but then ten years after his death, something began to shift for Carol. Through her health beat she reported on people who had survived extraordinary circumstances. She started to become obsessed with finding moments on which a life turns, moments they couldn’t control. 

One afternoon she came across an announcement from the National Institutes of Health. Scientists had found a genetic mutation responsible for progeria, a disease that causes children to age too quickly. People with the disease rarely live past 20. She imagined families raising kids who likely would not see their high school graduation. She contacted the Progeria Research Foundation and they gave her a list of names. That’s how she came to meet a 10 year old boy named Seth. 

At first she was reluctant to do the story because she knew it would trigger memories of Christopher. 

CAROL SMITH: I remember being really drawn to that story and not even necessarily very consciously at the time, but thinking that somehow this child knew, knew he was going to die in his parents knew he was gonna die in a, in a more present way than I ever was able to. So I, I wanted to get to know this child to kind of understand what, uh, how a child thinks about death. And it was, it was I think my own way of trying to figure out what Christopher might've thought about death.

In the days leading up to meeting Seth, Carol was nervous. But she wound up shadowing him for a year and really got to know him to be a regular kid who was silly and smart and laughed a lot. Carol even went to his birthday party. When all the guests had gone home, he sat looking at all his gifts and said, ‘I hit the jackpot. I’m eleven.’ That’s when it hit her Christopher wasn’t afraid of dying anymore than this boy was and he’d experienced just as much joy.

CAROL SMITH: He viewed his life as long and full. And I could view it that way as well. And that there's this moment when I have this sort of realization that you can look at a life as cut short, or you can look at it as completed. And I was choosing to look at his life as completed, and that helped release me from feeling like I somehow had failed him.

An editor at the paper Rita Hibbard, one of the few colleagues who’d met Christopher, was worried about Carol and the story being too close to home. 

RITA HIBBARD: I think there’s incredible power in that moment when a little boy who certainly knows he’s not going to live that long and lives his life to the fullest and says I hit the jackpot it’s those moments of joy in lives of terrible loss Carol’s able to bring... Three ways the subject to carol carol to our readers carol overtime to herself it comes full circle.

After reporting on that story Carol began having happy dreams with Christopher. Sometimes he was older playing basketball. Sometimes he’d talk to her.

Carol wasn’t fully healed, but meeting Seth was a big turning point. Reporting these stories had become a way for her to cross bridges … to process her grief.

On the tenth anniversary of Christopher’s death she reported on General John Shalikashvili whiteknuckling his way through stroke recovery. He had been the highest-ranking military officer in the country. As she witnessed the general go through the humbling experience of learning to walk one step at a time, she had a personal revelation.

CAROL SMITH: Here was a person who had been, you know, conducting gigantic campaigns around the world, military campaigns and was a very in control of all his, not only his personal sphere, but larger spheres. And, he had a lot of that taken away from him and he was able to build it and move forward, build it back and move forward. Um, so by taking, it was, it was...LAUREL MORALES: Taking small risks CAROL SMITH: By taking small risks and then bigger risks and then bigger risks. And by accepting that you can't always control the outcome. 

After that story she made an effort to make new friends. She hung out with colleagues at work. She even started dancing again -- salsa, tango. MUSIC She went back to the support group she’d found so unbearable before.  She says just knowing those women are out there in the world is a big support for Carol. She realized motherhood still belonged to her.

For a long time Carol would avoid children whenever she could. Fall was especially hard because that’s when she’d see school buses re-emerge. But after meeting the general she consciously made herself remember the things that made Christopher happy -- trains, cats, magic markers. 

CAROL SMITH: I essentially tried to like remap the memories so that instead of it being as trigger in a sad memory, that he could no longer be on the bus, then I would just focus on what he was experiencing when he was on the bus, which was just, again, it was very, um, he was happy, excited, proud...Christopher taught me to live joyfully and for a child who had a lot of challenges...he had a lot of surgeries and people were always taking blood and so forth. And yet he always found something that made him laugh in any situation. 

Carol was starting to find the words. And for Carol that was critical to dealing with her grief. More than 25  years after Christopher died, She wrote a memoir called “Crossing the River: Seven Stories that Saved my Life.”

CAROL’S READING from the book the excerpt about the title

For all those years, she couldn’t talk about Christopher, now she loves talking about him. 

CAROL SMITH: In fact, one of the most touching and gratifying things about people when they read the book and then they get in touch with me people who'd never met him are saying his name and, um, talking about how his life touched their life or how they connected to his story. And, and that feels really, really special and wonderful for me.

Today Carol goes on walks. She calls them her Christopher walks. 

CAROL SMITH:  I try and view the world the way he would have...he’d really like the bunnies.

Carol remembered a moment when Christopher asked for her camera, an old 35 millimeter. He signed “big picture.” She helped him lift the camera to his face and showed him how to look through the lens and focus. He turned around and took a picture of Carol.  

CAROL SMITH: In the picture I'm leaning back in the swing, laughing. I see me through his eyes. I see me happy. I see me as his mother still having a child had changed me profoundly as it does every parent. After Christopher died I didn't know how to integrate the person I was inside with the childless person the world saw...The essence of who you are doesn't change when something in your outer circumstances changes, indeed those changes may reveal and enhance traits you hadn't known. Becoming Christopher's mother had given me a new kind of strength. He taught me patience and acceptance...

Carol says no matter who else she became in her life, she would always be Christopher’s mom.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.