In her poem, “Secret,” published in the Spring 2021 issue of Shenandoah, Renee reflects on the fragility of the human body. She describes her shifts in perspective following the tragic loss of her youngest daughter, Kit. Here, Renee narrates her story of daughters, blood ties, and the body’s betrayal.
My oldest daughter, Zuzu, had her hand cupped to her mouth, blood dripping between the fingers. I hadn’t known how much a wound to the lips can bleed, and she had bitten straight through her bottom lip, a monkey bars accident.
A few months before, I had seen my youngest daughter Kit’s blood in tubes pumping in and out of her body through the labyrinth miracle of a life support machine. She was nearly six months old and had spent most of her 171 days in the children’s hospital CICU, fighting to breathe.
When I write about a body’s betrayal in my poem, “Secret,” this is what I’m talking about. The betrayal of a tooth through a lip, of a sliver of DNA going missing. I had never suspected anything was wrong in my pregnancy with Kit, my fifth daughter, until we had an ultrasound that showed a missing kidney, a seven-defect heart. Kit was born with a rare genetic deletion, 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (also known as DiGeorge syndrome). Survivable, for most, not hereditary, for us, and “just bad luck,” per the doctors.
Even with that luck, we still hoped. We saw our four other healthy children, running and jumping in their perfect bodies, and thought, of course she will overcome a bad start. Just some missed stitches at the beginning, but she’ll set herself right. I believed in healing, that, ultimately, the boat wouldn’t capsize. I believed if I knew enough and tried hard enough, I could save my daughter. I held her every day in the CICU, hoping my mother-love would will her lungs to open.
The day before her surgery, her medical team met with my husband and I in a conference room, and they asked us if we understood what would happen the next day. I told them the statistics of survival, the optimism of what has happened to other people. But they told me numbers are numbers, and they didn’t expect her to be on the right side of the statistics.
The heart surgery that was supposed to be her savior first collapsed her lung and with a stroke, erased parts of her like lights going out on a city block. The doctors made us look at the scans, the dark part of uncontrolled bleeding growing like an ink blot; they had to make us look, so we could understand. Goodbye first smile, first laugh, first word.
A few days later, she died in our arms, in a darkened room, when the doctors cut the life support cords with a plastic snap. I always thought that in the moment of someone dying, how powerless they must be, but that is not how it felt. She became “godlike,” transcending the body that betrayed her so badly, that could not sustain her a single year.
Her death felt like regret, but there’s nothing to regret, not with Kit. She reverberated in the air at that moment in the dim room, and the creation of the world with a Word made sense to me in a different way. Something had been done that can never be undone, and a new reality was created, one in which I held a dead daughter instead of a live one.
Four months after Kit died, I wiped off Zuzu’s face, careful to not let her see herself in the bathroom mirror—seeing an injury makes it worse. It healed in a few days, leaving a faint scar right below the curve of her bottom lip. Then I went to a quiet spot in our home, and wrote this poem.