So Who Am I?

I guess a good place to start would be with an article I wrote for the New York Times on the circumstances surrounding the death of my wife Becky and the birth of my son Jack. I thought it a stellar piece of writing but it disappeared into the maw of editorial process never to be heard from again. For your consideration:

Thirty-nine year old women are not supposed to die in childbirth. I remember repeating that sentence over and over as I watched the nurse disconnect my wife Becky’s respirator last January. I experienced an indescribable range of emotions at that moment. Here I was, standing in the critical care unit of NYU hospital saying good-bye to the woman I had been married to for the last eleven years, while three floors below in the nursery my new son Jack was engaged in the business of being a baby, blissfully unaware of the emotional maelstrom playing out above him.

Jack’s delivery by emergency c-section in the early morning hours of January 28, 2007 was not something Becky and I could have foreseen during the months leading up to her due date. We had taken the usual classes and had our contingency plans in place, but we never discussed what would happen if something went drastically wrong. Who does, really? All of the discussions that were nervously held in birthing class about complications that could arise during labor were focused on something happening to the baby. There was a shared assumption that the mother would perform her expected role without requiring the hasty intervention of neurosurgeons and anesthesiologists. Besides, hers had been an uncomplicated pregnancy. Aside from some borderline high blood-pressure and a few headaches there was nothing to indicate that Jack’s delivery would be any more complicated than the hundreds of other normal births that took place in New York City every day of the year.

I remember how happy Becky was when she found out she was pregnant. We had tried, and failed, for two years to conceive a child and we were both getting a little depressed. Right before she found out that our natural efforts had born fruit, so to speak, we were in the process of deciding where we could come up with the $10,000 dollars needed to start the first round of artificial insemination. This was not an insignificant question. Although we were both lawyers, Becky was a trial attorney for legal aid, hardly the most lucrative end of the profession. I had taken a job with an insurance carrier at highly reduced pay because I was suffering from serious trial law burnout. Our moderate salaries were further eroded by law school loans and large payments on credit cards we had run up paying expenses while we were in school. For a while it looked like we were going to have to resign ourselves to being childless; at $20,000 the cost of adoption was similarly out of reach. So, we were quite happy when we got the news that she was pregnant.

The next nine months flew by. The day before Jack arrived, we were down at a friend’s house in Asbury park. Becky was sitting in a chair talking about what to name our little friend who’s arrival, we correctly suspected, was imminent. The next morning at 4am her water broke and it was a mad dash in the car from Staten Island to the hospital in midtown. Something wasn’t right. Becky knew it right away. She was preoccupied on the way to the hospital and seemed a little out of it. By the time I had finished filling out the innumerable forms and leaving credit card imprints they had moved her to a delivery room. Shortly thereafter she had a seizure and they raced her down the hall to the operating room. My son Jack Becket Rutkowski was born 5 minutes later and handed to me ten minutes after that. Becky never regained consciousness and died the next day without ever seeing the son she wanted more than anything else in the world.

The doctor’s explained to me that a rupture of something called an Arterio-Venous Malformation, or AVM had caused her death. Apparently the stress of labor can cause this tangle of weakened blood vessels to burst, with disastrous results. This ticking time bomb was apparently present in Becky’s brain stem since birth, but throughout her entire life it was asymptomatic. I hear that AVM’s are present in less than 1% of the population. Of course, Statistics are meaningless if you happen to be the one.

Fortunately my son was born completely normal. He is today a happy, healthy one year old and I love him more than anyone could possibly imagine. This has been a difficult year for both of us. I had to learn to be both a mother and father from the ground up and he has had to suffer through my ham handed diapering and other well-intentioned mistakes. Whenever I look at him I can see Becky in his eyes and I remember her telling me repeatedly before he was born that she thought I’d be a great dad. It has taken a little while but I’m starting to think she wasn’t entirely wrong.