Loving Allie

Birth Stories

Birth stories are important.

They imprint us for life in small and large ways. It makes a difference to know if we were wanted, planned, a surprise, early, late, easy, complicated, vaginal, caesarian, a multiple, breach, subjected to any traumas while in the womb, or anything else that makes up the story of the beginning of our existence on this earth. If we don't already know the story of our births, we should make it our business to find out what happened to us from the beginning.

Birth stories make for interesting telling, even if they are sad, but especially if they are happy. My own birth story was simple. I was the eighth of ten children, born to a poor family in Anniston, Alabama. My conception was not planned. My parents had nine months to pick out a name for me but didn't. My birth was easy. In a hospital. The nurse named me. I was breast fed, like the rest of my siblings. Each of the ten of us was born at intervals of three years, two years, three years, two years, so that every other one of us is five years older. It makes keeping up with our siblings' ages easier. Because I was born in the middle of the pack, I learned early on how to please others. I learned how to negotiate for what I wanted. Everything was subject to negotiation. If I didn't want to sleep in the middle of three people in a bed, I had to figure out what to trade my two older sisters for one of their outside spots.

I also learned that in order to get any attention I had to be quick, smart, vocal, and competitive. It was easy to be missed in such a large crowd. I learned how to be seen and heard.

Each year on my children's birthdays I call them, usually before they are awake, sing Happy Birthday to them, and retell them the story of their births. I tell it so they will know how much they were wanted, how long we waited for their arrivals, how much they are loved, and how blessed we were by their very existence. In retelling these birth stories I try to recall minute details about how it felt, what time of day it was, etc., small things really that mark their entry into this world as unique.

The story of Loving Allie is mostly a death story, about the death of my only daughter, far too soon, at age twenty-eight, from the flu. Not an exotic strain of the flu. Nothing rare or unusual. Just the simple flu, a virus that kills about thirty-six thousand people annually in the United States.

But more than a death story, it is a life story, about her life and mine. And the story of her life begins with her birth story, a story that she heard from me many times. So much so that it became a kind of joke among her roommates and friends, who would sometimes overhear her end of the conversations on those birthdays when she would be away from home. I think she loved hearing her birth story each year. In fact, she loved it so much she began making up birth stories for her friends as well.

When she died, many of those friends participated in a celebration of her life by singing, dancing, telling stories, and more to help us remember Allie and honor her life's journey.

In order to show them how very much their being in her life meant to me, I wrote a kind of magical birth story for many of them in the months following her death. Will and I would call each of them and sing to them and then they would receive an email message with their own mythical birth story. Sometimes their mythical birth stories seemed to flow through me, rather than come from me. I like to think I had help from Allie in writing them. When I finished one that seemed rather clever, I smiled and thanked her for sharing it with me so I could pass it on to the ones she loved.

Allie's birth story is told throughout this book. Her friends’ birth stories are also included to weave together their lives with hers. Those whose stories are included here were the ones she held dear to her heart, her closest circle from high school, to college, and beyond. She chose her friends wisely and kept them close. We couldn't have survived her death without the loving support of so many of her friends. These little birth stories were one way to show them how much they mean to us.

Allie was loved from the moment she was conceived. It was my very great honor to have been given twenty-eight years, eight months, and one week with her in my life.

This is her story, theirs, and mine.