5/30/2023 0 Comments Rumpus magazine![]() ![]() ![]() One of her themes is how unprepared she and her husband were for Jacob’s terrible diagnosis, how young they were, how confident they were until Jacob’s birth that all would be well. Beyond that, I have no idea who he would have become.” She also thinks about how adults may change. “I only had enough to go on to be able to say for sure that a distinct person appeared inside me one day and was born to the world. One set of Putnam’s observations has to do with how our first selves fare over time-how they may change even as in other respects they remain the same. Putnam recalls her experience of Jacob in her womb and in his few days of post-natal life, which gave her a sense of him as a distinct self, one with a robustness of spirit, a readiness to take things on she sensed that he was “a difficult person, perhaps, someone with a hard energy, driven.” An early intimation was also true of her second son, Julian, who then seemed “sensitive, artistic, musical, resistant to enclosure.” The second thread is the narrative of Putnam’s mourning and thinking, some of it colored by her raising of her (healthy) second son, Julian, born two years after Jacob’s life and death. Occasionally she attaches a footnote that qualifies a claim about probabilities this practice is one of many signs of her good faith. In recounting her and her husband’s agonized decision-”an awful choice between a worst thing and another worst thing”-Putnam includes a lucid description of her son’s fatal heart defect itself. In 1989, when a recent transplant case had involved the use of a heart removed from a baboon, the dizzying odds informed the language (quoted above) of the Putnams’ physician. Putnam’s discussion of how the context has and has not changed is thoughtful, specific, and compassionate as she considers the choices available to parents now. One is a recollection of a mostly joyous pregnancy, followed by the traumatic day of Jacob’s birth and the grief-laden, complicated decision that his parents suddenly faced upon learning from their physician that their newborn son “will not be able to live.” (In 1989, “high-resolution ultrasounds at eighteen or twenty weeks were not routinely performed.”)Įven today, when the evolving clinical probabilities have opened more space for hope, the decision to seek a transplant or to commit to a different surgery-one that would reconfigure the infant’s heart so that it can sustain life with only two chambers-even today such a decision is problematical and fraught. There are two braided narrative threads in this essay of less than fifty pages. She speaks as a bereaved parent but also as a friend, a thinker, a mother, a skier, a writer (she has published extensively in poetry and short fiction). Its genre is memoir, all right, but it incorporates ethics, epistemology, clinical history, philosophy, language, historiography. So her memoir necessarily includes both many emotions and many kinds of information and analysis. But the brain and mind are parts of the self, even the feeling self, and her thinking does matter. ![]() Putnam has been thinking about (as well, of course, as enduring) this experience for more than thirty years, and her conclusions about it are bravely earned and are by no means mainly cerebral. But negative infinity is much harder to get your mind around than the grammatical concept of the double negative, so a reader may well fear that this idea is too cerebral for a memoir about the loss of an infant son, on the fourth day after his birth, to a dire heart defect known as HLHS (hypoplastic left heart syndrome). Among the meanings of Claudia Putnam’s cryptic title is a mathematical one, based on the lower left quadrant of graphs it is a meaning that she chooses, explicates, and explores from many angles. ![]()
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