October 6, 2002

• Author’s note:  Loyal readers, this blog and the preceding one are a chapter that represents a milestone in my memoirs.  From here on, things are more pleasant.  My life didn’t stop being filled with adventures and odd occurrences thirty years ago when this chapter ended, but it never gets this maudlin again.

  I remember how I felt after my son was stillborn on Christmas in 1972.  It was weird.  I kept thinking back over the months when I had been collecting diapers and baby clothes, and how as I folded them and put them on the little shelves I’d made from fruit crates, I just couldn’t visualize my baby wearing them.  That had never been a problem before.  My imagination readily pictures just about any thought, any expectation I have, but not that time.

  The inability to see myself holding that baby had bothered me, but I had shoved the thought aside.  Maybe that was denial, or maybe I just didn’t want to jinx the whole thing with negative thoughts.  I wanted a baby, but when the reality of the stillbirth sank in for me, I felt a sense of relief.  I don’t think I would have stayed with Stony after getting out of jail in Boulder, if I hadn’t been pregnant at the time.  The baby made a bond between us, keeping a very dysfunctional relationship together.  With no baby, I started thinking about splitting up with Stony.

  I didn’t say anything to him immediately.  He was grieving over our son, and so was I.  Always erratic, he became even more chaotic in his emotions and behavior.  Anger was always just below the surface, waiting for something to trigger an explosion.  For a while, at least, I wasn’t the target.  The two of us were trying to support each other through the grief, and we soon found we had a common adversary.

  When I had signed the release for the funeral home to take the baby’s body, I had apparently committed myself to letting them handle the burial details.  On leaving the hospital, I was given the mortician’s business card and instructed to call him and make the arrangements.  That alone was a problem.  The mortuary was in Leadville, miles away and a long distance phone call.  We were flat broke and without income or transportation.  Our firewood partner’s truck had quit about the same time our chainsaw broke, and we had already pretty well saturated the local market for wood, anyway.  One of those stacks of wood on a condo balcony lasted a whole season.  We had to cadge coins from people in the Gold Pan Saloon to get enough change for the phone call.

  I spoke to the mortician for a few minutes, jotted some notes, asked a lot of questions, and then hung up the phone and cried.  I had an itemized list of charges including the gravedigger’s fee, a casket, a burial plot, embalming,  and other services, that totaled at least several hundreds of dollars, even if I went with the styrofoam casket and all the other cheapest options.  Credit was out of the question.  “I’ve dealt with you hippies before,” the man said.  It had to be cash in advance, and it had to be soon because he couldn’t have my dead baby cluttering up his storage room too long.

  Through my sobs, I explained it all to Stony.  We were at a table in the Gold Pan, and we were joined by two women of our acquaintance who had overheard some of my conversation on the pay phone back by the restrooms.  Several other friends joined us as we went over the details and tried to come up with solutions.  The general consensus was, “That can’t be right!”  So another collection was taken and Stony and two of his buddies went back and called the man again.  They got substantially the same story I had.  The man had conceded that we could save $40.00, the cost of the styrofoam casket, if we provided our own box for the baby’s burial.

  They had explored every option we could think of.  State law wouldn’t let us leave the body unembalmed or bury it off in the woods somewhere.  It had to be a “dedicated burial plot” and although we might possibly, in time, be able to complete the paperwork for a permit to dedicate a small piece of our friend John’s land, that wouldn’t help us now.  He wanted that baby out of his mortuary ASAP.  He gave us four days.  I don’t recall whether he specified what he was going to do if we hadn’t completed the arrangements by then.

  We had gone into the Gold Pan to use the phone around midday on the day after Christmas.  When someone offered to buy me lunch, I accepted.  Our friends from Boulder and Tiger, and other new friends we had met in Breckenridge, and even a few people I didn’t recall having met before, stopped by to offer condolences.  The funeral problems became the general topic of conversation around the big table.  Stony shot some pool with his friends and people started, sometime in the afternoon, buying us drinks.

  It was my first alcohol in many months, and I lost count of how many Margaritas Grandes I drank after the fifth one.  I remember throwing up in the women’s restroom, and being supported on both sides as I stumbled back to the table.  Some time later, I recall knee-walking out to someone’s car for the ride up the pass to our little cabin.

  The next day we were back in Breckenridge, exploring options.  We priced plywood and nails to build our own baby body box–way more pricey than we could handle on spare change.  We went to the county welfare office to find out if there was any help available there–nothing.  We found that the entire community had taken us and our plight to their hearts.  Our friend Bruce, a carpenter, offered to build a coffin from some silvery weathered wood he had salvaged from an old barn to make cabinets.  Celeste said she had a piece of patchwork she had been working on for a quilt, and it would make a nice lining for the baby’s box.

  Astonished at the thoughtfulness and generosity, I accepted their offer.  Celeste said that she would hitchhike to Leadville with me.  Women always get rides faster than men or mixed couples.  We arranged to meet in Alma the next day and hit the highway together.  In the morning when I saw the box Bruce made after they went home that night, I was overwhelmed.  It was beautifully joined, the wood planed and sanded to a satiny finish, unvarnished, and with rope handles on the ends.  Celeste had neatly lined it with her patchwork material.

  We stuck our thumbs out beside the highway for at least two hours before a trucker stopped for us.  I was chilled through, my nose was running from the cold wind, and it was indeterminate whether the tears in my eyes were from wind or grief.  After we’d hoisted the box in onto the floor and settled our butts together on the single passenger seat with our feet on it, the driver asked, “What’s in the box?”

  Celeste hesitated and then answered, “Just some patchwork material.”

  “It’s my baby’s coffin,” I croaked.

  The trucker listened to the story, offered sympathy, and then went out of his way to take us to Leadville, and insisted on buying us lunch before he drove us to the mortuary.  His name was Frank.

  As generous and helpful as Bruce, Celeste and Frank were, that mortician was equally the opposite.  He said he had been stuck with dead bodies before by “our kind”.  “These mountains are crawling with hippies,” he said with a look of distaste.  He asked if I wanted to see the baby, but I couldn’t bear that.  I had lain and gazed at him while the doctor stitched me up, and had touched and stroked his little back and arm while his body was still warm from my body’s heat.  I didn’t want to replace that memory with the sight of him lying cold in a styrofoam box.  Celeste took the man up on his offer, went into a back room with him, and returned in a moment, visibly shaken.

  He accepted the beautiful box with a look only slightly less scornful than the one he used on us.  He made some corrections on the bill he had already prepared, deducting the forty dollars for the box.  He said the $90.00 for the gravedigger was not negotiable.  It was a union job.  Even if the man wanted to help us out, he couldn’t.  And, he said, we were getting a bargain at that price this time of year with the ground frozen.  Frozen ground was hard on backhoes and took longer to excavate.

  I told him I didn’t have the money… didn’t have any money at all.  I was so choked up I could barely speak, but I managed to squeak and croak out a promise to try to come up with some cash and get back to him as soon as I could.

  Celeste and I quickly got a ride back to Breckenridge with a one-armed miner from Leadville.  We spent the trip listening to his stories of mine explosions and cave-ins.  I was grateful for the distraction.

  When word of the gravedigging stalemate got around, Stony was approached by a man he had seen around town and spoken to a few times.  I’m chagrined that I don’t recall his name.  I remember him, though.  He was BIG… well over six feet and around three hundred pounds.  His family, Northern Cheyennes from Montana, ran a hotel with a bar we had been to a few times.  I met his mother, brothers and sisters.  All of them treated us like family and I loved them instantly.

  Our big benefactor said he knew the man who had the backhoe contract at the cemetery, and he thought he could talk the guy into letting him dig the grave.  Gratefully, I told him to go ahead and try, but from what the mortician had told me, it was impossible.

  Well, my new friend did the impossible.  We had told him to let us know if he got permission, and Stony, Bruce and maybe some other friends, would come over to Leadville and lend a hand with the picks and shovels.  He called a couple of days later, to tell us he had dug the grave, the baby was buried, and I could put that worry behind me.  Do I need to verbalize the special place this man has in my heart and mind?  I can’t find words for it.

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