On the brother she never knew

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

In the end, after a few hours, a few months, I dismiss these things. Chalk them up, as Ebenezer Scrooge did, to ``an undigested piece of beef.''

The butterfly that shadowed me the day after my father died. The bird that found a crack in a window and flew into my house after my mother died. Messengers, at first. But in time, simply a butterfly, simply a bird.

So will I deny this, too? Does reason always whittle faith into fantasy and certainty into skepticism?

Five years after I was born, my mother had a baby boy. He lived for 20 minutes, was baptized Joseph, and had dark, curly hair like my father.

This was all she told me. But I know more. I know she longed for babies. She begged for them. She made novenas. She wished on every wishbone and birthday cake, and I wished on mine, too, and on every first star.

But my mother kept having miscarriages.

Two years ago, 20 years after her death, a reader sent me a genealogy report. Part of the Curtin clan, which is my maiden name, she thought I'd be interested in family history. Listed below my parents, under the heading ``Children'' I discovered not just my name, but the name Joseph.

It didn't strike me then what this meant. But last week, when I happened upon the papers again, I sat stunned.

Joseph Curtin died as an infant. He was an actual baby my mother had held and lost, not just a story whispered one day when I found her crying. When was he born? And where is he buried? And why didn't we talk about him? Why didn't we mourn together? My aunt talked about a baby she lost. And my friend Janet's mother talked about her first born who died. How did my mother bear this loss without family and friends to help?

I told my daughter and a friend of mine about Joseph that very night. We were at my kitchen table and I said how hard it was to wrap my brain around the fact that he was a person who'd been born and died. Yet he still wasn't real to me.

And then we switched gears and got in the car and drove to Bridgewater because we had tickets to see a woman who talks to dead people.

Maureen Hancock is a medium who was a comedian before she started interpreting for the dead. She's funny. She's irreverent. And what she does is startling.

She's says talking to the dead is like the mall at Christmas, like the Verizon commercial, a cacophony of sounds. I'd seen her once before, and my daughter had never seen her.

She asked us up to the front of the room and she said that my mother was present and my father, too, and a male who had passed quickly - husband, brother, she asked? And I said no, my husband's alive, and I have no brother. And she said, ``There is a guy and he is next to you.''

And this is exact. Two people wrote it down. ``Did someone lose a baby?'' And I said, ``Yes.'' And she said, ``Your mom is with the baby and she wants you to know she's happy.'' She repeated this. And then as we were walking back to our seats, she said, ``His name is Joe.''

Only two hours before, I told my daughter and my friend about Joseph. And, yes, they could have spilled the beans, texted Maureen Hancock on her cellphone, and said have I got a scoop for you. But I know for certain that they didn't.

``Tonight is about making you understand what death isn't. It isn't an end,'' Maureen Hancock said.

For all of my childhood, I wished on every first star and on every birthday cake. And for all of my life I believed that my wish never came true.

Now I know it did.

In time will I convince myself that this was a lucky guess? Smoke and mirrors? A fragment of an underdone potato?

I pray not.

``It is so healing to know there is this something else,'' Hancock said.

And someone else, my mother's son, a boy named Joseph, I never got to know.