The night smelled ripe tonight, and it was a full forty degrees cooler than last year as I walked into the temperature-controlled building on the Amherst College campus where the graduation would be held. My one night a year of professional affiliation with my previous place of employment, and tonight the graduates consisted of a group of 13 students, the majority of whom had been in kindergarten, under my tutelage, during the school year of 2002-2003.
It is nearly bizarre for me to look back on myself as a kindergarten teacher, and a good one. I had no children of my own, and I really honestly loved my students. I thought about them at night when I was falling asleep, I would be jerked awake by ideas that might inspire one or the other. I was absolutely energized every day by the fact that these little people loved me; more than that, they revered me, and I sucked it up and it helped me to grow. I was very happy.
This particular group of children were very, very diverse. Not physically speaking, or socioeconomically speaking, but just as a group. Very, very different little souls, some quirky, some less so, but there was virtually no status quo. They were a trip to work with, but I knew I would not finish up the school year with them, because I was having a baby... right. I was having a baby.
So I was mostly their kindergarten teacher, up until the 2nd of May, and then I went on my maternity leave. They kissed me, and hugged me. They made me a big cake that said, "We love you, Carol." They all brought me presents, and they made me cards, and they cried when I left.

Tonight, some of the children are taller than me. Their voices are changing, they are becoming young women, they are singers, actors, writers, moving on to various high schools and academies and performing arts schools. I hugged each one of them, marvelling in their accomplishments, and they all asked about my children and noted my swelling belly.

And I thought back to when they were in kindergarten, when, on the night of May 13th, the phone chain began. The director of the school, moved by the vision of ghastly rumors spreading like fire from classroom to classroom, telephoned each teacher, who telephoned each parent. The call was the same: The baby has died, we don't know why. At that time, they didn't even know her name. Each child was to be informed. They would all know the same thing. This is very sad. We don't always know why this happens. Your class will have a meeting about this in the morning.

By the morning the baby had a name, Charlotte, and the classes did meet. Meanwhile, a mother who was a midwife held a meeting for the parents in the gym. People cried, asked questions, didn't know what to do or say. I was in the hospital, paralyzed in a double bed, curled like a fiddlehead around my husband while my baby was transported to another hospital to be autopsied. My life was over. The questions continued. Kids wondered if I would have another baby. They wondered what happened. So did I.

Cards came, flowers were sent. The midwife mother told me she would love to hear my birth story. People showed up at the memorial, and they brought more flowers. Parents whose children I had loved as my own felt heartbroken for me, the sweet young mother whose only child had died. They didn't know what to do, so many did nothing.

When I went to the school picnic the next fall, four months later, nobody spoke to me. Not one, single person. I walked around, as if in a daze, and believe me when I tell you I was crawling out of a hole and did not seek anyone out. They looked at me from a distance, but they did not talk to me. The kids did, of course. The kids hugged me and looked at me only a little sideways, but to them I was still Carol and they didn't need to ask questions. But to the parents, I was a terrifying proposition. When I left, I was tremendously relieved at their lack of courage. I had no energy for talking.

So tonight, I looked at the graduates, fledged in part by me, and I saw them as the children who would always, always remember that their kindergarten teacher had a baby that died. They will never forget that, as I will never forget them, the children who puzzled over my first ultrasound images, and who rubbed my belly and sang to Charlotte. She always danced to their singing, and she lived in that classroom for most of her life. When I returned to teach the same group as first graders the next year, they greeted me with open honesty, with questions about my baby that adults never would have dared to ask, and I appreciated them like nothing else. They were my friends, these little people who weren't afraid to meet my eye and ask what had happened.

I wondered, tonight, how many of them thought of this. Remembered me, then, or her.