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A beautiful day, a small plaque
By THOMAS FRENCH, Times Staff Writer
She knows that she did hold Lindsay Rose, because she has seen the snapshots of them together at East Pasco Medical Center. But the actual moment -- the tangible sensation of what it felt like to have the stillborn infant in her arms -- has vanished, lost in a fog of medication and trauma. "I wish she could have made it," she says of her daughter. "I would have liked to have been able to see what she looked like. But the way I was, it was hard." Now the photos are all Mary has. The 37-year-old mother is recovering at home. She and her husband have put together two albums filled with pictures taken after one of the nurses baptized Lindsay Rose and dressed her in a white gown the nurse had sewn herself. Mary is doing her best to understand. She sits in her living room, slowly turning the pages of the albums, studying each photo. She is memorizing the details of her little girl's face. * * * So much has happened over the past two weeks. Some of it Mary recalls. Other parts have simply fallen away. She remembers most of the Monday evening -- the night of February 24th -- before everything went wrong. Her husband, Steve, a security guard, was at work. She was doing the dishes and reading bedtime stories to the couple's 4-year-old daughter Faith and 11/2-year-old daughter Shania. Before Mary drifted off to sleep, she felt her third child moving inside her. The next thing she knew, it was the morning of Wednesday, February 26th, and Mary was waking up in the intensive care unit at East Pasco. A man she did not recognize was holding her hand, telling her he loved her. "It's okay," he kept saying. "It's gonna be okay." Later that evening, when Mary had regained enough of her senses to identify her husband and realize where she was, a doctor and a chaplain told her that she had suffered a seizure early Tuesday and then been rushed to the hospital. The doctor explained that an emergency C-section had been performed, but that her child had already died. It took her a moment to grasp what she was hearing. She took comfort in the name Lindsay Rose. In the weeks before the seizure, she and Steve had decided on that name in case they had a girl. Steve had chosen Lindsay; Mary had chosen Rose. The funeral was that Friday, at Chapel Hill Gardens cemetery. Mary could not be there; she was still in ICU. But Steve, his father and Mary's father carried the small white casket together to a grave site in a section of the cemetery reserved for infants and children. Around them, the mourners could see rows of more than 120 other small tombstones. Two chaplains from the hospital delivered eulogies. One read from a poem he'd written on behalf of Lindsay Rose, comparing her and the other children buried around her to buds in a bouquet, gathered by Jesus. Over the next few days, Mary continued to recover. One of the nurses from the labor-delivery unit came to her room several times to check on her. This was Lois Bineshtarigh, the nurse who had sewn the white gown. The thing was, Lois and Mary knew each other. A decade before, when Lois' son and daughter attended Wesley Chapel Christian School, Mary was a volunteer who helped the students with their art projects. She worked with Lois' kids, especially with Lois' daughter. Now, all this time later, Lois was pleased to have done what she could to care for Mary's little girl. When Mary arrived at the hospital, Lois had not recognized her at first. The last name was different -- when Mary worked at the school, she still carried her maiden name -- and she did not look like herself. That first day at East Pasco, she was on a ventilator, which made it all the more difficult to see her face. But once Mary's condition improved, Lois put the connection together. For her part, Mary remembered the nurse almost at once, even before she could identify her husband or other members of her family. She opened her eyes, saw Lois at her bedside, and knew her instantly. "Hi," Mary remembers saying. "How you doin'?" At the time, Mary did not know about the gown that Lois had sewn and placed on Lindsay Rose. Mary did not learn of this detail -- or of all the other things that Lois did for her daughter -- until after she was discharged from the hospital a few days later. This past Monday, at home with their two surviving daughters, Mary and Steve said they are deeply grateful for the care shown by Lois and everyone else at East Pasco. The couple said it has helped immensely to have the photos of their daughter, dressed in the special gown, and to know that she was treated with such respect and tenderness. Seated on the couch, with Faith and Shania playing at their feet, Mary and Steve talked about their ongoing attempts to make sense of what has happened. They said they believe that there is a reason for their daughter's death and that God will eventually reveal that reason to them. "He knows how many hairs we have on our head," Steve said. "He knows when a sparrow falls from the sky. He knows everything." Beside him, Mary nodded. * * * That afternoon, the Spittkas drove to Chapel Hill Gardens to see the grave again. They've been going daily since Mary came home from the hospital. When they reached the children's corner of the cemetery, Steve and Mary parked and got out. Faith, the 4-year-old, went with them. Shania lay asleep in her car seat, with the door open so her parents could see her. It was a beautiful day, with a deep blue sky and a light breeze that moved through the oak trees. Dragonflies hovered; from neighboring groves came the scent of orange blossoms. Steve and Mary and Faith walked along the rows, past the other tombstones from all the other families, and stopped at a spot marked with a small plaque. Lindsay Rose Spittka February 25, 2003 Steve looked at the plaque. "We're trying to save up for a tombstone," he said. "It's going to be like that -- " He nodded toward one of the small stones nearby. For a few moments, Steve and Mary knelt beside their daughter's grave. From a short distance away, Faith watched her parents, her face registering uncertainty. She saw her mother crying, her shoulders heaving. She saw her father wrapping his arms around his wife. Faith walked over beside them. She looked into her mother's face. "Mommy," she said, "it's going to be okay." Her parents pulled her toward them. Her father reached out his hand and lightly ran his palm across the dirt before him.
Faith put out her own hand and did the same.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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