I Found My Grandparents’ Sorrow Buried in a Trove of Forgotten Letters

They rarely talked about the tragic loss of their first child. Sixty years later, sifting through my grandfather’s old letters helped me see their lives in a whole new light.

Photos courtesy of Rachael Rifkin

My grandmother was in labor too long, and the baby kept hitting her head on my grandmother’s pelvis, trying to get out. She should have had a C-section but wasn’t given one. When Paula was finally delivered, they discover she had sustained a cerebral hemorrhage. She developed hydrocephalus – the buildup of too much spinal fluid and pressure on the brain – and died a few months later.

Had she been born a little later, she could have survived. The same year Paula was born, 1949, surgeons Frank Nulsen and Eugene Spitz developed a successful treatment for hydrocephalus: a shunt implanted into the caval vein with a ball valve, relieving the pressure. Prior to that, hydrocephalus was a death sentence.

This isn’t part of the story I grew up with. The story I know stops at Paula’s death. I always silently tack on what I think of as a semi-happy ending – the birth of the three children my grandparents would go on to have: my mom, Aunt Sue, and Uncle Larry. It’s a…