Dominick Birdsey and Dessa

Dominick Birdsey and Dessa are former spouses whose relationship remains emotionally present after their divorce. Their sixteen years together encompass the death of their infant daughter, and separation does not sever Dessa’s connection to Thomas Birdsey or Dominick’s enduring love for her. In Dominick’s account, their former intimacy survives as memory, longing, and awkward contact in the present.

Marriage and separation

Dominick and Dessa had been together for sixteen years. At thirty-six, he had been unhappily divorced for less than a year, but the marriage remained part of his everyday emotional life: in the middle of the night, he sometimes reached for her and was startled by the empty side of the bed. That small, involuntary gesture makes separation feel less like a completed transition than a habit the body has not yet learned to relinquish.

Dessa’s public work is also part of the picture Dominick gives of her. She and a friend organized day care for women welders at Electric Boat and persuaded the company’s managers to put a policy against workplace harassment in writing. The account presents this as a concrete accomplishment from her life before or during their marriage, not merely as a recollection of a former spouse: Dessa acted with others to address the practical conditions facing working women.

After the divorce, Dessa was living with a boyfriend who worked as a potter, while she ran a day-care business. Dominick had seen the two of them around town. The details mark the independent life she had established, a life he could observe from outside but did not share. His knowledge of her circumstances coexists with the persistence of his attachment.

Angela Birdsey and the life they lost

Dominick and Dessa’s daughter, Angela Birdsey, died in May 1983, three weeks and three days after her birth. Dominick was the one who found her. He remained grateful that Dessa had not been the person to discover the death, even as the memory of that morning fixed his own role in the loss. The account gives the circumstance plainly: he had stayed up correcting students’ papers, overslept after switching off his alarm, and was already leaving when he turned back to kiss the baby.

He had expected to know Angela better when the school year ended and his schedule eased. Instead, the future he had deferred became a life imagined only afterward. While waiting outside a meeting with Dr. Patel, he watched young children at a dance academy and imagined one of them as Angela. In that counterfactual family life, he and Dessa were still together; Angela’s drawings and school papers were on their refrigerator, and a dance recital was approaching. The fantasy gives the marriage an imagined continuation and shows how bereavement shaped Dominick’s picture of the family they might have become.

The loss also enters his memory of Thomas. Dominick recalls telling Thomas that he was an uncle and giving him an It’s a girl cigar. Thomas smiled, but he never met Angela: the planned visit was postponed, and she died before the brothers could bring her to him. Dominick can accept, at times, that Thomas’s illness eventually separated the twins; he can also admit that he has sometimes longed for his brother. Dessa’s continued affection for Thomas therefore connects her to a family bond that remained important even after her marriage to Dominick ended.

Contact after divorce

When Thomas was hospitalized, Dessa came to visit him. Dominick had put her on the approved-visitors list and thought she might come, though he knew she had no obligation to do so. She arrived carrying chrysanthemums and a silver balloon. Her visit was for Thomas, whom she loved, and Dominick was overwhelmed by the direct reminder that their shared life had left ties beyond the marriage itself.

After she came out, Dominick called to her from his truck. They greeted each other with a handclasp and a hug. Their physical familiarity was still legible, but his touch at her back felt tentative; after sixteen years together, he experienced himself as awkward and unsure. He described being close to her as both painful and pleasurable. The encounter holds recognition and distance in the same moment: they can embrace, but the ease of their former partnership is gone.

Dominick tried to kiss Dessa, and she turned her head away. He reached for a kind of closeness she did not return. She then drove off, braking to give him a thumbs-up. Her small gesture does not undo the refusal, but it preserves a note of warmth in an encounter otherwise shaped by unequal desire. Dominick watched her leave and acknowledged that he still loved her and expected to continue loving her.

A bond that persists in memory

The relationship is narrated through recollections and present-tense encounters rather than through a complete account of courtship or the causes of divorce. Its key measures are therefore intimate and specific: the empty side of the bed, the lost future imagined for Angela, and the careful, awkward hug outside Thomas’s hospital. Together they show how the past remains active in Dominick’s present without restoring the marriage.

A later dream briefly returns Dominick to the belief that he and Dessa are still together; waking brings him back to his actual circumstances with Joy. The dream does not change the status of his former marriage, but it makes visible how readily his inner life returns to Dessa. Across the account, separation is real, Dessa has built a life apart, and she declines Dominick’s attempted kiss. At the same time, affection, shared bereavement, and her enduring relationship with Thomas keep their connection from becoming merely a closed chapter.