Bereavement after Angela’s death

Bereavement after Angela’s death is not a single episode of mourning but an enduring force in Dominick Birdsey’s life. Angela, his and Dessa Constantine’s daughter, died in May 1983, three weeks and three days after her birth. Dominick’s account follows grief from the shock of finding her to the estrangement that followed, and then to the memories that continued to return years later. It also shows how his efforts to avoid pain—especially his refusal to speak openly and his decision to prevent another pregnancy—became part of the loss itself.

The loss and its first aftermath

Before Angela died, Dominick imagined that he would get to know her more fully after the school year ended. His work, coaching, union responsibilities, and weekly visits to Thomas Birdsey had occupied much of his time; he expected the summer to bring ordinary days with his wife and baby. Instead, after oversleeping, he turned back toward home to kiss Angela before leaving and found that she had died. The detail of this small change of plan stayed bound to the larger knowledge that there would be no later summer with her.

The first days left Dessa overwhelmed by grief and Dominick in the practical role of managing what had to be done. He dealt with the coroner and police and with the food brought to the house, much of which the couple could not eat. Later, he washed and returned the dishes. These tasks gave him something to handle while neither he nor Dessa could make the death comprehensible; they did not bring the two of them into the same way of mourning.

Dessa began taking long walks with the dog, Sadie, often returning after hours away and saying little about where she had been. Dominick once followed her to the river and on toward The Falls, where she sat watching the water. Concerned about her safety, he bought her pepper spray, but she often left it at home. His attempt to protect her could not reach the solitude she sought, and she did not want his company in the way he hoped she might.

Memory, anniversaries, and the silence between them

The loss returned to Dominick through anniversaries and involuntary images. He recalled Dessa grieving as the ambulance left their driveway and later at the hospital. Around Angela’s birthday, the anniversary of her death, and sometimes the holidays, those memories became especially difficult to escape. The nursery, with its empty crib and moon-and-stars wallpaper, made the absence concrete; Dominick sometimes drove fast or went to the river, seeking distance from the house and from thoughts that offered no explanation for the death.

Dessa tried, months later, to talk about Angela and to invite Dominick to speak about his feelings. He resisted, believing that conversation could not alter the fact that their daughter was dead. On one occasion he left the room rather than continue. Another night he heard Dessa in the baby’s room, speaking to Angela, but could not bring himself to get out of bed and comfort her. In retrospect, he wondered whether going to her might have helped them preserve their relationship. The episode reveals a central feature of his grief: he could recognize what care demanded and still remain immobilized by the pain of offering it.

Dessa attended support meetings for parents whose babies had died and urged Dominick to join her. He went twice, but found the meetings difficult to tolerate. At one, a couple marked their dead son’s birthday with cake and ice cream, and the group sang to him. Dominick could not participate in the gathering’s form of remembrance; he viewed it as strange and left after eating only a little. He acknowledged that it helped Dessa, even as he rejected it for himself. Their different responses did not mean that one had forgotten Angela: they meant that shared grief did not automatically give them a shared language for it.

Anger, the decision against another child, and separation

As the couple struggled to live with the death, their explanations for it diverged. Dessa considered the possibility that God had singled them out; Dominick turned toward the possibility that there was no God and that events carried no meaning. He understood life as arbitrary and cruel, an understanding intensified by Angela’s death, Thomas’s illness, and the absence of his biological father. Rather than helping him accept uncertainty, this outlook fed his anger and his sense that nothing could be repaired.

Dessa began preparing to travel alone to Greece and Sicily before Angela’s first birthday. She had wanted the two of them to make the trip together, but Dominick refused. He called the use of Angela’s life-insurance money for travel wrong, while privately fearing both the confinement of a ship and the possibility of having another child. He marked the occasion by secretly arranging a vasectomy. He told himself that fatherhood had hurt him and that he would never risk that hurt again; he did not tell Dessa, his friends, or even Leo Blood.

When Dessa returned, they attempted to reconnect and spoke about the memories of Angela that were beginning to comfort her. She described remembering the baby as more than the circumstances of her death, and said that these memories helped her live with the loss. Dominick could not say that he had experienced the same comfort. When Dessa told him that she was afraid, he assumed she feared another pregnancy and disclosed the vasectomy. She had returned from the trip hoping to tell him that she wanted another child. The revelation turned their already fragile attempt at closeness into a rupture.

In the weeks that followed, Dessa withdrew into practical work around the house, including cleaning and removing the wallpaper in Angela’s room, and spoke with her sister and a friend from the support group. She told Dominick she was leaving. He offered the possibility that the operation could be reversed, but Dessa identified the deeper problem as his anger and the blame she felt he had placed on her. Their separation therefore followed not only from his concealed decision about fertility, but from the pattern of grief and resentment that had made that decision possible.

Continuing grief and its later returns

After the separation, Dominick tried to resume teaching, but routine could not contain what had accumulated. In late September, while giving an ordinary lesson about punctuation, he broke down in front of his fourth-period class. He was taken from the school by police. A therapist called the episode a situational anxiety attack and proposed addressing the anger, grief, and betrayal left by Angela’s death, as well as Dominick’s experience growing up as Thomas’s twin and Ma’s and Ray Birdsey’s son. Dominick corrected the therapist’s description of Ray as his father: he was Ray’s stepson. Even in this account of bereavement, family identity and the pressures of being Thomas’s brother remain inseparable from his distress.

Years later, Dominick could recall the small, unrealized future surrounding Angela’s birth: he had told Thomas that he was an uncle and brought him a cigar, but Thomas never met his niece. Dominick also recognized that Thomas’s illness had, in a way, separated the twins, while admitting that he sometimes desperately wanted his brother back. The memory locates Angela’s death within a family already strained by illness and separation, without making one loss a substitute for another.

The bereavement also persisted as an imagined life. At a later point, Dominick saw children at a dance school and pictured one as Angela, inventing the daughter’s childhood, her drawings on the refrigerator, and a coming recital. In that fantasy, Dessa and Dominick remained together and their family life was ordinary. The imagined future makes visible what grief continues to hold: not only the child who died, but the years of shared life that never took place. In another later dream, Dominick dreamed that Dessa had not left him; he woke beside Joy, a reminder that the past marriage and its loss still entered his present through sleep.

Significance

Dominick’s mourning is marked by a tension between preserving Angela’s memory and refusing the vulnerability that remembering requires. Dessa finds comfort in memories that restore Angela to a life beyond her death; Dominick often experiences memory as a return to helplessness, and responds by leaving rooms, driving away, or refusing support. His secrecy about the vasectomy converts that defensive response into a consequential choice that denies Dessa the chance to share a decision about their future.

The narrative does not present grief as a process that simply ends. Angela remains present in anniversaries, the nursery, the imagined child at the dance school, and Dominick’s memories of what he failed to do for Dessa. His later ability to identify his anger and to recognize the cost of his silence gives those memories a different shape, but does not erase the loss. Bereavement continues to bind together love for the child, regret about the marriage, and an unfinished reckoning with the choices made in the name of avoiding further pain.