Blankets to bring the dead to life

Jean Martin always thought that the obstetrics room of a hospital was a happy place. But lying in a bed on the OB level of Southeast Missouri Hospital on an August night in 1993, it seemed to her to be the most miserable place on earth.

From the rooms around her, she could hear the crying of newborn babies in their mothers' arms. Her baby, she knew, was not crying.

A miscarriage after 11 1/2 weeks of pregnancy. Overcome with grief, she found herself faced with an unexpected question.

"Do you want to see your baby?" the nurse asked.

At first she didn't know what to say. She didn't know that hospitals allowed or offered that chance. But she soon resolved that she would like to see the baby and hold it for the first time, the last time. She knew she'd never get that chance again.

But when the nurse brought the baby in, Martin was again surprised, this time to see the tiny lifeless body swaddled in a beautifully knit blanket of interwoven white and pastel blue, yellow and pink yarn. The simple square foot of fabric made holding the baby seem more real, more like holding a normal, healthy child. But just as important to Martin was what the nurse told her about the anonymous person whose hands had knit the blanket, a story related to more than 250 grieving mothers who've received similar blankets over the past decade. That story is now summarized on a note attached to each blanket.

The note reads:

"This blanket has been made by a mother who suffered a pregnancy loss earlier in her life. It is her gift to you out of love and sympathy with the loss of your pregnancy."

"It meant a lot to know there was someone out there who understood what I was going through," recalled Martin.

Anna Mae Rigdon has never met Martin, nor any of the mothers who've received the blankets she's volunteered hour upon hour of her last decade knitting. But she's connected to them through more than just her act of anonymous sympathy. She too has silently grieved amid the cries of newborns in a lonely obstetrics ward.

Connected by loss

In 1949, Rigdon was sitting in the obstetrics ward at St. Mary's Hospital in St. Louis. She had just lost a child that was stillborn at full-term, due to complications during delivery. Rigdon shared her room with the mother of a healthy newborn, and every three or four hours nurses would bring the baby to its doting mother, making Rigdon's loss sting that much more.

"I was very jealous," Ridgon said. "I was also hurt. I just didn't think I should have to go through that."

Although she went on to raise 12 children, Rigdon never forgot the pain of that one loss. The 83-year-old now bears that in mind as she sits, needle clenched between her lips, in front of the television in her Jackson home or at the bingo table between calls knitting the tiny blankets.

"It makes me feel special that I can do something for a mother going through what I went through," Ridgon said.

Rigdon first started knitting for Southeast Missouri Hospital over a decade ago, when her daughter, Cindy DesPres, a nurse on the hospital's obstetrics floor, said the department needed sock caps for the tiny heads of the newborn babies. Rigdon was one of a handful of area knitters who volunteered her services to help the cause. Since then she's logged more than 4,500 hours knitting more than 2,000 hats.

"To me, knitting is simple," Rigdon said. "My hands are strong, no arthritis, no carpal tunnel.

"Strong hands, spanked a lot of children," she said, joking.

Each hat or blanket takes Rigdon about two hours to make. She finds the work relaxing and a productive use of her time and energy. Most of her yarn is donated by the nurses, her bingo friends and mothers who've sampled her wares and brought yarn to the hospital.

Called "Anna Mae hats" by the nurses, Rigdon's hats come in all colors and sizes, but are singularly distinctive by the pompoms that top them. Instead of buying them, she makes them by hand. Although the untrained eye may have difficulty distinguishing an Anna Mae hat, Rigdon, DesPres and the other nurses can spot them from some distance, as they do from time to time on the heads of babies in church and on the street. Since Rigdon rarely ever meets the mothers and babies who receive her work, that's all she actually sees of the fruits of her labor.

Covering the lost

Although the hats have been a big hit with healthy babies, the blankets hit Rigdon a little closer to the heart.

She estimates she's knitted more than 300 blankets of various sizes to accommodate the bodies of lost babies born premature at different stages of gestation. Since each blanket represents a child lost, Rigdon doesn't see them out on the streets of Jackson or Cape Girardeau. Having never even met a mother who's received one, all Rigdon knows of the impact her blankets have had comes through testimony from DesPres.

"A lot of times they cry when they receive it," DesPres said of the blankets. "Having lost the baby, they really don't have anything tangible. This is all they're really going to have to hang on to."

After 11 years, Martin has held onto her blanket, packed away with other memories of a painful time long passed.

She doesn't dwell on it. She's moved on in her life, raised two healthy children. And although she's never met Rigdon, she said she still feels a connection with her as a fellow parent who's had to mourn a baby. Martin said the knitted symbol of that connection links her to the most real memory she has of her child.

"As soon as I see it, it brings back memories," Martin said. "For mothers going home from the hospital without a baby, it's something you can keep forever."

trehagen@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137