Part 4… Tragedy Strikes

Arriving home from work the night of February 20, 1967, I followed my normal routine of tiptoeing into Boyd Dale’s room to check on him. That night, I knew something was wrong when I looked into his room. He was unconscious. I screamed for Boyd and called our physician. He told us to meet him at his office.
I drove our Mustang madly through our small town honking through every intersection as Boyd gave Boyd Dale mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. We raced into the office, our baby motionless in Boyd’s arms. Even as we rushed him into an exam room and the doctor looked him over, I knew it was over. My beautiful baby was dead. A victim of SIDS.
The doctor offered us a moment for a final good-bye. I kissed him on his forehead, overwhelmed by the grief. Boyd didn’t say a word. He touched Little Boyd’s hand in a silent goodbye as we left him with the doctor and drove our Mustang to my mother’s house slowly, in silence.
Thus began the rituals of death.
We went to my mother’s. Our pastor met us there and drove Boyd the eight miles to his parents’ to tell them. While we were away from our house, my aunts went in and removed all traces of our baby. We returned home and it was as if we never had our beautiful baby boy. It was as if we had never been parents.
Boyd later found a bib and secretly carried it in his pocket for months.
We borrowed money to buy a burial plot near my father’s grave. Walking into a room filled with tiny caskets was horrifying.
We had Boyd Dale dressed in his baptism clothes and laid in a powder blue casket. It was a cold, bleak February day when we walked across the hill with the wind blowing, our hearts full of dread at saying good-bye to our precious firstborn.
I knew life would go on but I lost my sense of pure joy and happiness. No matter what other wonderful things came into my life, I would carry this grief, a deep wound in my heart forever.