Their baby died during his nap. Then medical bureaucrats deepened the parents’ anguish
MEDFORD, Mass. — The parents were allowed to hold their baby until the medical examiner’s van arrived. Then, they’d have to hand his body over. So Holly and Eric High did what they could to say goodbye. They huddled in an alcove of the emergency room, cradling James in their arms, kissing him, rubbing his hair. They wished the police officer would stop questioning them. They knew she was trying to be gentle. But now, in these last moments with their son, it couldn’t help feeling like an interrogation.
There had been no warning. As usual, James had woken before dawn on Sept. 29, 2015. He didn’t cry when he stirred; instead, he made this babbling sound, almost bird-like, more curious than upset. Holly scooped him from his bassinet to breastfeed. Four days earlier, his pediatrician had declared him “perfectly healthy,” and in the gathering light, he looked it, wide-eyed and fat-cheeked at 4 months old.
Summer was slipping into fall, the Highs settling into a new routine. That week, Ellie, their 2-year-old, had started ballet. The month before, James had joined her at a home day care run by a neighbor, who’d quickly become their kids’ honorary third grandmother, soothing them through milestones, nudging Ellie from bottle to sippy cup. “She taught us how to be parents,” Eric often said.
They dropped the kids off with her around 8 a.m., Ellie running in to play with her friends. James’ eyes crinkled closed when he smiled.
For years afterward, their bodies would remember the time of day when it happened: Whenever Holly was sitting at her desk and felt a blinding rise in panic, she knew it was around 1:30 in the afternoon. The police reached Eric first, calling and calling until he stepped out of the chemistry lab he was teaching at Tufts University. James was being taken to Lawrence Memorial Hospital. They wouldn’t tell Eric what was wrong.
It was Holly who called the day care from her actuarial office in downtown Boston, who heard their neighbor coming apart on the phone. James never woke from his nap, she said. When she checked on him, his skin was blue.
James was no longer James by the time they got to the hospital. He was tiny in the middle of a full-sized bed. The team had been working on him for a while — jolting him with epinephrine, coaxing his lungs to breathe — and had gotten no response, they told Eric when he arrived. They wanted to know when they should stop.
“I need you to keep working on him until my wife gets here,” he remembered saying. He held James’ hand while the doctors tried to bring him back to life.
Holly collapsed as soon as she walked in. “I just want to hold him,” she said again and again.
He was declared dead at 2:34 p.m. Someone remembered the mementoes that hospitals collect for the family when a baby is stillborn. They pressed the soles of James’ feet into ink and made prints, right and left, slid them into a frame frilled with white lace. They cut a lock of his hair.
Then, they swaddled
