Rockabye, Goodbye 


"A true story written in the third person"
by "spikeabella"

This is the story of three people:  James Taylor, Clay Aiken, and a woman named Samantha.  Samantha and James Taylor are both baby boomers who grew up with all the expectations that the nation’s largest and most affluent generation, to date, collectively held.  In Samantha’s case, these great expectations were an especially strong testament to her optimism and to the spirit of the generation since she grew up in extreme poverty in Arkansas, just south of Branson, Missouri.  Unlike James Taylor and Clay Aiken, Samantha couldn’t sing; her passion was learning, and that earned her a scholarship to Harvard (Radcliff) where she met the man who became her husband. 

The couple had two beautiful daughters in just over two years in the early 1970s.  In fact, James Taylor had just released Sweet Baby James a few months before the first girl was born, and Samantha sang it to her every night.  The little girl thrived, and Samantha often told the story that her first words were “Goodnight you moonlight ladies,” and that the first question she asked was “Where’s Stockbridge?”  Maybe slightly exaggerated, but not entirely unbelievable given the number of times she must have heard those words.  So when the second girl was born, she too heard Samantha warbling “... waiting for summer his pastures to change...” as she drifted off to sleep each night.  If either child minded that Samantha couldn’t sing like James Taylor, she never said so. 

Life was good for Samantha and her family.  The girls were healthy and strong, the marriage seemed to be working, and the small family moved to Canada where both parents were planning to pursue graduate degrees.  In fact, it was exactly on the day that Clay Aiken was born, that Samantha was awarded her doctoral degree, although she did not know this at the time, and what small connection they would have was in the distant future.

The only pall cast on their lives was their desire for a third child.  They had always planned on having three and expected that after having two, it would be easy to conceive a third.  They waited until Samantha finished her graduate degree and started trying again.  But years passed and nothing happened.  In her late thirties now, Samantha concentrated on her daughters and on building a career as a professor and tried to remember to count her blessings.   Years passed and she accepted the reality and was thankful for the two children she had.  Then unexpectedly, late in 1983, she found herself pregnant.  She was jubilant although very cautious.  In 1983, any woman over 35 was still considered “at risk” during pregnancy, but Samantha was very careful, curtailing her schedule, watching her diet carefully, and getting plenty of rest and exercise.  The two girls were very excited about having a new baby to spoil, and joined with their parents in hoping for a boy.  Samantha’s parents hoped for a boy as well; so far, they had 9 grandchildren, all of them girls, and while they loved them dearly for the gifts that they were, they longed for at least one boy. 

The pregnancy was more complicated than the first two, and there were times when Samantha was required to remain in bed.  Then, in May of 1984, she was heavily pregnant and her husband and both daughters were sick with a nasty flu.  She was managing as best she could, and being careful, too, but one night, exhausted herself, she caught her shoe on the stair carpet and fell down a flight of stairs.  Four hours later, she was in labor.  It was about a month too early, but the doctors were optimistic about the baby’s chances. 

The baby boy was born on Samantha’s birthday, which she took to be a good omen, and when the nurse put the 5 lb. baby in her arms, she began to sing to him again  - “... deep greens and blues are the colorrs I choose/won’t you let me go down in my dreams.”  He didn’t stay long in her arms, though, because there were problems with his breathing.  The crisis passed, and a few hours later, Samantha once again had her son in her arms.  “There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highways....”   Once more he had a breathing problem, and once more he rallied.  This was the pattern of their lives for the next two days until the doctors told Samantha, who was hoping to be discharged, that she could go but that her tiny son could not.  They needed to do more tests.  So every day, Samantha got her girls off to school and then hurried to the hospital to feed and hold her son, singing softly to him all the while.  Finally, on the day when he was eight days old, the doctors told her that the baby had been born with a heart condition for which the prognosis was not good.  She looked at the tiny, perfect features and refused to believe that anything bad could ever happen to this child.  She held him, she sang to him (“... ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go...”), she prayed, and she willed him to live.  And he did.  He even got to go home.  But never for long.  Throughout the hot early summer of 1984, the fragile infant was in and out of Children’s Hospital seven times.  Then in July, his condition worsened severely and he was admitted for the eighth time.  This time, Samantha checked in with him, refusing to leave him alone, ever.  She held his tiny body, hooked to monitors and tubes, she rocked him, and she tried to feed him even as she felt his strength fade away, and always, she sang to him, “...singing works just fine for me.”

Early on the morning of July 16, 1984, she was cradling him to her heart, singing softly to him when she felt his heart stop even before the monitor told her it had happened.  It had happened before, once, and he had been brought back.  For over an hour, the doctors worked valiantly.  And vainly.  He was gone.

Any mother who has lost a child knows that there are no words to describe the heartbreak, nothing that can fill the void that is left in the soul.  To say that Samantha was devastated is to understate the obvious.  But she didn’t cry.  She couldn’t cry.  She would say, if asked, that tears were for sad movies; this was too much heartache for tears to wash away.  The day the baby was buried, the family sat huddled together in the church, the girls and their father crying along with everyone else in the congregation at the sight of the tiny white coffin.  But not Samantha.  She sat stoic, the grief etched deeply into her face.

Even grief creates emotional energy, and Samantha channelled hers into her daughters, her home, and her work, and it seemed that she was coping well.  She moved quickly up the career ladder.  As is often the case when a family suffers a catastrophic loss, the marriage did not survive, but the girls remained close with their father who eventually remarried.  A casual observer or, for that matter, even a close friend, would not have been able to see the glass wall that Samantha had put up to shield herself from the grief that would never leave her heart.  The day that Samantha’s husband moved out of the house, she insisted he take the James Taylor collection.  She said, at the time, that it was because she’d eventually replace the vinyl disks with CDs, but the real reason was that she couldn’t bring herself to listen to that song ever again.

Life went on.  Samantha remarried and the girls grew up.  They went to university, and then one went to medical school and one to law.  Samantha bought a lot of CDs as she rebuilt her life and her music collection, but somehow she never got around to buying James Taylor.  In the winter of 2002, after her second husband departed with another woman, she got hooked on American Idol.  In particular, the North Carolina crooner named Clay Aiken caught her attention, not only because he had the voice of an angel but because, like many women her age, she imagined that he’d be the perfect son-in-law.  Secretly, she probably envied Faye Parker her wonderful son, with his talent, humility and obvious love for his mother, and maybe she thought about the son taken from her, but if so, she didn’t dwell on it.  Instead, she became a fan.

A busy career woman by now, near the top of her field, Samantha was about the last person one would expect to become a groupie, or if a groupie, maybe a Rod Stewart groupie or even a Pavarotti groupie, if he has groupies.  That all changed when she went with a friend to see Clay Aiken live in concert last March.  When he sang “Carolina in My Mind,” she was reminded of how much she liked James Taylor.  She signed on for two more concerts on the Independent tour, and she bought Clay Aiken’s CD and his single, but she still she didn’t buy James Taylor.   She became a Claymate, joined the Clay Nation and was starting really, really to enjoy life, so when the friend suggested that they go to North Carolina to hear Clay sing in his home state, she happily agreed.  She knew that he was going to do a James Taylor medley, and she guessed that he’d do “Carolina” because he’d done it before.  Still counting herself a James Taylor fan, despite her neglect of him for all these years, Samantha went to the concert, prepared.  Or so she thought.

On that summer night in Greensboro, North Carolina, when Clay Aiken sat a few feet in front of her, opened his beautiful mouth and sang THAT song with his impeccable tuning and phrasing, the tears finally came.  The young Carolinian probably thought he was singing to a crazy woman by the time he launched into the hauntingly beautiful harmony in the chorus, her tears were flowing so hard.  But the woman he was singing to - and if also to 2000 others, she didn’t notice - was a mother finally able to say goodbye to her own sweet, sweet Baby James.  It was July 16.


spikeabella@hotmail.com