Standing at the revolving door, Karen Havis took a breath, walked tentatively into the lobby of Children’s Memorial Hospital, then began to revisit the rooms where her daughter had spent so much of her life until, one day nine years ago, her doctors allowed her to go home to die.
Havis walked through the emergency department that was often their first stop. She rode an elevator to the surgical suites where Bianca underwent some 120 operations over the two decades of her life, then to the constant care unit where she sometimes spent months. She went to the cafeteria where she ate so many meals that staff members knew her by name.
She saw nurses who had cared for Bianca, and when they recognized one another Havis fell crying into their arms. She stopped at the window where she had spent hours gazing at rooftops, thinking, praying, trying to tune out the ticking of clocks that reminded her how slow time passed. And she laughed when nurse Kathy Romanski grabbed a key to the parents shower off a hook; the shower was where Havis tried to shut out the world.
Children’s Memorial Hospital holds some of Havis’ worst memories. It also contains some of her most cherished.
“This was something I had to do,” said Havis, 48, a human resources manager. “I had to come back here and make peace with it all.”
As Children’s Memorial prepares to close its doors in June to be torn down, parents whose children died there are making a pilgrimage of sorts to the old hospital in Lincoln Park to see the rooms where their sons and daughters were treated and, in many cases, died. Like Havis, they are walking through the hospital to revisit a time, a place and even the people who figured so prominently, and painfully, in their lives.
These visits, it seems, are efforts by parents to keep the memories of their children alive, as if the wrecking ball that will bring down the hospital might also dislodge those memories from their proper place. The visits are meant as well to pay tribute to people who work in a place where children too often die. Havis long had felt she never properly thanked the doctors and nurses, technicians and others who cared for Bianca.
As word of the closing has spread — Children’s is moving to a new location downtown — parents have contacted the hospital and asked to visit. Hospital officials have reached out to parents as well; in February, letters went out to some 2,000 parents who had a child die at the hospital since 1998, which prompted additional parents to consider coming back. For some of them, the closing is a new loss, the severing of a connection, and it is stoking anxiety.
“Here at the hospital, we can understand the need to be attached to the place where a child died. And we honor that,” said Kristin James, coordinator of the hospital’s Heartlight bereavement program,. “This becomes a part of their history. It’s like it’s frozen in their memories.”
In some instances, the deaths are relatively fresh, and they sting. Others occurred decades ago; they still sting. One woman — whose parents had a son die at Children’s Memorial before she was born — told James that she hopes to find a connection to the brother she always wanted but never had. A woman whose 9-year-old big sister died in 1932 wants to pay homage to the playmate she has missed and mourned for nearly her entire life.
It is as if the emotional pain of the long-ago loss of a child or a sibling is becoming newly palpable in the bricks and mortar of the hospital building that has stood for decades, and that threatens to disappear when the hospital is demolished.
“I think every parent has a little different journey, a little different timeline,” said James.
Olav Bradley’s son Scott died of leukemia at age 16, in 1986, more than a quarter-century ago. So a few weeks ago, Bradley returned to Children’s Memorial and went up to the ninth floor, where Scott, a high school wrestler, was often treated. Bradley walked the halls and peeked around corners; afterward, he went for dinner at John Barleycorn, the restaurant where he would eat over the 51/2 months Scott was sick.
“It was kind of strange,” said Bradley, 72 and living in Medinah. “It was almost like coming home. It’s kind of a bittersweet memory.”
The only home Michael Chicalace ever knew, the only bed he ever slept in, was on the eighth floor of Children’s Memorial, in a room in the neonatal intensive care unit. There, flanked by banks of medical equipment, Michael lived for 20 days in October and November 2001.
After Michael died, still in that room that had suddenly gone quiet, his parents held him close. It was the first time, the only time, they did.
In the months afterward, Stacey and Anthony Chicalace sometimes would drive to Children’s Memorial from their Des Plaines home and sit in the lobby, hoping to somehow feel close to Michael. All Stacey Chicalace would have to say is, “Let’s go downtown,” and Anthony would know.
They came back earlier this month with photo books in a tote bag that Anthony Chicalace slung over his wide shoulders and memories that, although they were from more than a decade ago, seemed as clear as if they had occurred yesterday. In the cafeteria, they pointed to the table where they often sat, and Stacey Chicalace recalled that other parents never approached her when she was crying; parents knew to give one another space, she said.
They joked that they had called Michael “Popeye” because he usually had only one eye open. They remembered, too, that sometimes they called Michael a rainbow because his skin would turn from ash gray to a healthy-looking pink, then back to ash gray as his condition changed.
Stacey Chicalace laughed when she found the parents room in the Brown Family Life Center, a respite area for kids and parents on the fifth floor. Then, running her finger along the door, her voice broke as she recalled that, while she sometimes went in there to take a breather, she also sometimes closed the door and asked why her son had been born without a fully formed diaphragm and a hole in his heart. Those issues essentially doomed him.
Finally, they went to see the neonatal intensive care unit and one of the nurses who had cared for Michael, Molly Schau. Schau had so inspired Stacey Chicalace that she gave up her career as a figure-skating instructor to become a nurse: at first a neonatal intensive care nurse like Schau, then — when she found she was not ready for a job that touched so close to Michael’s death — a nurse in labor and delivery.
At the nurses station, they embraced. They talked about their kids, then about what Schau called the time “when we knew each other.”
“We had 20 days of up and down,” Stacey Chicalace said.
They quietly entered the room where Michael had been treated. They talked of those 20 days, of the doctors and nurses whose bedside manner helped them through the most difficult time of their lives, and of one surgical fellow with a particularly haughty manner. They laughed. Then, as in almost any other reunion, they put their arms around each other and took photos, Schau in the middle, an easy smile spreading across a face framed by blond hair. As they did, the infant in the space where Michael had been softly cried.
Schau said parents come back to the hospital after their children have died because in that intense time they form tight bonds with the staff. Schau sent the Chicalaces Christmas cards, and when she was at Lutheran General Hospital, where Stacey now works, she looked for her. When she drove near the Allstate Arena, where Anthony works as Skates, the on-the-ice mascot of the Chicago Wolves minor-league hockey team, she thought of them too.
“You lose your child, but there are so many other things that happen here,” said Schau. “That’s why people keep coming back here.”
Before Karen Havis had Bianca, she knew she would be born hydrocephalic, meaning that she had an excessive accumulation of fluid on the brain. She had experimental surgery in utero and, Havis said, it appeared it was successful. But it was not, and the next 20 years were filled with one illness after another, weeks and sometimes months at Children’s Memorial that, in many ways, came to inform Havis’ life. Her husband proposed to her at Children’s, and she accepted on the condition that they live close by.
They now live in Logan Square. Havis said close to a quarter of Bianca’s life — roughly five years — was spent at Children’s Memorial.
At 20, Bianca had the mental capacity of about a 7-year-old. And, with her various illnesses, it was a challenge to care for her. Like the Chicalaces and others, Havis said the nurses at Children’s helped keep her afloat, especially when things with Bianca became difficult.
“You really get to know the nurses,” said Havis. “But they don’t lie to you. They say it’s going to be hard. But they’re always there for you.”
When she thought about coming back, Havis was anxious about whether the nurses would remember her. She wanted them to, as if it would somehow add weight to the story of Bianca’s life, just as coming back was a chance to remind herself that Bianca had lived and died and left a mark.
“I have to see these places again. I have to see these rooms again,” she said. “Because it really did happen.”
As Havis walked through the hospital, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes glistening, she did not touch the beds or the walls or any of the equipment. Although she embraced most of the nurses she saw, she did not want to “take anything bad” with her when she left, she said. When finally she did leave, walking out of the hospital into the bright spring afternoon and letting out a deep breath, she wondered why she had waited so long to come back.
Afterward, Havis and her sister, Shirley Sosa, and a good friend, Heidi Silva, both of whom accompanied her on the visit, returned to Havis’ home, where they drank a glass of wine and talked over the visit. They remembered Bianca, and they chatted about the nurses and the unstinting kindness they showed them. Later, Havis could not get to sleep, the nearly two hours walking through the hospital playing in her mind.
When Havis awoke the next morning, the uncertainty she had felt about returning to Children’s was gone.
“I really, really, really needed to do that,” she said.
