Lille Søster Jill

Our little sister Jill was born on Christmas Eve 1957.  The first three children had been born at home in Denmark.  This first Canadian child was born in a hospital.  We three spent Christmas Eve with Kaj or Signe and their children while we waited for the best Christmas present ever.

All three of us little girls would get dressed in pink tulle dresses, Jill still in her baby buggy, and we would go for Sunday walks around Toronto.  Jeanette and I adored our little sister and would often play with her, trying to teach her to talk and walk.   One afternoon when Jill was about eleven months old, Jeanette and I were playing with Jill who was in her playpen.  Mom had given Jeanette and I some pears for a snack and she warned us not to give anything to Jill because we both had colds.  Well, I did sneak a bite to Jill.  Shortly afterwards Jill became very sick and the cold turned into pneumonia. 

My mother became so alarmed with this cold that she had the doctor come to see Jill but he said ‘nothing to worry about, just a cold’.  The very next morning Mom went to get Jill out of her crib only to find her blue, cold and dead.  Mom went into shock.  Dad went into shock.  They had no one to comfort them.  The hospital administrator was brutal.  He showed my parents what it would cost to bury Jill and my father said they couldn’t afford that.  Then the administrator said, “if you don’t do it we will throw her in the oven”.  Just like that.  My father said “then that is what you will have to do.”

Grief stricken and alone my parents became overly protective of the rest of their children.  They also never, ever spoke to us about Jill.  I have spoken with other friends who had also lost a little one and they experienced the same silence.  In those days people basically had to “suck it up” and just go on with their lives.  There was no such thing as grief counseling; a person simply had to be stoic about loss of life.

So what do I remember about Jill dying?  I remember my mother putting me to bed, tucking me in and seeing a tear rolling down her cheek.  I don’t remember understanding that Jill was dead, just that my mother was sad.  I was five years old, but by the time I was eight I do remember thinking back on that time and beginning to understand that I could have been the cause of her death because I had given her a bite of my pear.  That guilty fear stayed with me for many years until it finally faded away some time in my twenties.  My mother ever after had a very difficult time during the Christmas holidays although we never understood why.  I was almost 30 years old before my father told me that Jill had been born on Christmas Eve!  Then things started to fall back into place for me.

My parents’ first year in Canada was such a roller coaster of experiences, most of them quite terrible, that it is a real wonder that they did not turn around and go home.  But that is the fiber of immigrants who survive, they have a stubborn determination to succeed that has helped to grow a continent from a barren wilderness into a civilization.