birth certificate

Through the thick safety glass the woman with the dark rimmed glasses and white hair that was cut in a short bob stared at me for a good five seconds without saying anything.  I watched her as she watched me with a look of complete incomprehension.  I briefly wondered how long this contest could go on.  Five seconds is not long but it is an eternity when you say something like this,

The woman at window three told me to come here and talk to you about getting my son's birth certificate. He died the same day he was born.  She said you don't have those records but you must because he was a live birth so he has to have a birth certificate.

After the seconds-seeming-hours of staring stopped she knitted her eyebrows together and asked me to repeat his name and birthdate as she scrawled it across a scrap of paper.  Then she proceeded to clack away at her computer until she apparently came to a dead end (ahem, no pun intended) and had to call for her supervisor.

You can't hear much behind safety glass when people make it a point not to speak into the microphone.   So I just watched their mimed conversation from the other side of the counter wondering to myself why this was such a difficult request for them to fulfill.  Surely in a city as large as Los Angeles babies die right after they are born not infrequently and I can't be the only one who has wanted the birth certificate of her dead baby.

I saw one of them shrug and shake her head and then she asked me to have a seat.  They would call me back in a few minutes.

It was at this point that I started to chew on my bottom lip to keep the tears that were hanging around in the corner of my eyes from spilling out onto my cheeks.  I had not been looking forward to this errand, which had been nearly two years in the making, but I did not expect that it would be such an ordeal.  Waiting in line for an hour, explaining to not one but two separate people exactly how long George lived (as if it mattered- one minute or one hour or one day...he was born alive and should have a damn birth certificate), and then initially being told that I'd have to request those records from the state directly.

The woman behind the counter beckoned me with her cotton candy colored nails.

"This all we have," she said, and swung the computer screen so that I could see it.  The word "DECEASED" printed in block letters was all I could see through the semi-clouded with age safety glass.

That's fine.  Give me that.

Two minutes later I was sitting in my car staring at George's birth certificate.  Male, Singleton, Date of Birth 03/31/2010, Time of Birth 1559, Mother's Name Brianna, Father's Name Leif (spelled Leith, WTF?), Date of Death 03/31/2010.  In the box where either Leif or I should have signed the form there was the signature of someone I did not recognize.

No George Ellsworth.  It was blank where his name should have been.

And, of course, things started to make sense, as I sat in my car sobbing.  We were never asked to fill out his birth certificate at the hospital.  Was it a kindness, they thought?  Instead some stranger filled it out as best they could for us.  They never asked his name and that is what makes me the saddest.  To whoever it was who filled out that form for us he was an anonymous dead baby.

They should have asked us if we wanted to fill it out ourselves.  We would have said yes.