The Dead Baby Files

Elisabeth Dahl

It was January, the iced-over heart of a mid-Atlantic winter. I was studying for my Bachelor’s in English and had been hired to help extract data relevant to a grad student’s maternal and child health research. A large-scale longitudinal study had followed children from prenatal care through their pediatric-visit years, yielding a body of information now contained in short, medium, and tall file cabinets, a skyline of metal towers colored mustard, black, and pencil-lead gray.

The job was located in a deserted warehouse. My area within that expanse had the dimensions of a living room and the ambiance of a prison cell. A folding table and chairs sat at the center of the concrete floor, a space heater beside them. Around the table were forty or fifty of those file cabinets, and beyond them, high chain-link fencing that separated this storage space from the others. My new supervisor—a seasoned administrative assistant with short, no-fuss frosted hair—pointed to a handful of file cabinets set off from the rest. “Those are the dead baby files,” she said matter-of-factly. “We’ve already finished with those.” She opened one drawer, then banged it shut, sending a metal-on-metal sound slicing through the empty space.

When it fit around my class schedule, I’d drive my grandparents’ Chevy Nova past blocks of row houses, until I reached the warehouse. I’d unlock the door, listen for footfalls, apprehensive about who might be waiting around the next chain-link corner. I’d head down the hallway, passing storage spaces where outdated mainframe computers and medical equipment sat hulking under tarps.

Sometimes I’d arrive to find my supervisor or the grad student already working in our locked enclosure. We’d make conversation, sitting around the table in our hats and coats and fingerless gloves. As the weeks passed, we made our way through the file cabinets, folder by folder. The files could be inches thick, their colorful medical forms clamped in place by a brass fastener. My coworkers would flip through them, efficiently finding the relevant information and recording it on the corresponding form. I wasn’t as disciplined. I’d get lost in how the children’s lives were playing out—the height and weight charts, the medical tests, the handwritten care providers’ notes. After all, I was studying literature, and these were stories too.

Always, though, the dead baby files lingered on the periphery. During a few visits when I found myself alone, I drifted toward the cabinets and lifted out files. As thin and slight as bird wings, they told of stillbirths, crib suffocations, and other terrible outcomes.

The weeks went on, and I found it harder and harder to drag myself to the warehouse. The work was so cold and lonely, the warehouse so inhospitable. After a couple of hours, I couldn’t wait to climb into my Chevy Nova with its rusted-out hole under the driver’s seat, turn the heater all the way up, and drive back to the off-campus house I shared with friends. When I’d go to have my timesheet signed, my supervisor would frown at me. They were trying to get this study done, and I wasn’t pulling my weight.

Eventually, I switched to a new work-study post: editorial assistant at the university press. The office was near campus and full of people doing jobs I could envision myself doing someday. The hours were regular, the manuscripts interesting. The workspace had centralized heating, carpeted floors, and the regular presence of coworkers. There was no chain link fencing, no folding tables. I appreciated the creature comforts. But beyond that, the work suited me. Proofreading an index, red and blue colored pencils at the ready, felt right in a way that no other work had before.

And, there were no dead baby files. The closest thing we had was the dead manuscript copy. It would pile up in the corners of production editors’ cubicles, as new versions of manuscripts—the live copy—rendered the old versions obsolete. “Dead baby files” and “dead copy” shared a word, it was true. But at the press, the term was just a metaphor. At the warehouse it was real.

Elisabeth Dahl is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and editor and has steadfastly avoided managing anyone other than herself for years.

Website: elisabethdahl.com Twitter: @ElisabethDahl