Through the Eyes of his Father.

by Shawn Gallagher
Baby Brian’s Father

Having children is one of the principal reasons for the existence of human beings. If we don’t have children, we cease to exist as a species. You would think such a fundamental element of existence would mean we know what to do, what to expect, and how to cope with the elements of childbirth. Yet every man and woman, every couple, learns as it occurs to them.

Mary Pat and I were having our first child. We took Lamaze lessons, read books on having a child, and prepared ourselves as best we could. It was an average, relatively easy first pregnancy. There were no medical concerns and no “out of the ordinary” pregnancy issues.

We had been married for five years, and this was our first child. We planned as best we could and were extremely excited to be parents. This was my parents’ first grandchild, and Mary Pat’s parents’ third grandchild. We looked forward to telling them they were grandparents.

When Mary Pat’s water broke, we had just returned from eating at a nearby restaurant. I drove us to Ireland Army Hospital, which was just a few minutes’ drive from our quarters. We met our midwife at the hospital and settled in for the delivery process. I recall it was arduous and long. Mary Pat labored through the night and was working hard at delivering our baby. The medical team was very professional and helpful. But somewhere around the middle of the night, it was clear things were not progressing as well as they would have liked. I recall they felt the fetal monitor on Mary Pat’s stomach was not reading well, and they asked to attach an internal monitor to the baby’s head. That was probably my first concern that things were a bit unusual.

I recall our midwife being fairly concerned with how hard Mary Pat was laboring and her reaching out to the doctor responsible for overseeing our baby’s birth. As I understood it, the doctor listened to her concerns but felt there was nothing concerning enough to bring him in immediately in the middle of the night. I was told he was being updated as things progressed. I know progress was slow enough and the baby’s recovery from contractions was concerning enough that a C-section was being discussed. However, early in the morning things suddenly progressed, and Mary Pat delivered our son with me present in the labor and delivery room.

Immediately upon delivery, it was obvious something was wrong. The baby did not cry, and the medical staff rushed him out of the room without giving us an opportunity to hold him. There were no congratulatory wishes, and it was obvious to both of us that our son was in distress.

We supported each other and asked about our son’s condition. Eventually, we were told they were unable to get him to breathe on his own, and he had died. We had decided prior to our son’s birth to name him Brian Thomas Gallagher—Brian in honor of my brother, who died in 1977 in a car accident. We asked for a priest to baptize our child and were told that was arranged. Neither of us recalls talking to the priest, but hospital notes indicate a chaplain was notified and we always thought Brian had been baptized.

I had lost a brother, grandparents, and other older relatives, but I was stunned by the depth of loss that I felt over the loss of our son. Here was a baby that I had no chance to know, that I didn’t know as a person, and my grief was overwhelming. I was angry with God for taking our son. Nothing made sense. I kept myself together for Mary Pat, but we cried together and tried to console each other. Given a little time, I came to realize that we knew Brian for nine months as he grew in Mary Pat. He was our hope for the future, our dream of a child and a son. To lose him at birth was to have all those hopes and dreams end in death—a death which was wholly unexpected and, by all accounts, should never have occurred in 1982 in a modern U.S. hospital. We were told by the doctor who delivered Brian that we brought a healthy, normal baby boy to the hospital, and that they had failed to deliver him alive.

I remember driving to our quarters after I left Mary Pat at the hospital and screaming in the car, asking God why he had taken our son. I recall making the call to my parents and telling them our son, named after their son, had died in childbirth. My mother’s sorrow over the loss of our son, and her concern over our grief, was comforting but also distressing, as I was sure our tribute to my brother, naming the baby after him, must have reopened their grief over losing their son. Years later, when she was told she had suffered a heart attack at some point in her life, she told me she was sure it was when I told her we had lost our Brian, as she felt her heart break over our grief and his loss.

We were quickly confronted with decisions to make on arranging for our son’s burial. We authorized an autopsy to see if there was any reason for his death that we and the doctors could not see. The autopsy found no explanation for his death. We arranged for a local funeral home near Fort Knox to prepare the body for burial and arranged for a baby’s combination casket and vault. We discussed where we should bury him and concluded Fort Knox held no connection to our families, so we decided to bury him in my hometown of Highmore, SD, next to his uncle Brian, for whom he was named.

We held a Catholic funeral Mass at Fort Knox. Mary Pat’s parents and sister drove from Nebraska to help Mary Pat with recovery from childbirth and the loss of Brian. They, along with many of our friends and co-workers at Fort Knox, attended the Mass. Afterwards, we had the casket flown to Pierre, SD, where some of our family members collected it and transported it to the Luze Funeral Home in Highmore, SD, where a memorial was held. Some of Mary Pat’s family and my family attended the memorial. During the memorial, my mother took pictures of the body and the casket, knowing there would come a day we would probably want to see our son again.

After finishing a career in the U.S. Army and another working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, I retired in 2017. Mary Pat also retired in 2017 from some 30 years as a teacher, usually teaching special needs children. In discussing plans for our eventual deaths and burial, we concluded we wanted to be buried in the Black Hills National Cemetery, near Sturgis, SD. The next year, I asked Mary Pat if she wanted Brian’s body interred with us in the Black Hills National Cemetery, as I was aware minor children of veterans could be interred in national cemeteries. She quickly responded yes, and we began the process of arranging for his reinterment at Black Hills National Cemetery. Part of that was arranging for Brian’s body to be pulled out of his gravesite in Highmore. We contacted the Luce, Luze & Reck Funeral Home in Highmore, and the staff there helped us work through the process.

We were advised that removing a small child’s casket from a gravesite is not a sure thing, as a gravesite is roughly 4’ x 8’, and where a child’s casket ends up in that space is often not recorded and there is no standard placement for such caskets. We were advised that if the casket was damaged in disinterment, we would need to purchase a new casket, as the national cemetery requires intact caskets for burial. I acknowledged we understood, but it caused me to ask if the casket was broken open and they had to remove the body, could we possibly view the body? I told the funeral director we would ask their advice on whether we should view the body, and we agreed that if the casket was broken, we would revisit the conversation.

Some time later, we received a call from the funeral director telling us the casket and body had been recovered, and that the backhoe excavating the grave had pierced the casket with a shovel tine. This led me to ask if she felt viewing the body was advisable. My recollection is that she said she was amazed at the condition of the body and had no hesitation in advising us that we could view the remains. She said the breaking of the coffin introduced some dirt onto the blanket and clothing Brian was in, and that she would attempt to remove the clothes and launder them before placing him in the new coffin. We arranged with the National Cemetery for a service and interment to occur on November 8, 2019.

Mary Pat and I drove from Yorktown, VA over several days. Then on November 7, 2019, my sister, Alison, from Spearfish, SD, picked up our daughter, Kathleen, and our son Thomas from the airport in Rapid City and then drove to meet us in Pierre, SD where the five of us spent the night together. The next morning, the five of us drove to Highmore and went to Luze’s Funeral Home. The casket was arranged in the viewing area of the funeral home. Mary Pat and I went up to view Brian alone, and we both were amazed at how he looked. He looked like a sleeping infant, not a body that had been in a grave for 37 years and five months. I took pictures because we both knew people would not believe how perfect he looked. It was a sad time for us, as engaging in the moving of the body brought back the loss we suffered in 1982; but it was also an uplifting and mysterious time for us. Here was some sort of mystery, maybe even a miracle, in that we could touch our son, hold him, and see once again how perfect and beautiful a child he had been.

Katie, Thomas, and Alison all came up and saw him and were amazed at the condition of his body. In the pictures I took, you can see the autopsy incisions and stitching, and there is little or no corruption near them. The only thing that might be evidence of decay was a darkening of the fingernail beds, an almost bluish tint, which I am told isn’t uncommon even in live infants. We have been asked if there was any smell, and we all agree there was no smell of decay or any odor whatsoever. We had somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour with Brian before we had the casket closed and placed it in the rear seat of our truck for the drive from Highmore to Black Hills National Cemetery.

We arrived at the cemetery a little bit before our scheduled interment service. We had family members from both our families in attendance. Father Mike Mulloy officiated at the reinterment, and when we showed him a photo of Brian, he asked if it was from the original interment in 1982. When we explained it was a picture of Brian’s body as we saw it that morning, he was amazed.

We have been uncertain how to proceed with Brian’s story. We have shared it on occasion, and usually the pictures and story bring astonishment and peace to those who hear it—particularly when we share the story with parents who have lost a child. We have shown the photos to several funeral home professionals, and universally they have been astonished at the lack of decay. The astonishment only increases when they are told Brian’s body was autopsied.

Recently, Mary Pat attended a women’s group meeting at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Spearfish. The speaker talked about dealing with the loss of her child who had died. Mary Pat was hesitant but felt compelled to share Brian’s story with the speaker. We are convinced the Spirit did compel Mary Pat to speak to Bri—not just to offer her hope and consolation, but to nudge us forcefully to more widely share the mystery of Brian’s incorrupt body with a greater audience.

As a cradle Catholic raised in a secular society, and with a natural inclination for the scientific method and hard evidence, I can struggle with faith. However, I always come back to Jesus’s disciples after His crucifixion. They did not melt away and abandon Jesus’s message. The Resurrection and Jesus’s repeated interactions with the disciples and apostles after His crucifixion are the only things that I can conceive of that would impel them to spread the message of Jesus in a world that would kill them to stop that message. Given that, I can only look at Brian’s incorrupt body as a very specific piece of evidence that God has given us to see—so that I and others can more fully believe in Him and in a heaven where we will be united with God and reunited with our loved ones.