The term “posthumous child” wasn’t familiar to many people until shortly after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Just over a hundred babies were born to pregnant mothers who lost their husbands that day. The media became fascinated by this one aspect of the larger tragedy, but I was born a posthumous child nearly thirty years earlier. While my birth was under different, but also tragic circumstances, the effects on me were very similar to what many of the 9-11 babies experienced growing up.
My mother was pregnant with me when my father, Swede Savage, headed off to compete in his second Indianapolis 500 in 1973. My older sister, Shelly, who was seven years old at the time, traveled with my mom from their home in Santa Ana, California, to live in Indy for the month of May. Shelly would go to school while my mom went to the track for daily practice and qualifying sessions.
My dad broke the track record in time trials on the same day that his friend, 46-year old journeyman driver, Art Pollard, died in a morning practice crash. The race was delayed twice by rain, finally running on a Wednesday. My dad took the lead of the race on lap 42 and would lead for twelve laps before pitting for fuel. When he returned to the track, his car was filled with 75 gallons of methanol. He never made it back around.
For reasons still unknown, his car lost control coming out of turn 4 and slammed the inside concrete wall at full speed. The car exploded into pieces, with the engine and transmission going one way and what was left of the cockpit section, with my dad strapped in it, the other way. My mom, who was five months pregnant with me, was sitting with her friends in the grandstand and witnessed the whole thing.
My father survived for thirty-three days in an Indianapolis hospital before dying of complications from his injuries. He was only 26 years old. My mom, now six months pregnant with me, and my sister, attended his funeral back in California along with nearly a thousand others. When everyone went back to their lives after the funeral, my mom was left alone at home with Shelly in the house that my dad had purchased for them just a couple years before. Back at home, the grief, loneliness, and emptiness my mom was experiencing was unimaginable.
Three months after my dad died, I was born. When my mom was wheeled down the hall of the hospital to go home with me, her husband wasn’t there to greet her like all the other new mothers. She admits that she was emotionally vacant at the time of my birth, which adversely affected the normal process of mother-child attachment.
Before his death, when my dad was off racing, my mom spent long periods of time alone at home with Shelly. In those days, when the two of them had almost nothing but each other, they formed a bond that I was never able to form with my mom. She remarried thirteen months after my father died, before I was even a year old. Her new husband, my stepfather, brought two very young boys into the marriage. So in little more than a year, my mom went from being a pregnant widow with one child to a married woman with a six-person family to look after. As a young girl, one-on-one time with my mother simply wasn’t possible the way it was with Shelly.
Shelly had a relationship with my mother that I was never able to have, which was made even stronger by the trauma bond they shared, having lived through my dad’s crash and death together. On top of that, Shelly also had personal memories of my father that I obviously didn’t – and couldn’t ever – have. As I was growing up, and even in my adult years, I would hear family members say, “Why are you so sad? You weren’t even there!” This is the most hurtful thing you can say to a posthumous child. As if not being there was my choice! Don’t you think I would love to have had the same kind of memories with my father that my older sister had?
Growing up, I was hesitant to bring up the subject of my father. I knew it was a source of sadness and I didn’t want to make my mom or Shelly sad, so I would just keep all these complicated feelings inside. I remember though, when I discovered that my stepfather wasn’t my real father. I was just a little girl. I was so confused. I started wondering if my family was fake. Were my (step) brothers fake brothers too? It was all too much for a young child to process.
When I was in my teens, my stepfather became a drug addict and abusive. This made me even more resentful toward my real father. Why did he have to abandon me so soon before I was born? Why was I forced to live with a messed up, abusive father who wasn’t even my real father? It made me resentful toward my mom too. Why did she have to choose this guy, of all people, to be my dad? A woman can have more than one husband in her lifetime, but you only get one father and mine was already gone before I even got here. And I had no say any of this! It was my predetermined fate, right out of the womb.
Shelly died from leukemia at the age of 29, so now, just my mother and I are the only ones left from our immediate family. We’re doing our best to repair our relationship. We’re both shrapnel from the explosion of my father’s car. She got thrown one way by the explosion and I got thrown another. We’ve been trying to find our way back to each other our whole lives.
These are some of the complex feelings and emotions that a posthumous child wrestles with her entire life. There’s nothing I can change except to try to better understand my parents’ decisions at the time, why they did what they did, and to work through my own personal trauma. It was my father’s dream since he was a child to win the Indianapolis 500. He was on a national TV talk show and a guest at the White House at an age when all I could was just make it through another day. He was amazing. When he died, my mom tried her best to create a stable family environment in which to raise her daughters. I can’t fault either of them for the decisions they made. I just suffered collateral damage from my father’s crash at Indy, which forever gave me the label: “posthumous child.” It’s not been easy.