Last Piece of the Puzzle
“
Here’s where the story ends ...It’s that little souvenir
Of a horrible year
That makes my eyes feel sore ...”
–The Sundays
Life could finally go on. Other than developing this website, we really had nothing more to say or do about Denise Hubbard and Building Blocks Adoption Service Inc. We’d done our best and they’d done their worst. We’d learned a lot of things about them and they’d tried to trash us.
But there was one small matter remaining, of course — what, exactly, had killed Cyril?
Alysha Towell and another woman we were acquainted with who struggled with a different agency (who, like BBAS, had the tendency to send nasty letters written by their attorney) had spoken well of Irina O’Rear, a Russian attorney who now lived in Florida and had been helping many agency clients find crucial information their adoption agencies couldn’t or wouldn’t give them (as she had done for Automne).
As it turned out, she was from Perm herself originally. Her résumé said she had even sat on the court there.
We wondered if she might have the connections to get the official reports on Cyril’s death, to do what BBAS and Dennis Kaselak could not.
So we bit the bullet and called her up one day in mid-November 2001.
It took a few rounds of phone tag, but eventually we opened a dialogue with her through phone and email.
She wasn’t sure about most of the information, probably not the police reports, especially since we had never officially become Cyril’s parents and thus weren’t legally entitled to them.
But, the autopsy report? “You might be able to get that,” she said.
Irina contacted a friend of hers, a colleague still serving as a prosecutor in Perm, and a couple of weeks later she received an answer.
She told us he had gotten some of the preliminary information, but not the autopsy report itself, which was apparently missing from where it should have been filed.
He said he would try a couple of other avenues.
At first this was grist for the conspiracy-theory mill, but eventually it was found.
A day or so after the second anniversary of Cyril’s death, she sent us another email. Her friend had found it after all, filed somewhere else, and had even managed to talk to the pathologist who had done the autopsy:
My colleague was able to get the autopsy report. It consists of six hand written pages that are very difficult to read. He was able to speak to the Dr. who performed the autopsy and she even remembers the child. She said that he had many pathologi[e]s in his short life, but his death was caused primarily by a stomach infection. Since there is mostly medical terms in the report, neither one of us is qualified to render opinion or even make quotes from this document. Since the quality of the documents are so poor, there is no reason to fax this. I asked my colleague to send via mail service to you directly.
A little later she sent a forwarded email from him, in Russian, of the executive summary of the report. We were easily able to translate it, and it said what we had heard in Perm ... that he had died of a massive gastro-intestinal infection, and that we had freely adopted him (The orphanage director had worked hard to keep himself covered).
But, of course, what we were most interested in was the full version. What other problems might he have had?
The French Marxist Louis Althusser once wrote that the lonely hour of the last signifier never arrives.
In real life, that usually means it does arrive — but long after it would have any practical effect.
And for Cyril and us, that would be on one bright, warm December morning a couple of weeks later.
As so many other times, I was at work, Anguel at preschool and Daniel at home working on this site when there was a knock on the front door.
It was the mailman with something for us to sign. He was pretty excited about this envelope ... it had an obvious return-receipt type thing on it. But none of the guys at the post office could figure out what country it had come from, because they weren’t familiar with the alphabet it was written in.
Some had guessed it was Russia, and Daniel easily confirmed it. He knew exactly what it was and where it came from, and was happy to get it. He even signed for it in Russian.
Inside were about seven photocopied documents. One was printed, and easily translated, as the official certificate of the report.
The others were handwritten. We could make out some of the ornate handwriting but not all of it, so Hudson Neva’s services were required once again.
We told John Ryan immediately, but we weren’t able to send it until well after Christmas, sometime in early February.
It took about six weeks for the translations to arrive, in the form of Word files of each page.
There was a little bit more detail this time, much of it confirming our worst fears about how badly off Cyril had been. Like us, the pathologist had noted that Cyril appeared younger than he actually was.
Several organs, including his liver and kidneys, were described in her notes as “congested.” She described his lungs as “furry to touch” and observed that one area had pink and bluish-green spots. What that means, and whether it was normal or something that occurred post mortem, we don’t know, but it doesn’t sound good (The report does later note that the infection had spread to his lungs as well).
This was her final verdict (excuse the imperfect translation):
Death occurred from gastoenterologic vulgar Proteus Mirabilis with events of intestinal toxicosis in unfavorable background.
We immediately went online to look for information on P. mirabilis, Dan being particularly interested since, of course, he had been similarly infected.
The site we originally found has long since been taken down, so here’s the Wikipedia article, which has a link to this long, clinically written piece about P. Mirabilis and UTIs you may want to print out if you really want. The original site explained that it is primarily responsible for urinary tract infections. But, if it remains untreated for long enough and the immune system is unable to defeat it, it can spread to other parts of the body. In the digestive system, it presents with chronic diarrhea and nausea ... symptoms that both Cyril and Daniel can attest to.
It’s not hard to see how that orphanage environment could have led to such an infection being passed around. How many of the other children in Dom Rebyonka No. 2 had had it as well? What had their fate been?
There was nothing to confirm or deny the rumor we had heard that samples had been sent to Moscow and some of the other children had been hospitalized. This does leave it open as a possibility, however. Bacteriological cultures, the report indicates, were taken to the lab from several different organs.
Or is it possible that the pregnancy complications experienced by his birthmother had resulted in him being born sick? Although urinary tract infections are often a complication of some pregnancies, we couldn’t find much information on whether this particular kind could be passed along in utero.
One thing, though, could not be denied: the pain Cyril must have been in. He would cry as he urinated, I recalled. Now we knew why. And if this had spread to the rest of his body ... what effect could that have had?
His death must have come as a great relief.
If there is anyone reading this who has some skill in reading and interpreting autopsy results, particularly those using Russian medical terminology, please feel free to get in touch with us. There’s only so much we can understand.
***
Thus edified, we felt a sense of closure at long last.
And we felt such a relief that we couldn’t keep it to ourselves. We knew there were at least one, perhaps two, other people who would want to know this too.
So, the week we finally put this site online, Daniel put the autopsy report together in one Word file, printed out two copies and emailed them to the home addresses of Denise Hubbard and Richard J. Marco Jr., Esq., Attorney-at-Law.
“We hope,” he wrote, “that this closes a rather unpleasant chapter in our lives.”