Untitled Autobiography

Birth

My name is Susan.  I was born in Paterson, New Jersey on August 12, 1956 at 4:25 in the afternoon at the old Paterson General Hospital.  I was three months premature when I was born; the doctor did not give my parents much hope and told them, frankly, that my survival was a long shot.  My mother,  after twelve years of miscarriages, was adamant that I would live, telling him simply, “God would not have given me a child after twelve years to take her away from me.”


    “If she survives the night and can gain some weight, she may have a fighting chance.”  At that, the doctor walked away. 


    Obviously, I survived.  My father told me later, “It was strange, but babies all around you in the nursery, healthier than you, began to die … and you began to put on weight and, to the pediatrician's surprise, you did live.”  In those days there were no Neonatal Intensive Care Units for babies who were as sick as me;  me, born with a collapsed lung and weighing only two pounds at birth ( I had dropped to just over 1-1/2 pounds shortly after my birth).  Newborns like me were simply placed in the same Nursery Unit with the others.  It would be months before my parents were allowed to bring me home.


    Home.  Home was a large, two-story brick house on North 8th Street, on the North Side of Paterson.  It stood on the hill between Belmont Avenue and Oxford Street next to a brick one-family house (the man who built our house lived in that one with his unmarried daughter, a school teacher.  They would become very important in my life … my second family) and a one-family aluminum-sided house belonging to a woman named Agnes.  The next house over was the home of John and Marie Bruno, who's daughter, Carolyn, would become my lifelong best friend … who I would refer to as my “sister”.  Next to them stood a playground we knew as “The Commons Field”, and on the opposite side of the street was the baseball and basketball park, complete with dug-outs. 


    My grandparents, Maritza and Nazar Giragosian, were Armenian immigrants who worked in the silk mills in Downtown Paterson, and they lived in the second-floor apartment of our home.  This was my neighborhood, this was my home, and this is the story of my life.