Alexander has awakened from a nap, and is exercising his next favorite word after "cookie."
"Do you want your elephant?" Thomas' voice is steady, bemused.
"No!"
Do you want something to eat? No! Thomas buckles his son's squirming body into the highchair and smoothly starts the lunch ritual.
"How about this? Look at this!" The kitchen fills with the warm smell of buttered toast.
No! No! No! But Alexander reaches for it, and begins to eat despite himself.
Thomas laughs. Lunchtime is for chatter. In the mornings, he and Alexander "hang out like the boys."
Thomas reserves his patience for his son.
In the rest of his life, he is less patient. He wants to see changes. He wants more education for fathers, so they can better recognize mothers suffering from postpartum depression. He wants caregivers to be more alert to those most at risk. He wants insurance companies to better cover care for it.
In his grief, he has found a mission. "It's like searching your soul. You go to the deepest place to find out who you are. What is my purpose?"
He spends much of his energy trying to educate all those involved in the care of pregnant women and new mothers about the risk of depression.
Last June, he went to Santa Barbara, Calif., to the Postpartum Support International meeting. The people who devised the screening test his wife took were there. They said if a woman scored 120 to 130 on the test, caregivers should take "extreme measures" to intervene. Carol's score was 151.
The focus of the session was on training people how to give the test. Thomas, filled with emotion, found himself suddenly on his feet.
"What's important is not to give the test, but to pay attention to it," he told them. "You expect a woman to put a lifetime on a piece of paper, yet if you're not going to pay attention. ..."
Carol could have been immediately hospitalized or sedated in the caregiver's office so she could rest, then be observed. She shouldn't have been left alone. Even for a minute.
He talks to anyone who will listen. "Maybe they will learn something from me," he said.
Carol Smith
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Carol Smith is the senior profile writer for the the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and specializes in medicine and science reporting. She's worked at the newspaper for 13 years, with a five-year break from 1992-97. During that hiatus, she worked as a free-lance business columnist for the Los Angeles Times and also continued a business column for the P-I.
Renee Byer
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Renee C. Byer is an award winning photographer who started her photojournalism career at the Peoria Journal Star. (Illinois). Other photo positions include stints at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (WA) Statesman Journal in Salem (OR), The Oregonian in Portland (OR), Syracuse newspapers in Syracuse (NY), The Hartford Currant (CT), The Transcript-Telegram in Holyoke (MA). She currently is on the photo staff of the Sacramento Bee, (CA).
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