Личный очерк: Марселин Саломе, dTGA и наследие Бебо и Бабу

On Baby's, Bebo's and Babu's

Источник: https://scottritter.substack.com/p/on-babys-bebos-and-babus

Marceline Salome holds the finger of her father shortly after being born A ray of hope flickers in the sky

A tiny star lights up way up high

All across the land, dawns a brand new morn

This comes to pass when a Child is born

A silent wish sails the seven seas

The winds of change whisper in the trees

And the walls of doubt crumble, tossed and torn

This comes to pass when a Child is born

When a Child is Born, Fred Jay (sung by Johnny Mathis)

Marceline Salome MacDowell—all of six pounds, ten ounces—came into this world at 10 am on April 22, 2026. Marceline is the product of the union between my daughter Patricia and her husband Calvin, and the little baby girl is their first child. The birthing process went amazingly smooth—less than 20 minutes after going into labor, little Maro (the Georgian diminutive of Marceline—more on that later) emerged and took her first breaths.

There were some 15 people present when Marceline was born. After the doctors and nurses attended to the baby, a pair of strong arms lowered her tiny form onto the chest of the new mother, who got to touch the joyous package she had been carrying in her womb these past nine moths, and say a brief hello.

Then the doctors whisked little Marceline away to a waiting ambulance, where she and her father (who never left her side) were transported to Children’s National Hospital, where Marceline was admitted as a patient in the Cardiology Intensive Care Unit.

In the brief moments my daughter got to be with her little girl, Marceline’s skin color began to turn blue.

Marceline was born with what is known as as d-transposition of the great arteries, or d-TGA. In this condition, the heart’s two main arteries are switched.

Normally, blood follows this path: body → heart → lungs → heart → body.

With d-transposition, the arteries are connected to the wrong chambers of the heart. This changes the normal flow of blood. Instead of moving through the lungs to pick up oxygen and then going to the body, the blood circulates in separate loops.

As a result, the body does not get enough oxygen. Without surgery or adequate mixing of blood, babies can survive for only a short time.

This why the doctors only allowed my daughter a few brief moments of bonding with Marceline. With a d-TGA, every second counts.

Marceline is a girl’s name of French origin. The name can be traced back to Ancient Rome and the name Marcellus, meaning “dedicated to Mars.”

Mars is the God of War, and the name Marceline has become associated with the concept of “the little warrior.”

Patty and Calvin picked this name for their daughter after finding out about the d-TGA diagnosis. As the tiny baby grew in her mother’s womb, it became clear she was a fighter capable of overcoming all challenges.

A perfect little warrior.

There is no doubt little Marceline is in the fight of her life.

She is strong, and she is surrounded by love—and the most amazing medical team imaginable.

The little warrior will do just fine.

Life is about balance, and while everyone works with the little warrior to overcome the challenges life has placed before her at this early stage, there must be room for tranquility and peace.

This is why Patty and Calvin chose Salome as the middle name for their baby girl.

Derived from the Hebrew word for peace (Shalom), Salome was the name of a disciple of Jesus who, along with the two Mary’s, witnessed the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As such, the name has become a fixture in traditional Christian communities, including the Georgian Orthodox Church.

My wife, Marina, is a Georgian, and Patty and her sister, Victoria, were baptized in the Orthodox Church, and raised to appreciate and respect Georgian customs and traditions. Patty served in Georgia for more than two years as a Peace Corps volunteer, and has a deep and abiding connection to her mother’s homeland. Calvin has visited Georgia on a number of occasions, and shares Patty’s love for and interest in all things Georgian. They wanted a Georgian middle name for Marceline.

The little warrior needed peace to balance her life in the struggles ahead.

And so they named the baby Marceline Salome.

You’ve thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurled

Fear to bring children

Into the world

For threatenin’ my baby

Unborn and unnamed

You ain’t worth the blood

That runs in your veins

Masters of War, Bob Dylan

While Marceline Salome is a bright and shining light, the world she has been born into exists under a dark shadow of conflict and tragedy, where the lives of innocents are tragically sacrificed in the name of human avarice and ambition. Wars and rumors of war are an ever present reality that threatens the stability and harmony of the planet we call Earth, and all of humanity which populates it.

Marceline’s mother, Patty, and her twin sister, Vicka, were born under a similar cloud.

At the time of their birth, Marina and I were living in New York City, where I worked as a United Nations weapons inspector overseeing the disarmament of Iraq. During the months of January and February 1993, I had been working on an intelligence-driven inspection designed to find hidden Iraqi missiles. I was scheduled to be the Chief Inspector, but stepped aside so I could be present for the birth of my daughters.

The inspection was stymied by Iraqi obstructionism which led to the Iraqi’s threatening to shoot down a UN helicopter that flew too close to one of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s many palaces.

Back home, I watched as Patty and Vicka entered this world, holding my wife’s hand all the while.

The transition to parenthood comes in the flash of a moment, and there is no rule book or time outs.

Marina and I watched as our lives forever changed, without actually knowing at the time just how true that statement was.

The challenges of parenthood are manifest, and we both were unsure if we were up to the task.

We were fortunate that Marina’s mother, Lamara, had come over from Georgia to be with us and help us in those early days of child rearing. It was at this time I learned the Georgian word for Grandmother—Bebo—and came to appreciate just how important it was for us to have Bebo in our lives.

Raising one newborn is a challenge. Raising twins seemed like an impossibility. Fortunately for Marina and I, Bebo was there, the calm in the storm, drawing upon the wisdom and insights that only come from experience.

Under Bebo’s watchful eyes, our tiny Manhattan apartment became a sea of tranquility.

Outside, however, storm clouds gathered.

Ten days after our daughters were born, Marina and I took them to the pediatrician for a checkup. On the way back to our apartment, while placing car seats in a waiting cab, firetrucks swarmed past us, heading downtown. A truck bomb had exploded in the underground garage of the World Trade Center.

Terrorism had come to the shores of America.

I was given but a brief respite from my work in Iraq. By March I was back in the saddle, travelling to the four corners of the world coordinating support for the work of the UN in Iraq. I shuttled between New York, Washington, DC, London and Paris trying to pull together the pieces for a major inspection scheduled for the late summer. I travelled to Argentina to investigate potential Iraqi access to missile technology. And I led multiple teams into Iraq.

In June the United States launched a cruise missile attack on Iraq while I was in the process of deploying a team there. And in July I found myself confronting Iraqis at a missile test facility, knowing that if the Iraqis didn’t back down, more cruise missiles would be launched, most likely while I was still at the missile facility.

All of this took place while Marina was at home, raising two newborn babies. I would come home from weeks away in far off lands, only to deploy a few days later to deal with a new crisis.

Thank God for Bebo.

Without her support, I don’t know what Marina and I would have done.

But Lamara labored under the weight of her own reality. Back home in Georgia her husband, Bidzina, was caught up in a brutal civil war that had broken out in August 1992 in Abkhazia. Bidzina was a professor at the Sukhumi Institute of Subtropical Agronomy, an academic whose passions ran from raising tomatoes to hunting and fishing. When war came, the university was closed and Bidzina, at the age of 61, was drafted into the Sukhumi Battalion as a fighter. He and the other professors from his institute were assigned the task of guarding the Kelasuri bridge, which marked the southern approach to the city of Sukhumi where Bidzina and Lamara had made their home and raised their family, which included Marina and her older brother Archil.

We maintained tentative contact with Bidzina in the months following the birth of Patty and Vicka. But in late July, the Russians brokered a ceasefire between the Georgians and the Abkhazian separatists. A UN peacekeeping mission was dispatched to Sukhumi, and a good friend of ours—a former UN weapons inspector himself—who was part of the mission made contact with Bidzina, confirming that he was in good health.

In late August I began a deployment which would have me away from home for nearly a month and a half—the complex inspection I had began planning in March was now being put in motion. While I was away in Iraq, the ceasefire in Sukhumi was broken by the Abkhazian separatists, who—with the support of Russian aviation—launched a surprise attack. Within days the city of Sukhumi fell. Bidzina, who was guarding the Kelasuri bridge, manned his post until the very end, holding the bridge open for thousands of refugees who were fleeing for their lives. During this time he was bombed and shelled relentlessly. Despite these conditions, he held the bridge until he ran out of ammunition. He then disappeared into the mountains, joining thousands of others who were making their way across the Kodori Gorge, a high mountain pass located in the Caucasus Mountains covered in snow and ice, a journey which cost many of these desperate refugees their lives.

I returned from Iraq to a home full of anguish and worry. The images on television of the fall of Sukhumi were heartbreaking—dead bodies of Georgians executed by the victorious Abkhazian forces and their northern Caucasian allies filled the streets and plazas of the city Marina and her family had called home. Video of the refugees fleeing by sea or over the mountains spoke of even greater tragedy. Lamara and Marina would call back to friends and family in Georgia, desperate for some word about Bidzina.

But he had disappeared into the mountains.

For weeks we tried, in vain, to find out word about the fate of Bidzina. Marina and Lamara were worried sick, but they never once stopped caring for our twin girls.

Then one day a relative said he had heard Bidzina had made it out of the mountains, and was in the home of a relative in Zugdidi, a city on the other side of the mountains from Sukhumi. Within days we had Bidzina on the other end of the line, confirming that he was, in fact, very much alive.

I was able to make some phone calls to the State Department and the US Embassy in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, and got Bidzina fast-tracked for a visa to come join us in New York. He arrived in mid-November, and joined us in our apartment in midtown Manhattan.

Bidzina met his two granddaughters for the first time while seated on a couch in our tiny living room. He was very thin and tired. He spoke louder than normal, because his eardrums had been ruptured when his position on the Kelasuri bridge was bombed by Russian Sukhoi bombers. He was somewhat tentative in holding the girls because of the shrapnel wound in his back from an Abkhazian Katyusha rocket attack.

But with the girls in his arms, and a smile on his face, the transition from Bidzina to Babu (the Georgian word for Grandfather) was complete. The look of tranquility and peace on his face was heartwarming.

The world, however, did not stop casting its dark shadow. As 1993 drew to a close, I found myself neck-deep in a geopolitical quagmire that threatened to erupt into open warfare at anytime. The UN weapons inspection process I was involved in was in the eye of this hurricane, and more often than not the inspection teams I led were the trigger for major international crises. I worked long hours, and averaged more than 270 days a year away from home.

For seven years straight.

I was an absentee parent, not by choice, but by circumstance.

But Marina was not abandoned. She had Bebo and Babu by her side, helping nurture and raise the girls, and serving as an assistant mother and surrogate father, respectively.

The imprinting that took place during these years was unmistakable. My daughters learned to speak Georgian as their first language, and every aspect of their daily existence was imbued with Georgian cultural values and traditions.

Central to this was the role played by Lamara—Bebo. She greeted the girls in the morning, dressed them, fed them, and monitored their every movement, all the while speaking encouragingly in the Georgian language.

Our table was a Georgian table, filled with love and food, much of it grown in a family garden lovingly tended to by Bidzina (Babu), who put his experience as an agronomist to good use in his new home.

But Lamara was harboring a secret that she kept from us all. She was diabetic, and yet when she arrived in the United States, she did not want to burden us with this knowledge, being singularly focused as she was on Marina and the twins.

A few months after the girls were born, Lamara suffered a diabetic stroke. She recovered, and was able to serve the role of Bebo with all of the previous love and energy she had exhibited before the stroke. But the diabetes did not go away. Over the years, Lamara’s health declined.

Lamara passed away in her sleep of Christmas morning, 2001. She had been fully engaged in her role as Bebo the night before, helping put an excited Patty and Vicka to bed before retiring for the night with Bidzina, leaving Marina and I to play Santa Claus, hanging stockings, laying out presents, and making sure Santa ate the cookies and drank the milk the girls had set out for him.

We kept the news of Lamara’s passing from the girls as long as possible, telling them that Bebo was sick and had been taken to the hospital. We tried our best to give the girls a normal Christmas, but by the next day the twins were clamoring to go visit their beloved Bebo in the hospital.

We had no choice but to tell them the truth—Bebo had died.

We buried Lamara on a cold January day. Marina’s brother had flown in from Moscow to join Marina, Bidzina, me and the girls to lay Lamara to rest.

But we were not alone. Despite the fact that Lamara had arrived in America a stranger, her service was filled with scores of neighbors and friends who had come to know her as Bebo, the dignified, unassuming Georgian woman who treated them all with love and respect every time they stepped foot into our home.

Marina was taken aback by the tragic passing of her mother, who was only 64 at the time of her death. But Marina rallied to the challenge of continuing Bebo’s legacy, schooling the girls in the art of Georgian culture, cuisine and family values and traditions. Lamara lived on in Marina, and the role of Bebo continued unabated throughout Patty and Vicka’s childhood, and beyond.

And it will continue today.

In Marina, Marceline Salome has the most capable Bebo in the world, someone who had been tutored by the best, and who stepped in and continued the role when life dictated that she do so.

In the jungle, the mighty jungle

The lion sleeps tonight

In the jungle, the quiet jungle

The lion sleeps to night

Near the village, the peaceful village

The lion sleeps tonight

Near the village, the quiet village

The lion sleeps tonight

The Lion Sleeps Tonight, The Tokens

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great events, nor of great fish, nor of fights, nor of contests of strength, nor of his wife. Now he only dreamed of places and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them, as he loved the boy.

This passage from Earnest Hemingway’s classic novel, The Old Man and the Sea, always came to mind whenever I watched Bidzina in the years following the passing of his beloved wife.

He was 70 years old when Lamara died.

Every day since he and Lamara had arrived in America was spent caring for his wife, his daughter, and her family.

But especially his wife.

He took her on long drives, showing her the countryside surrounding the hamlet of Delmar, where we had made our home.

She accompanied him when he went fishing, and they had picnics on the banks of the many rivers and streams where Bidzina pursued his passion of fishing.

They had been inseparable.

And now he was alone.

Bidzina had been an accomplished athlete as a young man, possessing impressive gymnastic skills. When he wasn’t growing vegetables and teaching others how to do the same, he would be found in the hills and mountains surrounding Sukhumi, hunting and fishing. When the school year ended, he and his colleagues would disappear for weeks on time, camping in the wilderness, living off what they could kill, catch or gather.

These were his “lions on the beach”, memories which sustained him as the passing of time took its toll on his once vibrant, healthy body.

Bidzina’s mind was as sharp as a tack, and he kept it so by reading and writing a journal which captured his life’s experiences for posterity and the edification of future generations.

Despite the passing years, Bidzina remained active, sustaining an organic garden which could have qualified as the most productive farm land in the State of New York if measured by produce grown per square foot of cultivated land.

He continued to go fishing, and developed an extensive network of fellow anglers who shared his passion.

And he would go on daily walks around the neighborhood, greeting our neighbors and making new friends.

But his greatest role was as Babu.

The girls were the center of his life.

He doted on them, cooked for them, and helped them overcome life’s many challenges.

He was their friend, mentor and confidant.

Our home became a gathering place for the neighborhood kids and school friends who all loved the attention that Babu lavished upon them.

As the years passed, Babu slowed down, but he never stopped.

“Getting old is hard”, he told me.

He started walking with a cane.

And he reduced the size of the garden plots he oversaw every year.

But he never stopped.

Not once.

Bidzina was a daily part of our collective lives.

And he was the center of gravity in the lives of Patty and Vicka.

He took them to their soccer matches.

He attended their school plays.

He taught them the Georgian language, patiently tutoring them on a homemade chalkboard.

He taught them how to fish.

He brought them to his garden, and taught them the ins and outs of home agronomy, and how to make delicious treats from the fruits and vegetables they produced.

He helped them convince their parents to bring dogs and cats into the family, and helped care for these pets in the years that followed.

When the girls went off to college, they couldn’t wait to come home to bask in the attention their beloved Babu gave them.

They loved the smell of fresh fried potatoes in the morning, a Babu specialty.

And there was a perpetual pot of borshch simmering on the stove.

In the summer their plates overflowed with fresh Georgian salads made from the vegetables he grew in his garden.

And in the winter there was Ukha made from the fish he had caught and stored in the freezer.

Babu was their life.

Bidzina was diagnosed with lung cancer in the summer of 2017.

The doctors gave him less than six months to live.

But Babu was a fighter.

He lived a vibrant and productive life for another 18 months.

The cancer eventually won out.

But he was Babu until the very end.

On what would be his last day of life, Bidzina asked for my help in making him presentable. He was in the intensive care unit, and undergoing hospice care. He knew his time was coming.

We brought the girls in, and Babu sat up straight in his bed, and talked to them in a clear, strong voice about life, and their responsibilities going forward.

The girls listened attentively, and said their goodbyes. They fully expected to see him in the morning.

Bidzina fell asleep later that night, only to awaken just before midnight.

He had dreamed of his friends, he said, and of hunting.

He went back to sleep and, in the early morning hours of January 2, 2019, he passed peacefully, his loving daughter at his side, holding his hand.

At his service, the funeral home was filled with people who had come to love Babu over the years—the neighbors, the families of the children who were friends of my daughters growing up and had come to know him, collectively, as their “Babu”.

And his fishing buddies.

I was called upon to say some words.

I looked out on the faces of the people who had known this great man.

And then to the front row, where Marina sat with our two grieving daughters. The aura of Lamara surrounded Marina. She was Bebo personified.

But Babu was gone.

I thought of his dream the night of his death, and the dreams of Santiago, the main character of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

I closed my words by quoting from Hemingway’s book.

“Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him,” I said. “The old man was dreaming about the lions.”

I broke down as I spoke the last words.

The burden of Babu’s passing was too much to bear.

I’ll walk in the rain by your side

I’ll cling to the warmth of your tiny hand

I’ll do anything to help you understand

And I’ll love you more than anybody can

And the wind will whisper your name to me

Little birds will sing along in time

Leaves will bow down when you walk by

And morning bells will chime

For Baby (for Bobbie), John Denver

The doctors came and took little Marceline Salome at 8 am on the morning of April 27.

When the doctors arrived, baby Maro was less than five days old.

In the two days leading up to her surgery, she had made amazing progress. After she was born, she had been given paralytics to keep her from moving while the doctors performed the life-saving intervention necessary to oxygenate her blood. She was intubated and her little body had been covered with tubes, probes and sensors.

But she proved more than worthy of her name.

She was very much the “little warrior.”

She was taken off paralytics, and went on to breath of her own. One by one, the sensors were removed, and soon she looked like the perfect baby girls she was.

Her eyes opened, and she made the noises little girls make, including crying when she was hungry.

She got skin-to-skin contact with her mother, who could hold her and feed her.

When we left her side on the evening of April 26, she looked like she was ready to be taken home.

Then the doctors took her.

It took two and a half hours to prepare baby Maro for surgery. It was a delicate procedure, being performed on a delicate little girl.

The surgery began at 10.38 am.

By 11.59 am, little Marceline was on a cardiac bypass machine, allowing the doctors to begin the essential tasks associated with the performance of the main surgical procedure, known as an Arterial Switch Operation, or ASO. This involves moving the aorta to the left ventricle, and the pulmonary artery to the right ventricle. The coronary arteries are then reattached to the new aorta.

At 2.11 pm, the surgical team notified Patty and Calvin that the procedure was “progressing as planned.”

At 4.05 pm, the doctors reported that the ASO procedure was “still in progress.”

By 4.28 pm, the doctors were able to report that Marceline had “come off the cardiac bypass machine.”

And at 6.18 pm—nearly eight hours after they started—the surgical team was able to report that “the procedure is completed, everything went well.”

The doctor who headed the surgical team came to the waiting room to provide Patty and Calvin a more in-depth run down of how the procedure had gone. It was an extremely delicate operation—little Marceline was a very sick little girl. Despite the complexity of the procedure, the outcome was as good as one could hope for—no issues, and everything was where it should be, doing what it should be doing.

“Marceline did her job,” the doctor said. “It is now up to the rest of us.”

The little warrior has a long and difficult road ahead of her.

But she has been given the best start possible for her onward journey.

Millions of babies have undergone surgery to repair d-TGA heart defects, and most go on to live long and fruitful lives without any inhibitions put on them because of the surgery.

Baby Maro is well on her way to a life full of love, adventure, and opportunity.

Little Marceline Salome is the citizen of her age, born in a crossfire hurricane marked by human fragility and failure. The world needs this little girl, possessed of a fighting spirit that seeks peace, now more than ever.

But she needs time.

Time to heal.

Time to grow.

Time to learn.

Time to thrive.

I have thought long and hard about the role Bidzina played in the upbringing of my daughters.

He was the consummate Babu.

There is no way I can compare with such a man.

And yet now the mantle of Babu has fallen on my shoulders.

Like Bidzina, I have been cast in the role at a stage in my life where my body has ceased to function with maximum efficiency.

I’m a few months shy of 65, the age when I’m supposed to register for Medicare.

Society believes my time as a viable citizen has come and gone.

I am expected to go gently into that good night.

Bidzina did not choose such a path.

He raged, raged against the dying of the light.

He had a mission, and he fulfilled it up until his last breath.

I am not Bidzina.

I don’t have his skill set.

I had been an absentee father during the formative years of my daughter’s lives, trying to make the world a safer place to live while Babu, together with Bebo and Marina, tended to the day to day tasks of actually raising children and sustaining a family.

I can’t give baby Maro the Babu experience that my daughters had.

That is not who I am.

But I do have a skill set, and I will use it to the best of my ability.

I will give you, Marceline Salome, the gift of time.

I will strive to make the world a safer place for you to grow up in.

A world free of the threat of nuclear war.

A world free of the threat of world war.

A world where people strive to live together in peace and harmony.

Abe Rosenthal, the legendary editor of the New York Times, once penned these words about me:

I hope someday his twin 5-year-old girls read this job assessment of their father:

Brave in service against state terrorism, even braver in resigning to speak truths, and admirable in the faith that his countrymen will recognize awaiting dangers, if told by those who know.

These words were written in 1998. In the 28 years that have passed, I have no doubt both of my daughters have come to realize that their father fought the good fight when it came to making the world a better place for them to grow up in.

And now Patty and Calvin have made the decision to bring a new life into this world.

So my job is not yet finished.

I hear the lions roar in the distance, but it is not yet my time to dream of them.

There is work to be done.

After Marceline Salome was born, I wrote a very good friend whom circumstance and history has positioned to be viewed by some as the natural enemy of the United States.

He is not.

In fact, he is quite the opposite, a morally just man of faith who seeks to make a better world for all of humanity.

“Dear Brother,” he wrote back to me. “Congratulations! I wish the child good health, happiness and luck. I also wish that our children and grandchildren will be together in friendship and peace!”

I will spend the rest of my days striving to make his wish reality—that his children and grandchildren grow up in a world where they live in peace and harmony with little Marceline Salome.

I will do this as long as my body can bear the burden, and my brain is up to the task.

Who knows? Maybe one day the progeny of people whom my country today views as the enemy will one day come knocking on Marceline Salome’s door, wishing to call upon her.

That is a problem for Calvin and Patty to handle.

My duty is to make such a problem possible.

Don’t worry, little Maro, Babu’s got your back!

(People have been asking where I have been for the past week. As this article makes clear, I am where I must be, with my wife and by my daughter and her husband’s side as they bring Marceline Salome into this world. I thank everyone for their support during this time. And I would request that you keep little Baby Maro and her parents in your thoughts and prayers as they move forward on their journey of life together as a family.)

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