"Sadly, my mom’s experience wasn’t an isolated incident," the author writes.

There are no photos of my brother Paul. No one recalls what he looked like or what type of personality he had. He wasn’t here long enough to create those kinds of memories for us. However, his short life and tragic death were indelibly seared on our mother’s heart. She tried to conceal the pain she felt from losing him, while also keeping the truth about his tragic and unnecessary death — actually, I would call it manslaughter — hidden for decades.

The story everyone had been told was that Paul inexplicably inhaled a large quantity of “birth fluids” while he was being delivered. The fluids congested his little lungs and he died less than seven hours after his arrival. This seemed like an atypical childbirth injury, but it turns out it was so much more than that.

As my parents’ youngest child, I recall visiting the local cemetery with them every Memorial Day to lay flowers on the graves of Paul and Johnny, another older brother I never met. Tragically, Johnny, who was born four years after Paul, died at age 2 due to a respiratory infection.

My only living sibling was my sister, our parents’ first born, who was 14 years older than me. She married and started her own family when I was young, leaving me to often ponder what life would be like if I’d had one or both of our brothers to grow up with. During those years, Paul’s death remained shrouded in mystery. I didn’t ask any questions about what happened and I didn’t learn any new information about him until I was in high school.

The author as a teenager

I don’t recall the specific date when my mother told me about the appalling incident from 25 years earlier, but I suspect it may have been Oct. 8, the anniversary of Paul’s birth ... and death.

I was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine when Mom abruptly stopped preparing dinner and began telling me a story that sounded like something out of a gruesome horror novel. I listened in shock as she stoically and matter-of-factly explained why her first son’s life ended hours after it began.

Mom had been 28 years old in 1952 and, because Paul was her second full-term pregnancy, she knew how the delivery should play out. When her labor began, Dad rushed her to the hospital. All four of Mom’s babies were born quickly, but Paul had the misfortune of arriving in the early afternoon, when the family doctor was seeing patients and having trouble leaving his office to deliver a baby.

In that small-town hospital, long before fathers were permitted inside the delivery room, my mother was trapped alone with a frenetic nurse who was completely unprepared for working in a maternity ward. As Mom cried out with intense labor pains, the nurse yelled, “Your........

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