For Bombing Victim, a New Life Unfurls

Edye Smith Stowe was in the kitchen with her husband and her parents when the call came from the doctor’s office.

She was pregnant.

In seconds, the entire family was weeping, and a new chapter had begun in one of the most poignant stories to come out of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Stowe was just 23 when the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building took the lives of her two sons, Chase, 3, and Colton, 2.

Now, she has a new husband and the baby is due this winter.

“It’s such a blessing,” said Stowe, who became a magnet for the news media after the bombing for her willingness to discuss the event with a degree of composure that few other relatives of the 168 dead could muster.

She gained further attention when she and her ex-husband agreed to remarry in order to have children again--a relationship that would eventually fail.

“I thought I would never have children again. The very night of the bombing, I thought about that. My mom and I laid in the boys’ room--they had twin beds--and I thought, ‘I will never have kids again. My whole life is ruined.’

“I always thought that if something happened to my boys, I couldn’t go on living because I loved them so much. But I learned I can.”

Stowe and her new husband, Paul Stowe, learned May 7 they were to become parents in a phone call from a nurse at Pacific Fertility Centers in Beverly Hills, where the couple had undergone infertility treatment. Bombing suspect Timothy J. McVeigh’s trial was just getting underway. The moment was bittersweet, recalled Stowe’s mother, Kathy Wilburn. Edye, Chase and Colton had lived with Kathy and her husband, Glenn Wilburn.

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“Happiness hit along with a wall of sadness because it closed a final chapter on Chase and Colton,” said Kathy Wilburn. “It dawned on me that part of our life is over and it is time to start anew. Edye calls it a new branch on a tree.”

The pregnancy is “part of my recovery,” Stowe said.

Four months after the April 1995 bombing, Stowe remarried Tony Smith, the boys’ father. She had undergone a tubal ligation to prevent further pregnancies after Colton’s birth, but she and Smith announced their plans to have the procedure reversed in order to start a family anew.

Stowe underwent two surgeries on her Fallopian tubes and hoped fervently that she would become pregnant. The surgery has about a 50% chance of success if all goes well, said Dr. Geoffrey Sher, who directed Stowe’s recent treatment at Pacific Fertility Centers.

But a year later, she still had no baby and her marriage was floundering. Stowe and Smith decided to divorce a second time last fall.

“The only reason we got married was to try to have children again,” Stowe said. “We thought that was a good enough reason to get married. But it wasn’t. It should have been out of love for each other.”

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Shortly after the marriage broke up, she met Paul Stowe, who works at the ABC-TV affiliate in Oklahoma City. They had met at the Oklahoma State Fair. He knew who she was. They were married on May 9 in the Wilburns’ flower-filled backyard.

Stowe had made her desire for a family clear to Paul from the start, she said.

“We started talking about undergoing in vitro fertilization several months ago. We had fallen in love, and we decided we wanted to do this. Paul knew this was an important part of my healing process. He was willing to do whatever would make me happy. And we both wanted a family so much,” Stowe said.

She was offered free infertility treatment by the Pacific Fertility Centers after a former patient and member of the clinic’s pro bono committee saw her on a talk show discussing her tubal ligation and her wish to become pregnant again. For every 10 paying clients, the clinic offers one pro bono IVF cycle to a woman who cannot afford treatment.

“I had seen her on television on the one-year anniversary of the bombing,” said Maureen Zachary, a Concord, Calif., woman whose child, conceived through IVF, is now 6.

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“She had this pathetic story of these two boys who were her life. My heart went out to her. I knew the best thing for her was IVF. But it is expensive. . . . I thought, ‘We have to do something for her.’ ”

Stowe initially declined the clinic’s offer of free treatment because she wanted to give the tubal reversal surgery a chance to work. After becoming engaged, however, she and Paul decided to pursue the option.

IVF costs approximately $10,000.

On April 20, they flew to Los Angeles and spent nine days seeing the sights and undergoing medical tests and, eventually, IVF.

“I knew we had a very, very good chance of getting her pregnant, but I cautioned her that she shouldn’t expect it to happen on one try,” Sher said.

But both Paul and Edye were confident when Sher ushered them into a room to transfer three embryos to Edye’s uterus.

“It was one of the most moving experiences I can recall,” Sher said. “She had given me a pin with a picture on it of the two little boys she had lost. I was already so nervous and emotional. I said to her, ‘Edye, we can only create the circumstances here. There is a spark that has to come from somewhere else to create the outcome. We have to remember that is where prayer comes in.’

“She turned to me and said, ‘I’m going to get pregnant, and I’m going to have twins.’

“I said, ‘How do you know that?’ And she said, ‘I have two little boys up there rooting for me.’ ”

A preliminary ultrasound test performed in Oklahoma City shows she is probably pregnant with one baby, but another test is scheduled for this week.

News of Stowe’s pregnancy has elated clinic employees and patients because they knew the depths of her suffering. Infertility patients often speak of the loss they feel, Sher said.

“They feel a loss for that which they’ve never achieved. But with Edye, she had both types of losses; she was grieving for something she didn’t have and grieving for something she had lost.”

While Stowe once wondered if she would ever again feel chubby arms around her neck and wet kisses on her cheeks, Kathy Wilburn said she knew that her daughter would someday have a family again.

“Edye is meant to be a mommy,” she said. “Our family loves children. And Edye has loved children since she was a little girl. I had tried to get her to stay in college, but she was so eager to get married and have a baby.”

In April 1995, Stowe and her mother were Internal Revenue Service employees in Oklahoma City.

Edye had missed two days of work, Monday and Tuesday, but on Wednesday, April 19, had dropped off Chase and Colton at the Murrah Building day-care center and had gone to her office a few blocks away. She had just turned 23.

“Her co-workers were having a birthday party for her. They were saying, ‘Edye, come blow out the candles on your cake.’ And as she was walking toward the cake, the bomb went off,” said Kathy Wilburn.

“It’s something I don’t think we’ll ever get over,” she said. “It’s like losing your eyesight or a leg. You just learn to move on.”

The confluence of the recent events--getting pregnant on the first IVF attempt, the wedding and the bombing trial--has left Paul, Edye, Kathy and Glenn Wilburn and all of their extended family a bit bewildered, they admit. The Wilburns had planned to attend McVeigh’s trial in Denver, but Glenn is very ill with pancreatic cancer.

Now his dream--and everyone’s--is that he will live to see his grandchild.

What has made it so hard on Glenn and her “is that Edye and the babies lived with us. [With the bombing] Glenn and I realized that that was the end of our family. The new [baby] will have a mommy and a daddy and they’ll live in their own house,” Kathy Wilburn said.

And in Edye Stowe’s daydreams, it will be a life like other lives; where tragedy is a stranger and happiness is a constant.

Already, said Stowe, she is envisioning trips to the grocery store with her baby in tow.

“It’s going to be nothing but fun,” she said.