Mayte Garcia Opens Up About Child She Lost With Prince

Music legend Prince was full of joy in the delivery room as his first wife, Mayte Garcia, gave birth to their only child.

But when the infant boy, Amiir Gregory Nelson, was held up by the nurses, “The elation on my husband’s face turned to pure terror,” Garcia recalled in her new memoir.

“Why is he not crying?” Prince said, as the nurses struggled to save the baby’s life.

“The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince” describes in heartbreaking detail the moment in 1996 when the pair first learned that their baby was horribly deformed by a rare genetic defect, one that would kill him after only six days.

Prince and Garcia, his backup dancer and muse, had been married less than a year, and though she’d never even seen him take an aspirin, he was often “sick” or suffering from “migraines” — episodes she now realizes were linked to his substance-abuse issues.

Still, they had both been over the moon about her pregnancy.

The genre-defying musician had even built a swing set in their yard in Paisley Park, in anticipation of the baby.

Then the harsh delivery-room lights revealed their misfortune.

Amiir — Arabic for “prince” — had been born with Pfeiffer syndrome type 2.

His head was terribly misshapen. His hands and feet appeared webbed. And his eyes, formed outside their sockets, appeared lidless and alarmed, Garcia said.

The baby, and eventually their marriage, were doomed.

After the couple’s divorce in 2000, Garcia was told that Prince had every reminder of her and their baby burned.

“They brought the baby over to us,” Garcia writes in her new book, excerpted in People magazine.

“He was curled on his side, gasping shallow little gulps of air,” she writes.

“Because there were no lids to blink, his eyes looked startled and dry. I caught hold of his tiny hand, saying over and over, ‘Mama loves you, Mama’s here.’”

She writes, “After six days he was struggling to breathe. And I said to the doctor, ‘He’s not leaving here, is he?’”

He died that day.

Garcia has previously spoken of Amiir’s death, describing the insurmountable grief that, along with a subsequent miscarriage a year later, tore their marriage apart.

But her book reveals new details of the doctors’ warnings during her pregnancy, their first glimpse of the doomed baby and his brief and tortured time alive.

Garcia had started dancing and singing for Prince at age 16, and was just 22 years old — and married to Prince for mere months — when her doctors warned that her bleeding during pregnancy, and the grim images from her ultrasounds, portended something was wrong.

“Sometimes the body is trying to release the fetus for a reason,” the doctors counseled.

At one appointment, a doctor warned the baby might have dwarfism.

“My husband and I looked at each other and shrugged,” Garcia, now 43, writes in her memoir.

“‘And?’ he said. ‘I’m totally fine with that.’ I laughed. Of all the possible outcomes that had been offered to us, this was the first one that didn’t terrify me.”

An amnio test might determine what was wrong. But Prince, who would convert to being a Jehovah’s Witness five years later, shunned the test, which carried a risk of miscarriage.

Instead, the still-elated expectant father prayed.

“Please, bless this child,” Prince pleaded on his knees, Garcia recalls. “We know you won’t allow this child to be harmed.”

Garcia writes, “We did this every day from that hour forward.”

Afterward, “our son’s ashes were brought to the house in an urn,” she writes. “I don’t know how long I lay in bed with Amiir’s ashes.

“The next day — or maybe it was a week later or in another lifetime — my husband came to me and said, ‘I can’t be here. I have to go.’ Days passed in darkness.”

Prince may have never recovered from the shock and grief, Garcia told People.

“I don’t think he ever got over it,” Garcia said of Prince, who died of an accidental overdose of fentantyl last April.

“I don’t know how anybody can get over it. I know I haven’t.”

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