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Prince poses for photographers with his wife Mayte

Source: SINEAD LYNCH / Getty

Prince and his ex-wife Mayte Garcia had a passionate marriage, until the tragic death of their infant tore them apart, Garcia explains.

She tells the whole sad story of love and death in her new memoir, The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince, excerpted in People magazine.

She was thrilled to discover she was pregnant at 22. They planned to raise the baby in Paisley Park. Prince and Garcia named their baby Amiir (Arabic for “prince”) while he was still in the womb.

All was well until she started bleeding one day and the doctor recommended an amniocentesis to test for abnormalities.

The doctor said: “Sometimes the body is trying to release the fetus for a reason.” But Prince, Garcia writes, was against it: “My husband said, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’”

Prince prayed for the child, she writes, but doctors continued to warn of problems, including dwarfism. Garcia writes: “My husband and I looked at each other and shrugged. ‘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.”

He was born on October 16, 1996, “and then they held the baby up to those harsh lights,” she writes. “The elation on my husband’s face turned to pure terror.” They discovered he had Pfeiffer syndrome type 2, a rare genetic disorder.

“Pfeiffer syndrome type 2 is a genetic disorder that causes skeletal and systematic abnormalities,” she writes.

“The premature fusing of the bones in the skull, sometimes resulting in ‘cloverleaf skull,’ in which the eyes are outside the sockets. The fusion of bones in the hands and feet causing a webbed or pawlike appearance … I learned all of this later.”

In the days that followed, Amiir underwent multiple surgeries. He lived for six days.

In an interview, Garcia, 43, tells People: “I don’t think he ever got over it. I don’t know how anybody can get over it. I know I haven’t.”

Prince died from an accidental overdose last April and Garcia tells People that she pushed to release this book because “I knew there was going to be a lot of stuff coming out about him, negative and positive. I wanted mine to come from love.”

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