An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

by Elizabeth McCracken

After the baby died, I told Edward over and over again that I didn’t want to forget any of it: the happiness was real, as real as the baby himself, and it would be terrible, unforgivable, to forget it. His entire life had turned out to be the forty-one weeks and one day of his gestation, and those days were happy. We couldn’t pretend that they weren’t. It would be like pretending that he himself was a bad thing, something to be regretted, and I didn’t. I would have done the whole thing over again even knowing how it would end.

I can’t love and regret him both.

I made him up literally, of course, cell by cell and gram by gram, and Edward and I made him up in conversation and dumb flights of fancy.

After a while, I thought, Well. What if this is it? What do I do next? Call Edward in England, of course, but then what? Do I go home and get drunk? Drive like hell in the direction of my nearest good friend? Throw myself into the Hudson?

It happened to me, too, because it meant so much to me to hear it. It happened to me, too, meant: It’s not your fault. And You are not a freak of nature. And This does not have to be a secret.

Babies are born needing everything. They’re a state of emergency. That’s what they’re for.

And so in my grief I understand that mourning is a kind of ventriloquism; we put words into the mouths of our bereavers, but of course it’s all entirely about us, our wants, our needs, the dead are satisfied, we are greedy, greedy, greedy, unseemly, self-obsessed.

pictured a little girl named Mabel — not necessarily our little girl named Mabel, but an ordinary everyday Mabel. You had to love a little girl named Mabel. I

I thought about Pudding all the time, every day, possibly every waking hour. (It’s possible I still do think of him every waking hour, and if I were the kind of new mother who kept track of things — diapers, feedings, naps — I could mark down thoughts of first child as well.)

This is the real Superman moment for me, as I sit at my computer, telling this story. I want to reach into the screen. I want to hit Return between I wish he would respond more and but it is not serious. I wish he would respond more — Look at that lovely white space! There’s my laptop screen in front of me. Surely I should be able to touch the space, I am a science-fiction heroine now, touch the space and pull it open. Can’t I stretch time if I just push these paragraphs apart? Above, she is saying, I wish he would respond more. In the new bright hole in the computer screen, which is to say, the universe, she then says, I think you should go to the hospital immediately.

It’s a strange business, turning those days into sentences, and then paragraphs.

the books that Edward was going to read to me, the books I would read to myself.

He searched and searched. If he stops I know there’s hope. But he doesn’t stop. I say, “Non?” He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t stop. But he says to the screen, “Non.”

Of course it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world had already happened. He was dead. Everything else was easy.

Time had bent again. Time had developed a serious kink. Our old life — the one where we planned our existence around the son we were expecting — had ended, but our new life — the one where we tried to figure out how to live without him — couldn’t start yet. We were stuck in a chronological bubble.

“I didn’t know what it was I was feeling. Then I realized it was seeing someone and knowing immediately that you love him.”

I have mostly forgiven myself, and on good days I can say, What else could I have done?

I find myself thankful for large and small things, in the way of people who’ve lost two limbs and are glad not to have lost four.

Of course it reminds us of Pudding, but when have we ever forgotten? Indeed, we want to remember him,

all she wanted was permission to remember her child with pleasure instead of grief. To remember that he was dead, but to remember him without pain: he’s dead but of course she still loves him, and that love isn’t morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn’t need to be shoved away.

It’s a happy life, but someone is missing. It’s a happy life, and someone is missing.