An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

by Elizabeth McCracken

going mad from grief, the worst of it was that sometimes I believed I was making it all up. Here was some proof that I wasn’t.

It sometimes still feels like a bad dream.

Of course you’re a mother, just one who’s learned a hard lesson.

Once you’ve been on the losing side of great odds, you never find statistics comforting again.

When I found out my son had a serious disease while I was 24 weeks pregnant with him, I was reading an Emily Oster book called Expecting Better that used statistics to make pregnant women feel better about doing things that we have been warned against. I immediately stopped reading it as I realized that statistics meant nothing anymore. Statistically, my son should have been normal. Statistically, the likelihood of him being affected by his disease was 1 in 50,000. Yet, he had it and it took him away from me. I am now a statistic. One in four.

This does not have to be a secret.

I will share my story if it means that people who will have to go through it in the future know that they aren’t alone. I felt like the only person who has had to go through this because no one talks about loss. It would have helped to know there were others around me.

I can pretend that I knew Pudding. No, I did know him, not with my brain but with my body, and yet I know nothing about him, not even the simplest thing: I have no idea of what he’d want.

I knew my baby. I knew he would dance around in my belly when I ate potatoes and drank lemonade. He would wriggle around to certain songs so we made a playlist for him. I could have made a killing had I bought into some Burger King stock with the amount of times we ate there because it was a killer craving of mine. But that’s all I knew of him. I will never know who he would have been. Or what he would have wanted. Or dreamed of.

There’s a peculiar kind of loneliness, sleeping in a room near but not next to the person whose body you most require. He felt too far away.

I craved intimacy so much right after our baby died. If I could have crawled inside of my husband, I would have. I needed to be near him as much as possible. Our stay in the hospital was hard enough, but having him in the same room but unable to hold his hand or touch him while I tried to sleep was torture.

Since he died, I’ve never had a dream of him alive.

I’ve not dreamt of Ronan since before he was born. I wonder if my brain is protecting me from hurting. I don’t know if it would hurt or comfort me.