An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

by Elizabeth McCracken

Your friends may say, Time heals all wounds. No, it doesn’t, but eventually you’ll feel better. You’ll be yourself again. Your child will still be dead. The frivolous parts of your personality, stubborner than you’d imagined, will grow up through the cracks in your soul.

A stillborn child is really only ever his death. He didn’t live: that’s how he’s defined.

I can’t remember, the information’s gone like a pulled tooth, though my brain will keep poking at the empty spot.

When your child dies you cannot talk about how much you loved being pregnant.

You will lose nine months of your history along with all the other things you’ve lost.

was thirty-five and had never had a really serious romance. This mostly didn’t bother me. I liked living alone. I even liked going to movies alone and eating in restaurants alone. I would never have called myself single. The word suggests a certain willingness to flirt in bars or take out advertisements for oneself on the Internet: single people are social in the hope that they won’t be single forever. I was a spinster, a woman no one imagined marrying. That suited me. I would be the weird aunt, the oddball friend who bought the great presents and occasionally drank too much and fell asleep on the sofa. Actually, I already was that person.

Yes: I would want children if I met someone with whom I could imagine raising eccentric, friendly, hilarious children who we could bundle off to Europe and museums and circuses no matter how old or young they were. At thirty-five it seemed unlikely I’d meet such a person. That was OK. If life never brought me a husband or children, I wouldn’t miss them. I’d devote myself to good works or bad habits.

I couldn’t imagine naming a baby ahead of time, calling a baby by his earth name before he was a citizen of this world. Naming seemed a kind of passport stamp.

Partnered women with their confusing plurals turned my stomach. Who cared whether you and your beloved liked a particular restaurant in unison? Who believed that it was even possible? The love letters I intended to write would be first person and second person: I, you, never we.

We went through everything together, and writing we feels presumptuous, because he can speak for himself, and writing I feels presumptuous, because the calamity happened to both of us, was just as awful for both of us.

I didn’t know what to expect of birth, but I wanted it to seem like a collaboration.

I am not crazy, but I am being careful: I am not crazy, but if I’m not careful I will take a wrong step and end up in the forest.

Her eyes were khaki green that night. “Well, sometimes you sort of get an image, and you tell them, ‘I see an old coat and a rainbow and an empty bottle.’ It’s amazing how often that’s really meaningful to someone.” I couldn’t tell whether amazing meant she was amazed at her psychic abilities or the nature of coincidence or the ability of a desperate mind to find meaning in a random assortment of visuals.

Maud could not give up drinking, and so convinced herself it was not so bad; I could not give up my fondness for Maud, and so I tried to think of her drinking as a mildly entertaining eccentricity.

Somehow every one of these things happened at exactly the right time for me. This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response.

What amazed me about all the notes I got — mostly through e-mail, because who knew how to find me? — was how people did know what to say, how words didn’t fail. Even the words words fail comforted me. Before Pudding died, I’d thought condolence notes were simply small bits of old-fashioned etiquette, important but universally acknowledged as inadequate gestures. Now they felt like oxygen, and only now do I fully understand why: to know that other people were sad made Pudding more real.

For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We’d been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.

I can’t wrap my brain around losing a child and learning only then whether you’d lost a son or a daughter. Not finding out felt like an odd form of optimism.

Grief is a waterfall, and just like that I’m over it, no barrel needed, I’m barrel-shaped.

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