An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

by Elizabeth McCracken

As for me, I believe that if there’s a God — and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible — then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.

“Une femme religieuse,” the midwife clarified. A religious woman. Ah. Here’s what she said: Voulez-vous parler à une nonne? Which means, Would you like to speak to a nun? More nuns: of course in Catholic France, it was assumed that we were Catholic. But Edward heard: Voulez-vous parler à un nain? Which means, Would you like to speak to a dwarf?

You see, I’d thought he was a sure thing.

Where are they when we need them, the Dwarfs of Grief, we sometimes said to each other, when things were really bad.

I want it, too, the impossible lighter-side book. I will always be a woman whose first child died, and I won’t give up either that grievance or the bad jokes of everyday life. I will hold on to both forever. I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but that death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, but the death will never disappear from view.

the lighter side is not that your child has died — no lighter side to that — but that the child lived and died in this human realm, with its breathtaking sadness and dumb punch lines and hungry seagulls. That was the good news.

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

This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.

For three years we’d split our time between Iowa, where we taught and earned money, and Europe, where we wrote and spent it: Paris twice, Ireland, Berlin, Denmark. People told me, “I’d love to have your life,” and I would always say, “But then you’d have to accept my standard of living.” We didn’t own a house, a car, not even a sofa. We spent our money on souvenir busts and cheap red wine.

I am that thing worse than a cautionary tale: I am a horror story, an example of something terrible going wrong when you least expect it, and for no good reason, a story to be kept from pregnant women, a story so grim and lessonless it’s better not to think about at all.

grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving,

I don’t believe in omens. Still, it’s nice to see Nature try her best