An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Loren heard the author of the book, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, on the radio and ordered the book as a surprise for me. It is written by a woman whose first child was stillborn. I read it in two days. It was excellent, although not written from a Christian perspective. While pregnant, they jokingly named the baby Pudding, waiting to decide on a name until his birth. When he died, they thought it would seem odd to choose a name in death, so his death certificate actually has his name as "Pudding." Here's a few of my favorite excerpts from it:

"Every day as I love this baby in my lap, I think of my other baby. Poor older brother, poor missing one. I see the infant before me, the glory of the soles of the feet, the lips fattened and glossy with nursing, the nose whose future Edward and I try to predict daily. The love for the first magnifies the love for the second, and vice versa. Now what I think that woman in Florida meant is: lighter things will happen to you, birds will steal your husband's sandwich on the beach, and your child will still be dead, and your husband's shock will still be funny, and you will spend your life trying to resolve this."

"That is one of the strangest side effects of the whole story. 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 of it at all."

"Pregnant with Pudding, I wanted things simple, easy, low intervention. For my second child I would have agreed to anything, a simultaneous caesarean/induction/being-pounded-on-the-back-like-a-ketchup-bottle/forceps/extra-drugs/extra-pain delivery."

"Of course it occurs to me that Pudding might have lived if I'd stuck with either Dr. Bergerac or Dr. Baltimore. It's a low-decibel wistfulness; I can barely hear it over the roar of later, louder regrets. This kind is not so bad, the If I Did One Thing Differently, Then Maybe Everything Would Also Be Different sort, a vague, philosophical itch: yes, if life were different, then life would be different. Such thinking feels like science fiction, stepping on a bug in 20,000 BC and altering the course of history.

Other memories are more troublesome. Here's a length of time, my brain says, and then it stares, it sees an actual length of time suspended in the air, which then breaks into panels, as in a comic book. Here I am in one panel. I am in the line of danger, but I don't know it, I am living in the past: the past being defined by the fact that Pudding is alive, but not for long. In the next panel, seconds later, something is supposed to intervene. Superman swooping in, to - what? Deliver the baby? X-ray vision and superhearing are nothing special, every doctor's office comes equipped. Superman is supposed to come is all I know, so Pudding will persist.

But Superman never shows. I can see it so clearly. In one panel we are safe and stupid. In the next we're only stupid.

Those moments come later, toward the end of pregnancy."

For those of you who have been touched by the same sort of grief, I highly recommend it, if only to put the tangle of feelings into words. It's dark, but then again, it's a book about a child's death. Let me know if you read it.