This Is The Happiest Story In The World With The Saddest Ending

 An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir by Elizabeth McCracken

After our son’s death I read everything I could get my hands on written by and for people like me: Childless mothers. This book I read and reread, and then went back through again to the parts that resonated with me. “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.”

It’s the story of a writer living in living in a remote part of France with her husband waiting for the birth of her first child. Her baby died a week after his ‘due date’ and this book is her experience, interjected with dark humor and reflection. She wrote this book a year after the death of her firstborn, and when she safely has her rainbow baby in her arms. 

In her book she explores her reaction, the reactions of her family and friends, and the inevitable ‘what-ifs’ any one goes through after a tragedy. I read this a little more than a week after my child’s death and was surprised that her candor pulled a laugh out of me several times while reading. I also identified with exactly how she was feeling and how alone you feel right after. She says “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 about it at all."

The terrible thing about loss is it’s a solo journey, besides my wonderful husband, I felt alone. That’s why I went looking for stories of women who were in my boat, so I could feel like I wasn’t fighting a storm alone. And it’s true, "All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch the lost children, in this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of a sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.” Case and point, my new friend Ali. Met through a grief forum and one of the two-three people I tell things to. My best friend doesn’t want to hear I cried over my period, she doesn’t understand. Ali on the otherhand…does. People who haven’t lost a child don’t know how to act around me. The people that work downstairs in the restaurant I work in wouldn’t meet my eyes or talk to me right after. And 6 weeks later, I am in no way over it, but I am recovering and semi normal. “Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.”

She also summed up my feelings about people around me being pregnant, "Babies born to mothers who'd been pregnant at the same time as me hurt a little. I didn't mind hearing about them, but I didn't want to meet them. That puzzled me since it wasn't logical, and even in mourning I liked to think I was logical, but it was an unhappiness that rose up in me....

Even now I have a hard time with the babies born to friends around Pudding's birth. It is not logical, and yet there it is: this one is one month older, this one is three weeks younger. But mostly I just missed my own child." This perfectly describes how I feel about my sister in law, about everyone who seems to be announcing pregnancy right and left. They suck.:( Basically I'm jealous...