A Happy Ending

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, as every mother of a stillborn child knows, is a stillbirth memoir by Elizabeth McCracken, a well-known literary novelist. The book gets passed from hand to hand like a holy text. I read it the first week after Balthazar was born. The doctor who signed me out of the hospital had given me a prescription for Ambien, which I had said I wanted but which I hated. I would fall into bed exhausted at 8:30 and then wake up at 3 am and not be able to go back to sleep. It was unpleasantly reminiscent of the episode of agitated clinical depression I had in my twenties. After four or five days I quit the Ambien and it got a little better; I could sleep until 4 or sometimes 5 am.

It was too soon to read the book; I understood that. But what else could I do at 3 am, when I'd ordered the bereavement cards from Crane's with the purple crocus on them, had reread the stillbirth web sites, had written one page in my journal because that was as much as I could stand? There was Empty Cradle, Broken Heart and there was Elizabeth McCracken's book and there were four hours until I could wake up Jonathan. Maybe three hours until Jasper woke up, if I put the dishes away very loudly.

It was the only book I had any interest in reading, but I didn't love An Exact Replica. It is far and away the best of its genre, but I spent a lot of time focusing on all the ways in which the story was different from mine: it was her first baby, he was born in France. Subsequently I came to admire its economy and its form and elegance, but it's not the book I would write. It is, however, the standard by which all subsequent stillbirth memoirs will be measured. In a way, reading it was not therapy for me, but work.

McCracken made it clear from the first pages of her book that she had a new baby, born almost a year to the day after her son Pudding was stillborn. And I thought to myself, of course. This memoir could not have been written, much less published, without that baby. The conventions of narrative demand it. Readers require it.

An occupational hazard of writing memoir, especially if you are writing about something which is recent and evolving, is a kind circular thinking. It's not clear to me sometimes whether I am constructing a better narrative by placing the events from my life in a particular order, or if I'm attempting to conduct my life in such a way as to make a better memoir. My wanting another baby was and is real, but it affects my memoir, which in turn affects my life. How can I write my memoir without the requisite happy ending?

*

When their baby died, McCracken and her husband turned to each other in the hospital and said, we'll have another. Jonathan turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, well, that was it.

It was what we had agreed. We would try this one time. It was reiterated at many points along the way. Throughout the pregnancy I was wont to announce, as I passed a particular milestone: “Well, thank God I never have to do that again!”

In retrospect I wish it hadn't been stressed quite so much.

The day after Balthazar was born I told my mother on the phone that the hardest part of it all was that I would never be able to have another child. She accepted that interpretation as fact.

Then the first shock wore off and I realized how absurd that was. I didn’t know what I was agreeing to, when I'd said we'd try this one time. I was agreeing to have one more (living) child. I hadn't thought to put (living) in the fine print because that of course was assumed. I never agreed that my last child should be dead. I didn't sign anything, and why should I be held to such a cruel contract? If that indeed was the contract, I was reneging. By Day Two, I had changed my mind.

No medical reason for the stillbirth ever presented itself as a bar to future childbearing. The doctors saw that lack as a (relatively) positive position. They said that if I were to become pregnant again they'd watch me like a hawk and do everything they could to assure a successful outcome, which, based on the medical information they had, they seemed to think was more likely than not. “More likely than not” isn't necessarily the most comforting turn of phrase when you've just beaten the odds in the most awful way, but I was ready to buy it. Jonathan wasn't.

All of the books say that husbands and wives may take a different amount of time to be ready to conceive again and that you should keep the lines of communication open until both parties are ready. They assume, though, that both parties will eventually be ready and that you will attempt to conceive again. I didn't find any information on what to do when one party adamantly refuses and the other party wants it like their life depends upon it. Will this be my unique contribution to the literature? I really wish that weren't the case.

*

There was a piece on Salon.com recently about how to write a memoir. Most of the advice was condescending or banal. Don't get me started on what Annie LaMott said. But, oddly enough (because I knew him a little, years ago, and I remember a lot of drinking and not much swapping of tips) Tony Swofford was the one writer whose advice seemed useful. He said that he chooses a beginning date and an end date for the memoir, writes them on cards and pins them to his bulletin board. I assume there are flashbacks or digressions, but the narrative arc of the memoir takes place between those two poles.

I realized that I didn't know where the starting and ending points of my narrative were. I decided that the beginning is April 2, 2011, my fortieth birthday, the day I made the decision to make the decision to have another child, or not. The ending is harder to discern. I think that April 3, 2013, which would be Balthazar's first birthday, is a good place to cut. The grief process will no doubt go on and on for me, but that doesn't mean it belongs in a book.

I've been writing my way there, and it's getting closer all the time. Now I don't know what to do. I'm still writing the memoir. It has no happy ending. There is no baby. There is no pact to try to have another baby. There is no adoption paperwork on the dining room table, no emails to the foster care system. Nothing.

Is it enough for my life that I have a surviving son? Is it enough for the memoir? Is there a difference? Is it a flaw in my character that the nuances of this particular situation are lost on me? I do not want to write a book in which the big payoff is that I learned something about love or grew in compassion, even if those things are true. That's not the book, or the life, that I want.

Six weeks to find an ending? Something tells me it's going to take longer than that.