An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

A while ago I read about this book An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir by Elizabeth McCraken on The Book Nest. It is about a woman whose first child was stillborn.

There were many parts of the book that stated my feeling so well. Here are some quotes from the book that echo my feelings.

...a person who is dead is a long, long story. You may move on from it, but the death will never disappear from view. Your friends might 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.

I would have done the whole thing over again even knowing how it would end.

I had just stepped over the border from happy pregnancy to grief.

He was a person. I missed him like a person. Seeing babies on streets did not stab me with pain the way I know they stab some grieving women, those who have lost children or simply desperately want to have them. For me, other babies were other babies. They weren't who I was missing.

Before Pudding (Scott) 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 (Scott) more real.

My grief was still fresh, grief last longer than sympathy.

I didn't know the woman, but I loved her. I'd felt the same thing meeting another couple on campus, a professor and his wife who'd written me when Pudding died to send condolences and to say that they'd had a daughter who was stillborn nearly thirty years before. All I can say is, it's sort of a kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief.

Twice now I've heard the story of someone who knows someones who's had a stillborn since Pudding has died, and it's all I can do not to book a flight immediately, to show up somewhere I'm not wanted, just so I can say, It happened to me, too, because it meant so much to me to hear it. It happened to me, too, meant: It's not your fault. And You are not a freak of nature. And This doesn't have to be a secret.

That's how it works. When a baby dies, other dead children become suddenly visible.

If you are a mother of a dead child yourself-they will keep coming to you.

I did know him, not with my brain but with my body.

We'd known all along I'd be induce, and I'd said that I wanted to avoid the end of April, particularly April 27, not for my sake but for the kid's; it seemed like a too weighty fact to have in your biography, being born a year to the day after your brother who didn't survive.

Edward (Joseph) had shouldered a great deal in the past few days, he had pushed his enormous pain aside to tend to me.

I find myself thankful for small things.

...she wanted permission to remember her child with pleasure instead of grief. To remember that he was dead, but to remember him without pain: he's dead of course but she still loves him, and that love isn't morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn't need to be shoved away.

Hopefully you are able to piece these quotes from the book together and make sense of what I read/felt.