![]() Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York. ![]() He's dead but of course she still loves him and that love isn't morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn't need to be shoved away.Įxcerpt adapted from the book An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir, by Elizabeth McCracken. To remember that he was dead but to remember him without pain. "I think your name is Gus," I told him, and of course now I can't imagine why we thought his name could ever be anything else.Īnd now I'm thinking of that Florida lady again, the one who wanted a book about the lighter side of a child's death, and I know: All she wanted was permission to remember her child with pleasure, instead of grief. ![]() I wanted him to know how glad we were to see him, and how sad we were that he'd never know his older brother. He was a little, little baby, and I told him the story out loud, not knowing when we might tell him again. Sometime around 2 a.m., it had settled in my mind, and so I told the baby the story of his older brother. I could only see his head in its mint green cap. The baby was in his plastic hospital bassinet, swaddled into a neat and uncanny little package. That night, when Edward went home to get some sleep, I tried it out. In the hospital room, we tried out names. ![]() He was small and skinny, 6 pounds and change, 20 inches long. ![]()
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