DIED 1987
I WAS TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS old when my first baby died. It was a few days before his due date. They never could say why. I held him in my arms once, briefly; he weighed less than a dinner plate. He looked like a little Chinese doll: hair black, eyes slits, skin flushed and not at all corpse-like, fingers curled into fists. We dressed him in pale yellow flannel for his cremation. All the ideas we had about him, even his name, were burned along with his body. The same people came to the memorial as to the shower. My husband started taking sleeping pills in the daytime. I had to wake him up when it was time to try again. The only thing I knew was what I’d learned at my job writing computer manuals: when some mysterious awful thing happens and the whole document disappears, you have to open a new file and start over. That is all you can do. Twenty years later, I don’t have any better ideas.
Twenty years later, I was in my kitchen when the phone rang. It was my son, born shortly after the first one. He was calling from his dorm in DC to ask if I had heard about Virginia Tech. I had not, but soon I knew a great deal. For weeks I read about them. I thought about all the things in their rooms and the dates on their calendars. The bridesmaid dresses, the airplane tickets. Their mothers having to wake up day after day to the colorless, white-hot morning, the insides of their heads roaring like houses on fire. One family was pictured in the newspaper the day they drove to Blacksburg to pick up their daughter’s body. They brought a favorite dress for her to wear. “I just want to touch her hair,” the mother told a reporter. “Her fingers were so little.” Don’t you see how lucky I was? If I had to lose him, at least it was before I knew him, before all my love poured out of me like milk. At least I could still start over.