By Cara Tyrrell with Introduction by Christina Gombar
“It’s a happy life, but someone is missing.”
Exhale’s own Cara Tyrrell talks with author Elizabeth McCracken for insight into loss. McCracken tells her story in her brief but searing memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, published in 2008. Like McCracken, Cara Tyrrell experienced the stillbirth of her first child, and then went on to have two more healthy children. Like McCracken, Tyrrell is also a writer, currently working on her combination memoir & prescriptive guide for grieving parents. Tyrrell and her husband founded Share Southern Vermont, a non-profit chapter of the national Share, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support Group.
Elizabeth McCracken is also the author of two novels and a short story collection.
Cara Tyrrell (CT):
You say, “I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but that death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story.” And, “I can’t bear for my first child to fade into history.” After spending time in your grief and birthing two more children, how do you keep Pudding’s memory alive for them? How do you memorialize his story for your family? For yourself?
Elizabeth McCracken (EM):
We haven’t yet figured out what we’ll do as far as telling Gus and Matilda — they’re both under two. There’s nothing I could say to Gus that doesn’t feel to me like my imposing my emotions upon him. I don’t want them to feel like they were born into sorrow. My sorrow is mine; should they feel sorrow over their lost brother, I want it to be their own, and genuine. I don’t know if that makes sense.
But I do want their brother and his death to be something that both kids know about, and not a Sit Down and Have a Conversation to Hear the Family Secret. I assume that at some point talking about Pudding with our two other children will feel natural. It just hasn’t yet. A big part of publishing the book (as opposed to writing it) was so that there would be an object in our house that memorialized him, that was just there. I do want to be clear that this is only how I feel about telling my living children, and how I feel about the memory of my first kid — no judgment on families for whom the dead child is part of every day conversation.
We haven’t marked his birthday, or the anniversary of his death, the past two years. The first year I was 38 weeks pregnant with Gus, the next about 10 weeks pregnant with Matilda. But it’s occurred to me recently that this would be a good year to start something. This will be the first April since 2004 that I haven’t beenpregnant. That’s surely going to make the anniversary of his death feel different, and more completely his own.
CT:
You have a way of threading black humor with intense emotion and just the right dose of sarcasm to feed the bereaved’s soul. Did this memoir just pour out of you or did you have to work at that balance?
EM:
Poured out is about right. I wrote it in three weeks, and didn’t revise much — largely because I really wanted (for myself) to capture what it felt like to me, to have the one child on my lap, to have that real joy, but for the sorrow over my first to be still so fresh. I don’t know when or how or even whether I would have written about Pudding without Gus being around. I didn’t write about him the summer after he died, and then I was pregnant with Gus, and I felt like if I really stared at my grief, it would turn into psychotic worry. In my second pregnancy I tried to ignore both past and future. But once he was born I understood that I had to write something — not for publication, but for myself. I needed to turn my dark feelings into sentences so I could understand them. I could only write from my experience. Gus was literally in my lap for much of the composition of the book.
As far as the humor goes — that just my own ghoulish sense of humor. I was actually relieved and happy, once people read it, to hear that they often found it funny. I was sort of surprised that I’d put a single joke in, but I suppose it’s just something I do reflexively. And perhaps that’s the thing I cling to, to answer question number one: I believe humor is a property like God, everywhere even when you cannot imagine it at all, even when you wish to renounce it. It is ready to comfort you, and ready to fully assert its power when you need it.
CT:
Many first time pregnant women – myself included – echo your sentiment, “I loved being pregnant. Whatever hormones had shakentogether in my bloodstream, it was an agreeable cocktail.” But aftera late term loss we no longer believe that any week of pregnancy is safe, not even forty. How did you experience the pregnancy after loss? How did you manage the anxiety and superstition in combination with your goal of a healthy, screaming baby at then end of the pregnancy?
EM:
Ah, pregnancy after loss. The first time I felt like I plodded through it, looking at my feet, never ahead. Every now and then I became wracked with sorrow and guilt and paranoia. When I was pregnant with Gus, mouse-infested houses seemed to lift off their foundations and follow me around. The house we’d rented, several houses I visited — and because the farmhouse where we had spent my pregnancy with Pudding had mouse problems, I got a little hysterical. I washed my hands like an insane person. I ate like a saint. Frankly, I almost never felt hopeful — not hopeless, it’s just that every single time I imagined we would end up with a live baby, I reminded myself that I’d thought that before. But I did manage to enjoy it a little, in the way you can enjoy fine weather one afternoon and not take it as a promise for fine weather always.
The third pregnancy was initially a bit easier — well, not right at the start, actually. First they thought I might have an ectopic pregnancy, and then they worried that the embryo seemed small for dates, with a worryingly slow heartbeat. But somehow once we got past that, I relaxed a tiny bit, maybe because that was different enough from my first pregnancy, where no one ever thought anything was wrong. There’d been something to worry about this time, and then we’d addressed it. Not that I took anything for granted, but I wasn’t buzzing like a tuning fork with anxiety the entire time. Then towards the end, I found out I had a two vessel umbilical cord, and that the baby was worryingly small, and then getting smaller statistically. Her birth was very scary, and I had all those horrible thoughts: Here we go again, my fault for feeling cocky. I burst into tears at one point — the baby’s heartbeat kept decelerating — and the doctor, not my doctor, who had to go home after being on call for 24 hours, but a doctor I reallydidn’t like who I was growing to distrust –she goddamn HUGGED me. I almost punched her. I didn’t want a cuddle, I wanted a living baby. Shortly afterwards, she finally decided to perform a Caesarean.
CT:
It is obvious you and your husband Edward fell in love fast and hard. I have a very similar love story, that shook to its core after Emma’s death, then re-solidified in a way I never knew possible as we allowed each other to grieve. They say great loss can only impact a love story in one of two extreme ways, accounting for the “50% of all marriages dissolve after losing a child” statistic. How would you say losing Pudding strained and/or strengthened your already tight bond? Does it continue to?
EM:
Well 50% of all marriages period dissolve anyhow these days, don’t they? I’m always leery about writing about my marriage, largely because I feel like, as my friend Henry once put it, no one wants to hear about your happy marriage. I am married to an exceptionally good human being. That makes everything easier and bearable.
CM:
Even though you were not in the United States (McCracken’s stillbirth happened in France) you were required to name your baby. For many bereaved parents, the need to name is instinctual, affirming our stillborn children’s existence. Many parents are intensely frustrated that it is easy to receive a death certificate, yet it takes a great deal of work to request and receive a certificate of birth. Similar frustrations exist within the tax system where claiming your child’s existence hinges on if they took one solitary breath before they died. In essence – discounting the heartbeat heard and seen by monitors for forty weeks. Did you struggle with this? How do you weigh in on these debates?
EM:
The certificate we got in Bordeaux was specifically for a child born ”without life.” And that seemed fine and true and acceptable to me. My child was dead when he was born. Anything that comes even slightly close to pretending that this isn’t true makes me nervous — or should I say, it makes no emotional sense to me. I think that’s why we don’t have photos and don’t miss them: I would only ever see them as a photo of a dead body. I’ve come to think ofmy lack of understanding of other parents’ and their photos as linguistic, just not in my emotional vocabulary. I don’t understand them the way I don’t understand Spanish. I know that Spanish is full of meaning and beauty, despite the fact I cannot comprehend it.
That said: a death certificate and no birth certificate makes no sense to me. Impossible to have one without the other. As far as taxes go — well, the idea of trying to balance grief and money, I can’t do it. I’ll admit I asked my accountant, and when she said no, I apologized for asking. I feel strongly that my son was a person. Nothing but my pocketbook would be affected by the IRS agreeing with me.
CT:
Time is simultaneously the biggest cliche and the most poignant truth for baby lost parents. As you exist now, three years removed and two living children later, has time shifted your perspectives in any way? For example, if you were to sit down now and write your memoir would it look or feel different?
EM:
Oh my heavens would it. Every passing month would make it different. Which is why I wrote it when I did, and as fast as I did. And I think that this is true of any memoir, not just a book about grief. But I still miss that boy. I do. It doesn’t get better but it does get easier — I miss him much more peacefully. He feels nearly internal to me again, as though I know I will never see him but he’s close. I can touch my ribs and feel him. I don’t long for him, but I miss him. He’d be three years old! & I realize I write that more with a sense of wonder, rather than feeling pain at what I’ve been cheated out of. His goofy sister is sitting in a bouncy chair at my feet, wiggling around and gurgling. I wish he were here and I’m glad she’s here and both feelings are true.
CT:
I cannot count the number of times I have withheld answers to questions based on the size of the person’s belly asking them. I didn’t want to be that person that broke their every-pregancy-results-in-a-living-child bubble. Your words, “I am that thing worse than a cautionary tale: I am a horror story… a story so grim and lessonless it’s better not to think about at all” resonated with me so deeply. Yet, are you still? Has your book, your “calling card” - allowed your tale to evolve from horror story to hopeful message?
EM:
You know, it’s funny: I know three pregnant women. I see them several times a week. They all know what happened to my first child. And yet I have the ordinary conversations about babies and pregnancy and labor and delivery. I think my thoughts, and then I talk about babies as though they’re guaranteed, because I don’t know what else to do, because saying anything else makes me feel like a wretch. On the other hand, another colleague and his wife lost their twin boys at 24 weeks earlier this year. To them I can be a hopeful message. But only to parents with lost children. That’s just how it is. Otherwise, I do feel like a horror story. I cannot imagine telling someone pregnant about Pudding. I would absolutely omit the information, and I would feel disloyal to my first child, but my first child is dead, and therefore is not harmed by my disloyalty.
I think I was worried that Edward and I would always seem like ruined tragic people–that we always WOULD be ruined tragic people. But we aren’t. What happened to us was awful, but not unspeakable, because we and our friends speak of it.