'I Have No Words to Tell Him How We Grieved'

Memory defies understanding. We know things we don’t remember knowing. On Wednesday I read “Fugitive Son,” a sonnet by A.M. Juster:

“The Japanese mourn children they abort.

In Shinto shrines they pick a figurine

To represent the life that they cut short.

They bow, then slide a folded note between

The sandalwood and jade as if a soul

That never loved a face could now forgive

Or any act of penance could control

Unwanted visits from a fugitive.

“I never picked a message I could send

Or bargained for forgiveness.  There was none.

Although I know my boy does not intend

More pain, he asks about the nameless son

We lost three months before he was conceived.

I have no words to tell him how we grieved.”

Comment would be an affront but Mike’s poem triggered a memory. More than thirty years ago, a reporter I worked with and his wife adopted an infant boy. My first son had been born months earlier and we were delighted together. Their son died from SIDS on Father’s Day. Only once before had I seen people shattered into numbness, and that was at the funeral of another little boy, in Indiana, who had been killed when run over by a tractor driven by his mother. Another memory followed, one I hadn't recalled in years. One morning in the early nineteen-sixties, I was swimming with my mother. We were dog-paddling near the middle of the lake when she told me she had had a miscarriage the year before I was born. The baby was a boy. She never mentioned it again.