With Max finally sleeping through the nights, I have been able to pick up some books that have been on my reading list for a long time. One of these books is "An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination" by Elizabeth McCracken.
The book is a memoir about McCracken's stillbirth of her baby boy and a subsequent pregnancy. The author applies honesty, wisdom and even wit to a painful event. I have been finding so many similarities between her and my emotions (with the big difference being that I would never be able to put them into words the way McCracken did).
Ultimately, “An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination” is sad and at times tear-inducing. McCracken offers an unstinting account of her grief and the outlying emotions it engenders, from embarrassment to feelings of failure to misdirected anger. It definitely is a good read and I would highly suggest it to anyone who has not experienced the loss of a child but knows someone close to them who has experienced such a loss. The book will provide much inside to the many aspects of grieving a baby or child.
I will leave you with one of the most moving passages from the book. McCracken imagines her tragedy as a comic book in which her baby is fine in one panel, and then: “In the next panel, seconds later, something is supposed to intervene. . . . But Superman never shows. I can see it so clearly. In one panel we are safe and stupid. In the next we’re only stupid.”
