I was in fifth grade when my mother told me about the brother I should have had. I have replayed that exchange hundreds of times, tasting silences, listening for intonations. “A brother?” I asked.

“I was pregnant,” she said, “but I miscarried.”

“What is miscarried?”

“I was going to have a baby, but the baby died.”

“When it was being born?”

“Earlier. He wasn’t a brother yet, but the beginnings of a brother.” She held her fingers apart, as if measuring a baby mouse, or maybe an ant. “I had to know if I had lost a daughter or son, so I saved the tissue and asked them to test it.”

“I almost had a little brother?”

“An older brother,” she said. “It happened forever ago,” my mother said, “two and a half years before you were born.”

It wasn’t until twenty years later, while I sat with my wife Jacqui through her third ultrasound, that the word miscarriage fully lodged in my brain. The fetus hadn’t been growing right for weeks, and now the obstetrician was laying out procedures. Of course I understood miscarriages were nature’s way of recognizing an unfixable problem and cutting its losses early. But academic knowledge always tastes more bitter when you find yourself standing in its cross hairs. Or sitting, as I was, beside the o.b., a wand gooped with KY sliding across Jacqui’s abdomen relaying bad news. The baby had died but hadn’t been expelled. To perform the D&C, the o.b. administered Versed, a sedative-hypnotic that relaxes the body, depresses respiration, but keeps the patient conscious. In the process, the patient loses all short term memory, which allows one to repeat the same pointless question, as I did, about a grocery list, without the patient remembering either the question or her earlier responses. I wish I had asked better questions. Who owns the sun? What flavor of day lets you know you’re in love? If you could fix one broken person from childhood, who would it be? Suppose you invented a loneliness machine, would you design it with or without training wheels, and how many people would it seat at a time? In recovery, a nurse, too perky and loud by half, whisked in a tray of cranberry juice and cherry Jell-o, as if it was color Jacqui had lost. It seemed both callous and holy to laugh at such red. We laughed. When the nurse left, I climbed into bed with Jacqui and watched her cut the Jell-o into tiny bites. Red red red.

Open the spiral notebook my mother-in-law Ruth keeps beside her kitchen phone and you’ll find a list of quilting patterns she hopes to tie one day—Daylilies, Christmas Splendor, Rhumba Star—each entry followed by a page number to a quilting book. Flip the notebook over and open it from the back, and you’ll discover not quilts but the names of friends recently departed. “Death and Quilting” she has titled this notebook. She keeps both categories together in the same spiral “for convenience” and “to save on paper.” Once a week Ruth sits down at her computer and from three thousand miles away scours the online obituaries of her former hometown newspaper, The Syracuse Sentinel. Usually she settles for a name, but the luckier victims rate a shorthand entry for context:

May 24         Herbert Fritzen
     6/20           Glen Burdick—80—a fall
     7/24           Christiana Seibert 94 Svces. + buried private
                                  No calling hours 7 grandch
     9/10           Daniel Cushman (sarciodosis) 48 yrs.

“It seems rather morbid,” Jacqui said. They were washing dishes in her mother’s kitchen. “I mean when you find a friend, after scrolling through pages of death, do you say Bingo?” Ruth thought a moment, then shook her head: “No,” she said, “not Bingo. Something else.” Are quilting and death antonyms? Complements? The secret coordinates on a child’s globe she carries inside her? Or is it a way of organizing time—a present that has a habit of slipping into the past, a future she can stitch in the here and now? Krista Mersereau, Stanley Colella, Joyce Famett’s brother, Boo Hodkin. “Pandora’s Box,” “Apple of My Eye,” “Bird’s Eye View.”

A brother that wasn’t, a son or daughter that isn’t—these haunt me, the way names haunt my mother-in-law. The sensation is not unlike an aching tooth your tongue tries to comfort. And thinking here on the page, as I’m trying to do, reminds me of other losses, other moments, that shouldn’t come back for further consideration but do.

Dave Kelley, a Murtah man, died yesterday when his parachute didn’t open. My mother and I heard the news on the radio, in her sewing room, casually sandwiched between Frank Sinatra tunes, which made the announcement seem like a dispatch from another world. I was thirteen. How to represent this man who for two years rented the basement bedroom next to mine? With facts? He was a lanky 6’1” Idaho native, a part time student, open major. Through subjectivity? He thumped me in Ping-Pong and took me joyriding on his Kawasaki and looked like Icabod Crane and dated my sister once and listened to the James Gang and by the time he moved out he had thrown himself out of airplanes 83 times. By metonym? He carried his jump book, zippered inside his leather jacket, next to his heart. It gleamed, that jump book, with its forest green plastic cover that snapped close to protect the pages. His hours of ecstasy and training and fear shrunk down into prosaic haiku, one entry per line. Entries went like this: 9-17-71—“Pocatello Airport—wind 15 mph Swest—12,000 feet—Clear all the way to Craters of the Moon!” He unsnapped that thing with the authority of an investor, his entries a series of endless deposits. Why didn’t the ledgers balance?

Passing to the Other Side. I only played once—behind the junior high, at lunch, in spring, in the shade of an Austrian black pine, with the brittle smell of sagebrush blowing down from the foothills. When it was my turn, I lay down, rested my arms on my stomach, and waited. Five girls and two boys sat cross legged around me, holding hands. Vanessa, who had learned the proper steps from her cousins, touched my shoulders. We all closed our eyes. “We are here to honor Lance, who has died.” Down the hill I could hear the yells from a contested softball game, and beyond that the distant wash of highway traffic. “He died of a drug overdose,” she said. “He took too many drugs, and went running off a seventeenth floor balcony. He was sure his butterfly wings would catch him.” A little snickering, then the serious tone returned. “We are all sad,” she said. “Is there anyone who would like to speak in behalf of the departed one?” Silence, then one by one the comments. “Basketball.” “He was the fastest boy typer in ninth grade.” “A good dancer, and not afraid to ask you.” “His hair, it’s kind of like a Brillo pad.” Then they put their fingers under me, and lifted. In that floating, they read my horoscope, cracked open a fortune cookie with my name on it, tapped into a stillness none of us had words for, a moving inside the not moving. At that moment, I knew there was an Other Side. Then the cold and hot of late March rushed over me, as if the weather couldn’t make up its mind what chapter came next.

Tissue, miscarriage, brother. In Sunday school I learned that God had made a promise about stillborn children: grieving parents, if they remained righteous, would one day raise that child during the Millennium. But miscarriages—this was theological terra incognita. Is a child at the time of miscarriage a child, or merely the potential for a child? When does the spirit enter the body, at quickening or birth? I picked at these conundrums one by one the older I got. Did the spirit of a miscarried child simply wait on a cloud till the Millennium? And if not, did that spirit enter the next available mother, whether in Trinidad or Kamchatka, or could it hold out till its first mother got pregnant again? In which case, was my brother really me? And the most pressing of questions: given the well-planned gaps between children in my own family, had my brother lived, would my parents have even bothered trying to get pregnant with me? These were not questions I asked over dinner.

Last March I ran the Moab Half Marathon with my wife Jacqui and her two friends—a slightly downhill route alongside the serpentine Colorado, red rock country, one of the most beautiful and desolate places on earth. After the race, after gorging on fresh fruit and bagels, after showers, after hiking into Delicate Arch, after watching a girl drop her water bottle off a cliff, after getting vertigo as it fell and our stomachs fell with it, we packaged ourselves back into the car and drove north. Erica, who was using this race as a warm-up for an Ironman, Erica, whose Id remains repressed in public conversation no longer than three minutes at a stretch, had a question. “If you had to kill yourself,” she asked, “you know, someone was making you, how would you do it?”

“Pills,” Jacqui said. “I would just want to die in my sleep.”

“Me,” I said, “carbon monoxide, a la Anne Sexton.”

“I’m not sure,” Sharon said, “but not with a shotgun. Not any kind of gun.”

“I’m with you,” Jacqui said.

“I used to think I’d just pedal off a cliff,” Erica said. “Me and the bike just drifting down. But lately I’m leaning toward drowning. Not in the ocean or anything. In a water tank. You know, go out in style, have people drink me for weeks and weeks, before the water guy got smart enough to check inside.”

Drinking the dead—we’re always doing it, usually inadvertently. In the congregation I belong to, a women’s group called the Relief Society looks to various neighborhood needs, including when necessary, the family luncheon following a funeral. Three weeks ago, before taking a trip out of town, the leader of this service group caught up with Jacqui, who serves as one of her assistants, in the church parking lot. She handed Jacqui a box. “In case we have a funeral while I’m gone, here’s the cutlery for the lunch afterwards.” She was referring to Sanford Giles, in the hospital again. With bad heart and kidney, seven operations in two years, his organs were too far gone to make him a viable candidate for transplant lists. Jacqui tossed the box in the back of our mini-van, sixty place settings. As it turned out Sanford recovered and the president forgot to reclaim the cutlery. We drive it to piano lessons and soccer games. It’s there when we unload groceries, there when I’m trying to make room for a flat of chrysanthemums, and there again when neighborhood kids throw themselves into the back seat for the morning car pool. Some evenings we see Sanford, accompanied by his wife and wheeled oxygen tank, walking the neighborhood, his cane a third leg. I wave and immediately think of the cutlery in the trunk, each napkin wrapping a clear, plastic trinity of eating utensils. Or, opening the trunk, I see the cutlery, and think of Sanford. Does he count his days and hours like a miser? Or does he go through his days, as I do, trying not to count anything out loud, but simply live?

So many hopes back then for the child that was not yet a child. If I had written them down, they might have gone like this: “Dear little swimmer, you have a three-year-old brother waiting to play cowboys and dinosaurs with you. We’ll put your crib in the corner of his room. He calls himself Deo because he can’t say Derek. His Deo language is easy to pick up: airplane is ‘hapoo,’ ants are ‘eye.’ If you gurgle nicely, he will let you ride his wooden zebra with its mane of many colors. Our shower curtain shows all the countries. Pull it around you—and voila!—you find yourself at the center of the world. Baths are warm and wet and, on lucky mornings, splashy. So many thing to teach you. We will count spots on our neighbor’s dalmatian, clap our fins for the seals at the zoo. We have a big chunky bike now, a red one your mother found behind the dumpster. There’s a child seat on the back for bombing around the neighborhood. We will go fast fast, the two of us, helmeted, just in case.”

Where are the happy deaths? If I believe, with Emily Dickinson, that “this life is not conclusion,” then shouldn’t the stories I tell taste, at least faintly, of eternal perspectives? I think of the archetype of lovers fated—no, blessed—to die together, a pattern that periodically expresses itself in actual lives. From last week’s wire service then. A gentleman in his eighties died of a heart attack. When the attending physician notified the surviving wife who had lived with him for fifty seven years, she expired immediately—yes, you guessed it, of a heart attack. In other words, twin broken hearts. To sum up, their tickers, which in combined time had been pushing blood around this planet for 156 years, came to a stop within fifteen minutes of each other. What devotion, we say, what sweetly shaped catharsis. But this couple did not die young, did not leave behind dependent children, were little more than stock characters in a newspaper fairy tale. But try to tell a similar story involving a pair of children, drowned together say, or killed in a mountain pass in a rain storm, and all we can muster is a dead spot underneath the solar plexus and an uncomprehending shake of the head. I remember our neighbors’ daughter, who in her final weeks of chemo wore a different flowered hat each day before finally succumbing to brain cancer. I believe her spirit continues on, I know it in my bones, but I can’t prove it. Her younger sister begged her mother, Can’t we keep her here, in the closet, so that I can play with her sometimes? Death plays us all close to its vest, as if each of us were a card in its hand.

The afterlife I believe in has room not only for departed and unborn children, but for pets—cats and dogs and goldfish, even the pink-eyed albino rat we kept for three years. My daughter named her Shasta. One evening, after crawling on demand from one end of the room to her cage along the Andean footbridge of eight outstretched arms, she rolled up into a ball of labored breathing. The next morning she wasn’t any better. So following the advice we found on rats.com we gathered a bucket, a chunk of dry ice, Saran wrap, and a brick, and we euthanized her. The brick, incidentally, was not to crush the skull, as I at first feared, but to keep Shasta from touching the dry ice at the bottom of the bucket. She died in her sleep, the way I want to go. It’s been seventeen months since we buried her, but periodically my daughter reopens the wound. “I didn’t play with Shasta enough,” she says, “and sometimes I ignored her. I liked her, but her claws were so scratchy.” My daughter ended her latest mourning episode in a flurry of cutting and drawing, which yielded an announcement to the world that she hung on her door: “Rats are the Best Pets in the World.” Illustrations featured cameos of Shasta crawling, eating, standing on her two hind legs, and hanging from the top of her wire cage, like a circus acrobat. “Do you think Shasta misses me?” Brooke asked. “Perhaps,” Jacqui said, “but not as much as we miss her, which is okay.” Jacqui’s answer, meant to console, sent Brooke into a fresh crying jag: what if the object of our affections, the thing we cry over does not cry back. Against all rational evidence, I’m holding out for a literal you—ratsthat do miss us, unborn children who eavesdrop from beyond even if they cannot speak.

Once, while I was driving through Houston with Derek, enroute to some appointment, just past Rice University, near the Museum of Art, he said from his car seat: “You be Jesus, and I’ll be the tiger keeping the wolves away.”

When it comes to new age crystals and horoscopes and seances and channeling the dead with scented candles and 1-900 psychics at 3:00 a.m. who can read my future like a recipe card, I’m a skeptic. But when Jacqui’s great aunt says that her dead sister directs her to the best parking places at Wegman’s Grocery, like a retriever in point, or when Jacqui’s grandmother says that beside her blue bed, this blue bed, this very one, her dead husband nudged her three weeks after his funeral, I listen. It’s not renewed faith or bolstered hope I feel at such moments, but something baser: jealousy. Like Brooke, I want the dead to want me. I want them to brave that liquid window that keeps our worlds separate. I want them to brush past encumbrances, or nestle inside me as if I were an abandoned well. I want to say as Simone Weil does, that “mortality is the closed door and passage back.”

When we changed insurance carriers recently, it fell to me to fill out Jacqui’s portion of the health questionnaire. How many times have you been pregnant? How many children were born? To Jacqui, these questions are routine, since she encounters them every time any health issue arises, but to me, the questions had a more compassionate note—once again, an irrational response on my part. The voice I heard doing the asking was young but mothering, a soothing nurse’s voice, a voice attached to pink or maroon scrubs, with hair pulled back and a quick clean smile. I wrote. Five pregnancies, four children. A difference of one. A difference that hovered above the page, still hovers, like the disturbance of air I imagine after a hummingbird flies away. There and not there. Not the grief of losing a child, which must be devastating, but vaguer, ghostlier—the loss of someone who might have been yours in a parallel life.

Many literary critics refer to plot as a temporal syllogism. It’s not much of a stretch, then, to see the sentence as a microcosm of life, a grammatical structure that traverses time, and the period at the end of a sentence as a kind of caboose that clears a little space for us to parse what has come before. And logic would suggest that if one period, like death itself, ends a sentence, shouldn’t three of them end it in spades. But the opposite is true. Line up three or four periods in a row, and you sense not a conclusion four times more emphatic, but unfinished business, bread crumbs leading you deeper into the woods, blips across a night sky, a secret about to be revealed, God in the wings, a child’s dot to dot that invites us back into the drama, till we look up, astonished, like . . .

He watched us, open-mouthed, like a B grade actor stuck on pause. He no longer spoke. Or walked, or read, or fed himself. After three massive strokes, Thad Wilcox couldn’t do anything but lie in his diaper and watch us. Which is why my neighbor and I helped out his wife Effie on Sunday afternoons—fill ins for the home care nurses who took the day off. We lifted Thad, one two three, out of his wheelchair but never out of his fog. Or we wheeled him, down the hall and into his room, where three two one we settled him into his bed but never into lucidity. What is the difference between live weight and dead? I never asked the question out loud but I thought it. Straws and televised sports and apple juice—these were his pleasures. How could Thad have played football at Air Force, fathered five children, and worked for the V.A. designing prosthetic arms? We took his former life on faith, since neither of us knew him before the strokes. Each visit was a new puzzle in point of view: we returned kindness to his staring eyes, but routed questions and small talk through Effie, the way one does when discussing a great aunt who has just fallen asleep at a family birthday party. At the door, Effie would say, “To help out like this—you’re angels,” and we would deflect the compliment, then re-enter the green world, stunned at bodies that carried us under an endless sky. After I’d been helping Effie for some weeks, I called her but got a wrong number, an unctuous, used-car salesman voice. I don’t remember the ditty, but something rhymed, with swagger. We’ve been out doing our do’s. To leave a message, just follow the cues. I hung up and punched in Effie’s number again. Same recording. Halfway through the couplet, it came to me. I was listening to Thad. Husband Thad and grandfather Thad. Thad of three years ago before his mind slowly untied itself and drifted down a slow river no one could rescue it from. Thad who had quadrupled in age since she said I do. Thad who could still speak. No wonder she didn’t erase. Did she sometimes push play even when she had no messages?

In one of my poems a young boy and his parents driving a forested highway come upon a porcupine thrashing around on the asphalt. Recently hit and left for dead. The father, out of kindness, lands five shivering blows with a tire iron. The mother, dressed for a wedding reception, refuses to watch, but instead uses the boy’s face as a mirror. The poem ends this way:

Once, after a reading, someone asked, Is the porcupine poem autobiographical? I can’t remember how I answered. What I should have said: Yes, it happened precisely like this, except we weren’t driving to a reception, but returning from a fishing trip. Except we were in a pickup, not a sedan. Except my father was in Egypt on a geology expedition for FMC and my mother was sewing dresses for a production of Oliver, and the man driving was my scoutmaster, Mr. Luker. Except Mr. Luker used a rock instead of a tire iron, and the porcupine stilled after the second blow to the head, not the fifth. Except we got out of the car and saw the porcupine die from three feet away, not twenty. The blood was everywhere and looked like red paint in the head lights, like someone had sprayed it on, then sprayed it on again. That porcupine in my head, the porcupine in the poem—are they the same? The child I mourn, this one on the page—do they answer to the same secret name?

One of my favorite passages in literature comes at the end of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” In this long short story, a re-telling of the parable of the prodigal son, Baldwin brings together two estranged brothers in a dingy jazz bar in Harlem. The returning younger brother, a musician who has drunk the dregs of experience, including a prison term for heroin addiction, sits down at the piano with a few friends to play a set. The older and supposedly wiser brother, who is also the narrator—the one who finished school, went to college, married, and became a math teacher—has reluctantly agreed to drop by. But he’s out of his element here—does not care for jazz, knows precious little about his cultural heritage, is in denial about the turmoil he feels at the death of his young daughter. After a series of false starts at the ivories, Sonny breaks through his own suffering and finds an intuitive groove both redemptive and communal. Watching from his table, the narrator observes:

I heard what [Sonny] had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother’s face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it. I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

I came home to learn that our upstairs neighbor Wally needed help with his necktie. “His tie?” I asked Jacqui. “Are you sure he said tie?” I climbed the steps in my Levi’s and T-shirt. Wally was a starched-shirt guy, part preppie, part GQ, who went to work each morning dressed to the nines, as if the workplace were a fashion battlefield. How could I hope to help him on any matter sartorial? And on today of all days, with the memorial service of his partner, Harvey, just three hours away. It wasn’t a visit I wanted to make. Two years they had lived above us: hellos at the mailbox, goodies exchanged each Christmas, our emergency key taped inside their cupboard door. And three times a week, we were treated to our own private rain show when Harvey watered—no, drenched—the houseplants on their balcony above our patio.

Wally answered the door after my first knock. He was wearing a shark-colored suit that changed colors each time he moved, and under it a blinding white shirt, unbuttoned collar flared out. He was handsome, hair dark and curly, his English clean and slow and elegantly accented from growing up in Mexico City.

“Could you help me?” he said.

”Sure,” I said, still bewildered.

He went to the front closet, and came back with a tie. Silk so fine it looked wet, green chevrons folded inside purple gray swirls. I took it.

“Just tie it?”

“Yes,” he said. The tie against my hands felt cold and smooth. I sized the ends. Strange to feel silk against my bare neck.

“Half Windsor or full?” I asked.

“Half,” he said.

I nodded.

“You know how couples divide things up,” Wally said. “Ties were Harvey. He tied them so well I never bothered to learn.”

So that was it. Over, around, up, down, through. The tie ends hung together like kite tails, like the y’s in Wally and Harvey. Five days a week, for at least five years, maybe longer, Harvey had been performing this service. I remembered Harvey’s trip back home to Georgia earlier that summer. Wally, unable to get vacation time, had stayed behind. Harvey must have tied the ties before leaving—two weeks’ worth of knotted silk. Each morning, Wally must have let them layer and spill against his hands, before deciding which to lift over his head and put on like a vestment.

Losing a child: this remains Jacqui’s secret fear, the one thing she feels she could not bear in this world. She speaks of it rarely, superstitious that mentioning it in the open will test fate. Of course, people bear it, suffer, and go on living. Or do they? And if so, how? A few houses away from us lives a couple in their late forties who woke up one Christmas morning to find their daughter, Cessily, in her crib, cold and not breathing. SIDS, they assume now, but what does giving it a name accomplish? When they speak of her, as they occasionally do, present and past battle it out. She is sometimes the smiling two-year-old on their fridge, sometimes the coltish fourteen-year-old she might have become. Once at a special holiday Christmas service, I heard the father express his thanks to the anonymous someone who drops off a small gift each year at Cessily’s grave—a tiny wreath, a card, a teddy bear. He’s divided: yes, he would like to say thank you in person, but he’s comforted having a silent friend keeping vigil with him, a watcher.

In our front hall hangs an etching of four figures, by Bruce Smith, called The Raising of Lazarus. Because it is an artist’s proof, a practice run, the artist did not intend for it to hang here, or anywhere for that matter, which is why I like it. Loosely rendered, simple with sincerity, this iteration is a lamp by which the artist peers the next ten feet into the darkness. I think of St. John’s account of Lazarus, almost harrowing in its tenderness. Jesus groaning in spirit, weeping with Mary and Martha, then calling Lazarus out of the tomb. One of Christ’s great miracles, commentators say—to raise a man four days dead. According to Jewish tradition, by the fourth day, the spirit no longer lingers near the body, but has moved on. Or as Martha puts it, “By this time he stinketh.” To call back the spirit, then, from that other realm, as Christ did, is to prove His very Divinity. In the artist’s proof, a nimbus floats above Jesus’s head. But which of the remaining figures is Lazarus? When I asked three of my children, each chose a different figure. Is Lazarus the man clutching his breast, or the one with his right arm extended, or the kneeling figure who clasps his head and leans toward Jesus? Perhaps the artist clarifies this ambiguity in a later print. I prefer not knowing, for it invites me to imagine the spirit, a spike of smoky light, re-animating Lazarus, not once, but three times, a process ongoing and repeatable.

We have boxes and boxes of family snapshots, Jacqui and I, but only a few in which we all appear together. In this, we are like my own family growing up, which almost never managed a family shot unless someone was blowing out candles or staring from a national monument during vacation. And by accident or design, Jacqui and I have managed to replicate my family in both size (four children) and birth order (boy, girl, boy, girl). My favorite family snapshot, which I keep in my office, shows the two of us and our children in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, standing beside a park entrance made of deer antlers. Structure out of death. I dislike asking strangers to snap pictures for me, but on this occasion I overcame my reluctance. So here we are, smiling from a shelf devoted to translated poets: Akhmatova, Amichai, Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Cavafy. Translated—I like the way this term begs the question. Begs many questions. Sometimes when I study this snapshot, I picture a seventh face, the way I did when I was the son in the picture. There is always room for that seventh face, like a helium balloon we take turns holding. The balloon floats above Jacqui, or hangs to the left of our youngest, creating a new asymmetrical balance. Sometimes it’s pulled in close on my lap where Jacqui’s thigh touches mine. It’s comforting, finally, that tug of the balloon tied to the wrist, a reminder: even in letting go we don’t let go.