"The opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares"

John Updike wrote that line in the December 7, 1963, issue of The New Yorker, in reference to the horrible connotations such ordinary things as an aging movie theater and a particular row of parking meters acquired in the immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

I happened upon it in a posthumous retrospective of Updike's New Yorker contributions, and it set me thinking about the duck-shaped ceramic planter out in the garage; an innocent object Susan and I can't bear to part with—or bring inside the house.

I was sitting at the computer desk in our bedroom when Susan came home from a routine obstetrician's appointment and told me with a quavering voice that the doctor couldn't find our baby's heartbeat.

Gina should have been our sixth daughter. Should have arrived on February14, 1986. But our precious valentine died at 20 weeks in Susan's body, and was delivered stillborn on September 19, 1985. Fully formed. Impossibly tiny. Her cord—no thicker than two twisted strands of yarn—terminating at the partially detached placenta that had caused her death. A doctor placed Gina tenderly in a white plastic bucket, and I regret to this day that I did not kiss her little head before he fixed the lid.

I can't begin to fathom Susan's grief at Gina's loss. I can only imagine an exponentially more wrenching anguish than the crushing heartache that took me completely by surprise. I'd never really wept before; and in the ensuing days and weeks found myself crying at the smallest provocation: a few bars of poignant music on the car radio; a little girl in a pink parka playing in the snow.

Friends sent cards, bouquets, and the duck-shaped planter mentioned above. Hand-painted in muted tones. Overflowing with ivy.

Three years later I wrote this in the journal I was keeping at the time:

9-19-88. I am thinking about you today, Mary Regina, on this third anniversary of the night we lost you forever. You would have been two years and seven months old by now. Toilet-trained and talking. Full of fun and mischief. An angel when asleep. An angel when awake. In my mind I can see me doing for you the things a daddy should do. Holding you on my lap in my corduroy chair. Strapping you into your car seat. Hoisting you into the shopping cart at Farmer Jack, while saying, "Such a big girl!" I always think of you as having reddish-blond hair like your sister Thea's. Blue eyes, of course. There, at the end of the hall, by the clothes hamper, you sit on the floor wailing about the toy Kelly grabbed from you. I come, full of sympathy, lift you and hold you near, feel the cool skin of your cheek against mine and the wet trace of your tears. God bless you, my daughter.

Well, that journal entry was about 20 years old when I was viewing an episode of Medium one Monday night and got weepy all over again for Gina.

The principal character, Allison DuBois, was dreaming that she and her grown-up son—who had died as a child—were driving somewhere in a car. And as I was looking at that vivacious young man, I began envisioning Baby Gina as a vibrant young woman of around 22, and completely lost it.

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From an e-mail to a friend dated June 7, 2007

My father-in-law is 81. He is dying of congestive heart failure. His kidneys are just about shot and it's just a matter of days. My mother-in-law took him to the hospice yesterday. His last trip to anywhere.

This man has been an object of scorn for me as long as I've known him. He treated Susan and her brother badly after marrying their mother when Susan was twelve. Needless to say, he was the model of prospective-stepparent perfection prior to tying the knot. Then he kicked Susan out of the house when she was just seventeen.

He'd promised Susan's mom he'd support her, that she could quit her job. Also needless to say, neither of those things ever happened; in fact, he retired a good dozen years before she did—from part-time self-employment mowing lawns. It was she who supported him, for the most part, from their wedding day forward.

And the band just played on and on and on.

Now he's teetering at the edge of oblivion, Will, and I find that I no longer harbor so much as a shred of rancor toward him within my amply larded breast. I am glad of that, and at the same time I feel sorry that I have resented him for my wife's sake for so many years—especially since Susan (a better human being than I can ever hope to be) has never, ever, ever treated him with less than the courtesy and consideration that every father considers his due. Her goodness indicts my humanity, mocks my pretensions of decency, makes me feel ashamed.

Last evening, at dinner, she told me something so piercingly poignant that it brought me almost to tears for Hank—a thing I never would have imagined possible.

She told me that her mother drove Hank home from the hospital yesterday afternoon to collect a few things before taking him to the hospice, where his medications would be discontinued and his exit from this earth eased in all ways possible. But as they were about to leave the house, Hank told Nancy he wanted to complete the nearly finished jigsaw puzzle he'd been working on for weeks.

And then he sat down at the table and put the handful of remaining pieces into place before getting back in the car.

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