I was taken for lunch, and a tour of the city. I was shown around a medical laboratory. We met for a few more days and talked over how the manikin should work. I made sketches. I promised I would return in no longer than six months with a working prototype.

Back home in Stavanger, when I wasn’t in the workshop designing the manikin’s body, I was searching for her face. I studied women’s magazines, newspapers. I looked for her image on the street, on billboards where lifelike drawings of women advertised cleaning solvents and toothpaste, automobiles and shampoo. She wasn’t in any of these places. I looked for weeks until the faces became meaningless and I began to feel desperate. Winter melted into an early spring and in April, at a Saturday party thrown by neighbours, I turned on their new television set and searched the faces I saw there. But the images on the screen were flat and emotionless and revealed nothing.

I spent a sunny afternoon in the library and found a table in a corner, hidden by stacks, and built a wall of heavily bound books on classical art, hoping I would find her there. Balthus’s Thérèse was too suggestive and Da Vinci’s lady with an ermine seemed to know too much. Manet’s Olympia was too confrontational. The black lace around her neck and the silky, low-heeled slippers on her otherwise naked body suggested she was a prostitute. Schiele’s Edith – too old. The Mona Lisa – too smug.

Botticelli’s Venus made me pause. What I liked about her was the context of the sea at her back and the muscular presence of the wind god Zephyr, puff-cheeked and determined, blowing her to shore. But she was too forlorn, too sexual. I drew her face many times and imagined it in three-dimensional form. And it wasn’t right.

By June 1960, the body of the manikin was finished, including the tube system that would transport the blown air through the mouth and nose to the inflatable chest cavity. Miller and Wolf telephoned me several times over this period, anxious to know when I would be returning with the prototype. But I still hadn’t settled on a face. I took sketches of your mother, your sister. I even sketched your face, wondering if I could somehow interpret it on to the face of the manikin. But your mother forbade this. The idea that yours would represent the face of someone who might be brought back was intolerable to her. I don’t know what I had been thinking.

Where are you, Bear? Does any of it matter, where you are? Do you miss being alive? Do you feel cheated by the things you’ll never do, by what you’ve lost, this. Food-in-your-mouth life, this. Biting into the flesh of an apple, or melting ice cream on the tongue, life. This. Sand-in-your-toes life. Your mother kissing your sleeping eyes. You could never have known how much we loved you.

Should I be afraid? Is there memory, where you are? Is there an echo?