Be strong, my daughter. Be well, and happy.

With All My Blessings and Hopes,

Your Mother,

Lucy

* * *

A few nights later, having gotten up in the middle of the night to get herself something cool to drink, Lucy’s mother, Henrietta, found her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark, quietly weeping.

“Oh, hon,” said Henrietta, pulling out a chair beside her daughter and sitting down, “what’s wrong? Wait—I know, I know, that’s a dumb question, we both know what’s wrong. I’m always doing that, aren’t I? Asking a question I already know the answer to. It gets worse the older I get. I’m sorry, hon. I guess what I meant to ask is…is there anything I can do to help?” She reached over and took hold of Lucy’s hand.

Lucy looked at her mother, smiled in the darkness, and then shook her head. “No…but thanks, Mom. I was just thinking about…oh, never mind.”

“C’mon,” said Henrietta. “You was just sitting down here thinking about what?”

“About the souls of unborn children.”

“Well, now…that’s maybe not such a bad thing to be thinking about, is it?”

Lucy shrugged. “Depends on the direction your thoughts go.”

“So which direction are yours going in?”

“I…God, Mom…I really...I mean I don’t want to…”

Henrietta’s voice became softer, even more caring than it usually was when she talked to her daughter. “Please tell me about it?”

Lucy considered this for a few moments. Her mother was a very religious person—not fanatically so—her advice to “…read your Bible and be Christian…” was the closest she’d ever come to lecturing Lucy about religious beliefs—but, still, she said her prayers every night, went to mass every Sunday and on all Holy Days (especially at Easter and at midnight on Christmas Eve). While Lucy had always secretly considered herself an Agnostic, she’d never told her mother because she did not want to hurt Henrietta’s feelings; but in this case, right here, right now, with the emptiness and sadness still very much a part of her, diminishing her, gnawing at her, threatening never to go away or allow her a few minutes’ peace, she felt not the least bit guilty about swallowing her concern for others’ feelings and concentrating solely on her own.

“I’ve been sitting here for about an hour,” she said to her mother, “and I think I finally figured something out. I think the Church has it wrong; stillborn or miscarried babies, embryos…they don’t go to Limbo—they become angels. That’s why angels look so terrifying—and they have to look terrifying, or else the angel that appeared to the shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth would not have said ‘Be not afraid’ right away, you know?

“If the miscarried, the malformed, or…or the incomplete babies, the unformed ones, the ones that didn’t grow into what they were supposed to be…if they go to Heaven and keep the physical form they were in when they died, they’d be creatures no one would be able to look at if they encountered them on a city bus. Someone who doesn’t live past birth is spiritually unblemished because they’ve never been hurt or hurt somebody else. They’ve never sinned, or been sinned against, they’ve never been selfish or unreasonable, they’ve never disappointed anyone, or been disappointed. They are pure, untainted, theoretical Possibility—the souls who could become President, or an astronaut, or a genius, even if they do have messed-up genes or major chromosomal abnormalities.