As it was, I experienced nothing but the most profound love for Elliot in the moment of his birth and felt more complete than at any other time in my life. A firstborn child. Life created. Magic made mundane by frequency, but still magic nonetheless.

Sometimes I wish I was an empty vessel, that I wasn’t able to feel. Sometimes, in the darker hours, I dwell on what was, and long to be free of the memories of the life I left behind. Was it cruel to leave Elliot? Yes, but it was as cruel on me as it was on him. I had no choice, or at least I didn’t realize the choice I was given. Not until it was too late. I struggle with it every single day. I pray to a god in whom I don’t believe to help me change the unchangeable, but what’s done cannot be undone, at least not by me.

This isn’t an appeal for pity. It’s not supposed to be therapy on a page. I just want you to know that guilt rots my waking moments and that I am as tormented as you are likely to be, when you read what comes next.

Some regrets are so large they create their own gravity, and all emotion is drawn towards a singularity of pain. I spent a long time there, caught in a crushing, dark storm of depression, and I’m afraid if I think about my young son too long, I will return to that Hell.

When I went back to my early work and read the words I’d written so long ago, I realized my reader knew more about me than I did. Laurie was right. The absence of a child was a common theme in my first books. In my second novel, The Constant Child, I wrote:

We are bound to the past, links in a chain that stretches into the infinite unknown. The death of a parent is natural. It is the passing of a soul into history, another link that ties us to the ancient beginning, but the loss of a child breaks that chain. It is unnatural and abhorrent, for the child’s loss is felt in the past and future.

The child is mourned by the souls of their dead ancestors because the chain of which they are a part will go no further. All the hardship those ancestors endured, all the suffering, all the love that forged new links was for nothing, because their story is now at an end.

The child is lamented too by all the future souls who will never be born, who are doomed to exist only in the netherworld of imagination, in the minds of those who ponder what might have been.

And while the ghosts of our ancestors and the spectres of an imagined future mourn, the loss is felt most profoundly of all by the child’s parents, who miss hair to tousle, a smile to brighten their day, and a warm body to hug.