When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
     For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.

My sister wants two little angels for our parents’ gravesite, and it’s been my job since we talked about it last year to procure them. True to form, I went shopping in earnest for them yesterday, because our annual Pilgrimage to the Shrine is set for Tuesday.

Completing this task seventy-two hours before deadline rather then twenty-four or even two actually represents an advance in responsibility and efficiency for me. I have a habit of accepting assignments like this and then carrying around the thought of acting on them for so long that the thought becomes a burden and the need to follow through urgent.

I have an idea that my sister envisions gray angels made of some imitation granite, to match the color of the headstone. I couldn’t find any of that type that seemed suitable, especially in two different poses. I chose instead the terra cotta figures pictured at left. I know they are technically fairies, not angels, but I liked them.

The figures are meant to represent me and Rosie. The small prone figure actually is an angel, (or what people picture when they say “angel”) and I chose that to represent the child that my mother lost.

My mother was 35 and my father six months short of 30 when they married in 1946. Family planning was then, at best, an inexact science, even for those who did not take their guidance from Catholic teaching. Therefore, a scant nine months after the wedding, I was born. Three years later, my sister arrived. In between, there was The Other One.

What I know of The Other One I've stitched into story from the little my mother has ever offered. As a teenager I once heard her talking to her sister on the phone. Aunt Mary had called to report that her daughter-in-law had that morning been delivered of a stillborn child. "Well, that's something we've all been through," my mother said. "Nine months of effort and nothing to show for it." Her voice that day had a cold edge I would come to know well. I would hear it whenever I tried to share a sorrow or a disappointment of my own which she judged frivolous.

Eventually I would learn that my sister was not her second child, but her third. The second was lost when I was ten months old. She told me once a little of what happened -- a miscarriage in progress, her standing at my crib convinced that she was looking at me for the last time, her crying "Save the baby! Save the baby!" as the emergency room doctor said bluntly, "The head's out." She would talk of her rage at having to spend her recovery days in the same room as happier mothers who nursed their infants and cooed their names.

I asked my mother once if this child had been a boy or a girl. She looked at me as if I had asked what color its tail was. "Well, I don't know," she said, her tone indicating that the conversation was over.

I was left with even more questions. If it had a head, it had a body, I reasoned. So what kind was it? If a living fetus is not supposed to be aborted because it's a person, shouldn't a dead one that delivers itself into your hands be buried, like a person? Had that been done for this child? If not, what happened to it?

And a name. Did this child have a name? From the moment my mother discovered she was pregnant for the first time, the child within her was Michael, for her father. I once found a box of things that she had saved from my babyhood -- a invitation to a shower given by some of her friends, the cards that had been attached to their gifts. There were the congratulatory cards after my birth, and her thank-you note list, each item and donor neatly checked off. And there was a letter from my mother's best friend, a woman who would become my violin teacher. It began "Dear Mike," welcomed me into the world, and told me how much I would come to like my unusual name. It seems that when I turned out to be a girl, my mother became determined to name me Michael anyway. It had taken weeks for friends to dissuade her.

When she became pregnant the second time, did she choose a name? Certainly Michael again for a boy, but what if it had been a girl? Would it have been Rosemary, and the child who became my sister Rosie then something else? When the child was lost, did she give it a name anyway?

Chances are she did not. In fact, the chances are good that she never saw it, held it, or participated in any traditional "arrangements" for it. In those days the procedure in such circumstances was to take care of matters as quickly and quietly as possible, with a minimum of involvement demanded of the disappointed parents. This was thought to be a help in minimizing their pain and helping them to return to "normal." My mother always believed in the wisdom of experts. If a doctor or a priest or a symphony conductor
suggested a course of action, she generally followed it. If someone said to her, "This was all for the best. Put it out of your mind," then that is what she did.

Once I thought about these things while on a spiritual retreat. I didn’t want to press my mother for more details because to do so might cause her distress that she was unprepared to process. Instead I laid my questions before God, and in prayer was led to the scene of my mother's travail. In the vision I saw her face contorted in pain, her hand clutching the rails of the crib where I lay sleeping. She screamed and expelled her dead infant. Its face was composed and serene, and it neither moved nor breathed. Those in charge shrouded it quickly and bore it away, and I, watching through the mists of time and space, was the only one who knew that it was a girl.

Four generations of Catholics in this city have been served by a single family of funeral directors, the Daileys. When my mother died in 1993 I asked Tim, my age and currently in charge, if his family had performed a service for my family in early 1948. He graciously checked his records, recently converted to an electronic database, and found that apparently they had not.

He said that sometimes, in the forties and fifties, if the family did not want to undertake the task of burying the remains, the hospital might do so for fetuses of advanced development, often in a "potter's field" area in a local cemetery. And if not that? Well, then, the remains would become ordinary medical waste, and be dealt with accordingly.

I called the hospital, still in operation right along the river in the south end of the city. Someone knowledgeable about these things told me that, alas, all records from that time had been lost in the flood caused by Hurricane Agnes in 1972.

I’m revisiting a familiar theme here -- lost children, forgotten souls. To my knowledge, my lost sibling has no gravesite, nor a name, nor any other identity. In another spiritual exercise I once gave her a name, Maura Michaela, the Gaelic word for “dark” and the Gaelic feminine of my grandfather’s name. And sometimes I imagine that the stone marked “Anna,” my great-grandmother’s name, rescued from the cemetery refuse pile and installed in my garden, stands for this child.

Last week, when I wrote “My Back Pages,” I thought a lot about how each event in a life contributes to the next one, that even as minor a choice as a decision not to throw away a pack of letters will color in some way the events which follow. And today I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a family of three children instead of two.