Mirror of Erised

She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes – her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green -- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time.

I reread the first book of the Harry Potter series last week. It’s been a long-long time since I first met The Boy Who Lived. I’ve been trying to remember exactly how old I was then, and I can’t put my finger on it. Young, incredibly young, is the answer that matters. Funny, because I do remember that when I first read it, on my sister’s recommendation, I had to tell myself that it was ok for the much older person that I was to read the children’s/young adult books. You know, because they are good, and they just happen to be being written when I was no longer a child or a young adult. It turns out the definition of “young” changes a lot as one ages. Go figure.

I first read the book in the American edition, but by then I already knew that Sorcerer’s Stone was the weak tea Americanization of the original British Philosopher’s Stone.  I knew about Philosopher’s stone—learned about it from some adventure stories I read when I was actually a bonifide kid growing up in the Old Country. And I remember that the words sorcerer’s stone kept bugging me in the text, as did the references to soccer (because, you know, the rest of the world calls it football) and a few other things. I tell you this because this time I read it in the Old Country Language translation—we got it for Monkey, but as a responsible parent I had to check out the translation, don’t you think?

It’s a good translation, with less than a handful places where I thought the translator didn’t appreciate an idiom or a standard turn of phrase, and as a result, produced a clunky sentence that didn’t read like it belonged. I’ve forgotten some of the plot points, though they all came to mind easily at the first hint of each in the text. The cleverness of descriptions delighted me again. Uncle Vernon wishing hearing Harry’s name to be a figment of his imagination, despite usually wishing to stay far away from imagination and its figments—that made me laugh. 

Monkey is eleven now, the age the protagonists are when the story starts. I realized, reading it this time, that when I first read the book, I imagined them younger. What I am saying is that I knew they were eleven, but my conception of what an eleven year old is was off. And this time the question my close friend raised some years back about whether Slytherin house and kids entering it are too easily stigmatized was close to my mind as I read.

I tell you all of this to emphasize that this time the reading of this book was a much richer experience for me. I knew the plot, but I was seeing it a little bit anew. Reading in a different language made it more of a 3D experience, if you will—it made the language stand as a bit of its own thing, in addition to the story. Reading this time was an experience joyful in a way that stretching is pleasurable after sitting too still for too long. I felt my brain delighting in the multifaceted work it was doing—the “oh, I remember why I like this” and the “yeah, still got it”-- much like I imagine a runner sidetracked by an injury might feel during the first run back, sensory memory of joy in the doing coming back alongside the here and now sensation of her muscles responding to the familiar challenges.

I was on the reader’s high, if you will. Which high carried me straight into a dark room with an ornate mirror resting on clawed feet.  

The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just as Harry's did.

Mirror of Erised. I remember that when I first read the book I liked this mirror as a plot device a lot. I liked that Ron sees what he sees, and how Dumbledore uses the mirror in the end. I even remember being affected by the description of Harry looking at his family, and appreciating the extra punch the mirror packs precisely because Harry has never even seen a photograph of his parents before.

But this time there was something else. This time there was a hard gulp of knowing exactly why Lily Potter in the mirror is smiling, and why she is crying. Lily Potter got to do the one thing many of us have at least once said we would’ve liked to do—she got to trade her life for her child’s. Lily in the mirror is not real, but the mirror shows Harry how she would’ve reacted if she was. Lily in the mirror is not real, but to me she is recognizable.

Because I met my first son only after he was dead, much of what little that I know about him is about what he looked like. I know that my younger son has the same nose as A, for example. But my younger son’s face has changed so much over the years. I have to admit to myself that I have no idea what A would’ve looked like as a six year old.

Once Harry understands what he is looking at, he is searching the faces and figures of his family in the mirror, delighting in recognition. If I got a glimpse of A as a six year old, as an eleven year old… Even if it wasn’t real, I’d drink it in too.

On a related note (it’s related, I promise), if you’ve ever talked about the day your child was born dead or the day your child died as both a happy and a sad day, what reactions did you get? Because I think most people just don’t believe us when we say that. There’s the look of genuine incomprehension that people get. The look may be followed by kind words, the right words. Or it may be followed by a platter of platitudes. Or by nothing at all. And those reactions tell us a great deal about the people who utter them. But the first bit, the incomprehension, I’ve come to see it as a very honest and very human reaction—what people hear in the story is the death, the finality of it, the horror. And they get the sad day part. But I think it takes an extraordinarily wise soul to also get that the very finality of it takes away the luxury of separating the joy from the sorrow—this is the day, and this day is all we get. So we rejoice in the beauty of our children, in the family resemblances, in whatever little things we manage to carve out. Mostly, we rejoice in them having been here, in them being our children.

The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.

Erised is desire spelled backwards, as if read in a mirror. The mirror shows us the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. Lily and James and the rest of the Potters are in the mirror because Harry desperately wants to know them. The story of The Boy Who Lived inverts our stories. Or maybe I should say it reflects them. Harry doesn’t get to separate the joy from the sorrow either. With the mirror he has more than he’s ever had before—he can see where he came from, he can see that he was loved. And that is a lot, and it brings joy. But these people who loved him, they are still dead. In a weird way, because they are no longer abstract ideas of mom and dad, because now they are this mom with green eyes, and this dad with unruly hair, maybe they are actually a little more dead now.  And no matter how many days or nights in a row Harry might’ve come to the mirror, the glass remains, fragile, but as always, impermeable. And the people who loved him remain dead.

And that recipe for a powerful kind of ache is just too familiar.

Have you ever encountered your grief reflected in an unexpected piece of art—a book, a movie, a play, a painting, a photograph? Or tell us what you think you would see in the Mirror of Erised. 

on the bookshelf

I have one shelf in my library with the books about bulging bellies and chunky babies. Witchy books of herbs for pregnancy and the childbearing years. Academic books about development. Unopened books about sleep training. Bought books about gentleness and discipline. Enlightened books about mindful parenting. Bestseller books about what to freak out about when expecting.

When I came home from birthing my stillborn daughter, my only interest in that shelf and those books was the index and the glossary. Every pregnancy book I opened, I searched the back first, fingers holding the pages of the index that read “Stillbirth,” “Death,” “Grief.” Though I now intimately knew what stillbirth was and what exactly happens medically after your child dies in you, I searched for some nugget of understanding about why Lucy died--the physical and the metaphysical reasons. I dug those meager pages for a prescription for survival. I didn’t want to learn how to deal with my heartburn anymore. I wanted to learn how to deal with my heartbreak. The only question I now had about parenting was “How do I move forward?”

Most of those books start their loss sections with the same obvious sentiment, "Every parent's worst nightmare..." And it was all so pat, so obvious, to someone who has suffered a stillbirth. “Make sure the mother holds the baby. Make sure to take pictures. Make sure to grieve.”

Don’t worry I won’t forget to grieve.

When I realized that every loss from miscarriage to stillbirth to SIDS was wrapped up in a glib two-page section, I started collecting my own books. I have a new shelf now. It started after those pregnancy books failed to offer any solace. And it is no exaggeration that each book on that hulking shelf has given me something. I read a book about how other cultures deal with the death of a child, Sookie Miller’s Finding Hope When a Child Dies, which opened up the universal experience and exposed me to babyloss rituals from around the world. I bought children’s books, like Something Happened, that talked specifically about pregnancy loss and losing a sibling so that I could help explain to my daughter why we were so impossibly sad. Reading Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination made me feel like I walked into my best friend’s home. She made a cup of tea, wrapped me in a quilt and shared my own story, only with more humor, insight and love than I could possibly muster at the time. It was the first time I felt understood intimately by another person. I have spiritual books, like When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, that gave me Buddhist teachings on fear and loss. It was a book I bought during my grandfather’s death that I rediscovered after my daughter’s. There are books about surviving pregnancy loss, like Empty Cradle, Broken Heart by Deborah Davis, that gave me some reassurance that these feelings were not eternal, that I would find some place of calm eventually. I have collections of poetry about grief and death, like In the Midst of Winter, which were gifts from friends that simply said by dint of their existence, “You are understood.” I eventually added to my collection a book about pregnancy after loss called unsurprisingly, Pregnancy After Loss by Carol Lanham. That shelf held me together some days, reminding me of the universality of my experience. Simply seeing the book titles together in a row, I was reminded that I was not alone.

Some days, honestly, that was enough.

+++

Jessica, librarian and author of Dear Gus, pulled together an incredible collection of books about grief and loss in Glow in the Woods new section, On the Bookshelf. Please visit for a spell, let her know what you think and what books you found helpful in your grief. She will be expanding and adding to this section. We are so appreciative of her insight and librarian superpowers to expand our resources.

Did you turn to books after your loss? What kinds of book were you looking for? What books did you find that resonated with you? What books have been helpful to you in your grief?



Is that Me you're talking about?

"Is she drunk?" and Alicia whispers back, "I think she was drinking in her room before dinner."

::snip::

All through dinner Lucille has been careening wildly from sadness to elation to despair . . . But as we sit down and begin to eat dessert, she breaks down and sobs silently, her shoulders shaking, her head turned away as though she's going to tuck it in under her wing like a sleeping bird.

::snip::

"What's wrong with your mom?" he asks as I carefully arrange myself next to him, trying not to get stabbed by my dress.

"She's manic-depressive."

"Has she always been?"

"She was better when I was little. She had a baby that died, when I was seven, and that was bad. She tried to kill herself. I found her."

-- The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

I should probably recuse myself here because I am one of the few people on earth who didn't like "The Time Traveler's Wife." But the point remains the same: I was somehow so completely unsurprised to find out that the drunk-by-dinner emotionally vapid and over-reactive mom of the protagonist had a skeleton in her closet: a skeleton of a baby, that is.

What is it with images of mothers who've lost children in popular culture?

I'm sure in my lifetime I've run across this trope a million times between books, the movies, and the television, and yet for the life of me I can't remember many of them that I encountered prior to my own loss. Dead babies were simply a plot device or (as above) character development -- a throw-away line that explained someone's depression or alcoholism or emotional instability. "Ahhh," I can hear myself saying as I read the line, and then moved on to become engrossed by the story's main theme. Now I feel as though I'm a magnet for these storylines, and depending on my mood, and their presentation, my reaction to these literary doppelgangers has been decidedly mixed.

For some fiction, dead babies and children make great plot devices: it's a crime, a mystery, a turning point. A grief-laden springboard from which the rest of the story flows, a sometimes hidden/sometimes overt source of guilt, a crux in a relationship between parents. Recently and notably, there's been "The Rabbit Hole" (an acclaimed play which revolves around parents coming to terms with the death of a 4-year old who ran into traffic) and "Antichrist" (starring Willem Dafoe as half of a grieving couple, whose young child fell out of a window while unattended, apparently because they were next door having a moment, if you catch my drift). (Disclosure: I have not had the wherewithall to watch either of these two productions.) There's at least one recent "Law & Order" depicting a nutty babyloss mom and a few older ones with dead babies as centerpieces; and there's an MI5 from a season ago where a infant-napping goes awry and parents wind up mourning as the mystery unfolds. As many of you are now aware, the first twenty minutes of Pixar's "Up" include a poignant passing reference to either infertility or miscarriage -- a precursor to the balloons uprooting the house and the adventure unravelling as it does. I'm sure there are countless medical dramas that use this riveting ploy, but I stopped watching those two and half years ago. Too close.

Then there's child loss as character development. Think of the quiet, introverted grief-stricken father -- teetering on divorce, by the way -- who spends his life trying to travel and yet not escape the comforting cocoon of his home in "The Accidental Tourist." You just want to hug him, he looks so sad, and eventually Geena Davis does (apparently his grief just needed some fun-time crayzee!). Or another set of parents, in a movie featuring nothing but a relationship, attempting to channel their grief and save their marriage in "Ordinary People." These are "accidents" that happen to "ordinary" parents -- and we're left watching what we assume would be an everyperson, every family type of reaction.  This could happen to me; I hope if it does I find a fun Geena type chick to help me out of it.  Somehow circumscribing these people by grief makes all the sense in world -- or does it?

Sometimes the personality conclusion from babyloss is a real head-scratcher. In the TV series "Damages," Glen Close deliciously plays Patty Hewes, an evil lawer who eventually is revealed to have a violent streak, especially in regards to one of her young, female employees. In the waning minutes of the season one finale, the mystery explaining Patty's personality is finally unveiled: Her baby died. What are they trying to tell me here? Did she miss her dead daughter, who perhaps would now be around the age of her new hiree with whom she has an intense love/hate(/murderous) relationship? Or was she just fucking nuts thanks to grief? The camera passes over a gravestone, backs up to show Glen Close kneeling over it with tears flowing, and then cuts to a flashback in a hospital where things go horribly and vaguely and fuzzily wrong.   We, the viewers, are suddenly meant to understand her -- and an entire season of her icy, bitchy, wild, calculating, sociopathic and homicidal character -- completely. Just like the mom in "Time Traveler's Wife", where with a few throw-away words we're to summarize her identity, her character writ large. And it's not pretty.

What does this all say about me? Where does society (or the literary half) think I'm headed? For divorce? A murderous rampage? The bottle? Hot sex in the woods with Willem Dafoe?

:::

Maybe babyloss is more common than I'm giving it credit for: maybe it really is widespread, hidden beneath the weeds, and all of these authors and television programs are simply stating the obvious, what happens all the time and what everyone knows. Maybe this is the publicity we all need.

Recently In the New York Times Magazine, Gina Bellafante wrote about the novels of Jodi Picoult, and how they all seem to center on children undergoing great peril. Picoult is a best-selling author whose books have spawned movies -- but why? Why does she use this outline, and why on earth are people interested in reading it?

I remarked what a miracle it is that any child survives to the age of 6, given the exposed outlets, tumbling kitchen knives and thousand quotidian threats that are, in a new parent’s mind, colluding toward an entirely opposite outcome. Picoult laughed in sympathy. “You can’t make your kids wear helmets, you just can’t do that,” she told me. The real dangers are, of course, the ones we can’t (or refuse to) anticipate.  

So that's it. Point out the stuff I may not have thought of, expand my horizons. Is that what I am to everyone around me, the one who makes them realize and understand danger? To remind them that bad stuff comes from nowhere and can happen to anyone? And what does the reader take away from countless books highlighting a mother's worst fears?

“Maybe the average reader is not facing the daily challenges of a mom whose child is dying of cancer, for example, but she probably had an argument with her teenager that morning about something inconsequential that left her feeling frustrated and certain there’s no middle ground between them,” she told me. Picoult said she hoped in some sense that her books were the way to that middle ground.

Middle ground? Is that what me and my story represent to the general public? I'm wondering here if Picoult means "perspective" ("Things aren't so bad! We could be treating my kid for cancer!") or "gratefulness" ("At least my child is alive to fight about things like her skirt being too short!"). I would like to think that parents around my neighborhood think about me when they begin yelling at their teenagers, and slowly come to understand some nuance about appreciating life, and taking control of what you can. But frankly, I think Picoult is probably a best-seller because Americans love a car-wreck. They love sitting in fear for a brief moment, and knowing it's a fiction and not happening to them or someone they love. According to some of the anonymous comments on our blogs, some people like absorbing stories of woe and figuring they would handle it differently, or better.

That, I fear, is what I represent to many.  Alcoholics and sociopaths.

:::

I watched last season's "Dollhouse" feeling simultaneously insulted as a woman, and mystified that Joss Whedon could come up with this stuff on a weekly basis. In short, the series follows men but mostly women who are confined in a spa-like building (after signing contracts, though the pressure to sign is questioned) for a period of years during which time their memories and identities are erased. When they're needed for a "job," (usually a callgirl-slash-adventure type gig) an imprint is placed into their heads of the person/-ality they are to be for that particular job. Tension mounts throughout the season as bits and pieces of the Dolls' past flit through their consciousness. In one episode, the Dolls retain their original identities for a a few hours, and with those some of their residual memories. And one Doll -- a female sub-character -- stumbles across a baby carriage and says bewildered, "I had a baby."

"Just watch," I immediately said to my husband on the couch next to me, "her baby's dead."

Sure enough, minutes later, we find her stumbling into a graveyard to recall the death of her child. And this is why, we are left to connect the dots, she agreed so wholeheartedly to signing over her identity and memories for a period of years, never to think of them, the baby, it. To escape the grief, to escape her. To enter a mini coma. To forget (even temporarily) that horrible day or event. To let that ubiquitous Time, pass.

Strangely, that bit of character I got completely. 

Where have you stumbled across babyloss parents in popular culture?  How were they depicted?  Did you find the plot device or character development that ensued to be familiar or unrealistic?  How did it make you feel?