Because he is dead.
He is dead.
He is dead, dead, dead.
As dead as a doornail. As dead as a dodo. As dead as yesterday's front page news.
He went from cradle to grave in six hours flat. The dead go quickly, sometimes. So quickly, they leave. Even if there's time for a fond farewell it feels like they've slipped through your fingers just before you've finished your sentence.
For the second time I let them put him in a box and screw the lid on, tighter and tighter, until he's out of sight. He's a baby in a box. Sounds like some kind of novelty toy.
His brand new cot also lies in a box, waiting for the baby that never came home. It's a big box; unwieldy and impossible to hide in our small house. Much bigger than the tiny cube in which the baby lies crushed up and burned.
It's a pretty urn. As pretty as an urn for a dead baby gets.
I get it home and suddenly I'm incensed. It shouldn't be in my living room. WHY IS IT IN MY LIVING ROOM? Why? Fucking why?
I'm half inclined to smash it after all that. That's what I think of baby dust. It doesn't feel sacred. I don't know what's in there, but it sure as hell isn't my baby - the one with the soft, velvet cheeks and the tiny little mouth perpetually opened as if he were getting ready to coo to me the sweetest ever song.
I want to grind those ashes into a paste and plaster it across my face, and the face of every single person I know. I want them to know what it feels like to have dead baby all over you, as I will every single day for the rest of my life. I want to make some kind of mark on them, even the ones I love, so when I see them I will know that we are all in this together. A mark like we are the chosen ones, like the priest gives good Catholics on Ash Wednesday.
No one wants to hear this, but I picture my baby in the fire where they burned his precious infant body. I'm scared to put those images into words - the words are too, too brutal. Blistering, shrivelling, disappearing into. . . nothing. . . I wish I'd mummified him and kept him in a display case like the priceless objet d'art he was. He was a valuable original, impossible to reproduce. He was a masterpiece lost forever to us.
Ashes can't be remade into solid form, so he's not eligible for the much talked of heavenly resurrection. There's laws of physics, I'm sure, that could give me an exact answer as to why I can't make him whole again. I wish I knew them. Maybe then I'd understand.
He's dead, you know. Oh, my baby. He's dead. He's still dead, where once, for a few magical hours, he was alive. But now he's dead, dead, dead. My baby is bloody, fucking, dead.
