On Father’s Day, I packed up Jules’ nursery for our move to North Carolina. It was an ironic act, or perhaps a symbolic one: I am now the kind of father who is tending to an empty crib.

We have been returning to the world slowly over the last few months. Returning here means re-entering the flow of time, resuming the activities necessary for life. I have taken on more income-generating work. We have been cooking dinner again — as opposed to living on generous offerings of freezer food and gift certificates for take out. After months in our monastery of mourning, we have been venturing out again for various social engagements.

Each of these activities takes a great deal more energy than it did before Jules’ died. Daily life is now bewildering. Underneath every action — and every interaction — a stream of sadness still flows, softly gurgling: How is he still dead? How are we still here? We are exhausted by the mere acknowledgement that we must go on living without him.

As we have rejoined the land of the living, Jules’ nursery has been a place where time remains stopped. When I move too fast, when I do too much, I retreat there. I surrender myself to the world without time, the world where Jules is. Willa does this, too. In the early days, I’d walk into the nursery to find her curled up sleeping on the floor. 

The poet Emily Dickinson, who knew plenty about death and grief, writes:

Death sets a Thing significant
The Eye had hurried by
Except a perished Creature
Entreat us tenderly

To ponder little Workmanships
In Crayon, or in Wool, 
With ‘This was last Her fingers did’…

Dickinson’s words resonate even though Jules’ fingers touched neither crayon nor wool. Still, we continue to smell his little sage-colored jumper, to hold his swaddling blanket in our arms, to read his books aloud.

I would add to Dickinson that death sets a Place significant, too. Death transforms certain sites into axes Mundi, Places where the world of the living connects with the world of the dead. In Pennsylvania, on Fridays — Jules’ birthday, Jules’ death day — Willa and I often sat together in his nursery. 

The Friday before Father’s Day would have been Jules’ six month birthday. That’s why we left the nursery up, even though we were moving to North Carolina just a few days later. We needed to spend that day there with him. 

In Pennsylvania, Jules’ axes Mundi extended beyond his nursery to other Places as well. We found him in our bedroom, where we felt him kick over many months. We saw him as we passed by the hospital where we held him after he died. We imagined walking him in his stroller in the parks near our house when we saw other parents with their babies. We have so little of Jules that these places feel like part of him. 

I am sure that parents of living children have many challenges when moving: no baby wants to sit in the carseat for a ten-hour interstate drive. Uncanny as it may sound, Willa and I faced a different challenge: moving with our dead child. As we prepared to move to North Carolina, we could hear the stream asking: Where will we find Jules now?

I have lived in many places, but moving here and there has left me with a sense of placelessness.

I was born and raised among the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. While I feel at ease near tall peaks and dense forests, it has been many years now since I lived in that place of my youth. 

When I was eighteen, I spent a year in Senegal, West Africa, at the other end of the world, a place about as different as could be imagined. Hot and arid; the people desperately poor, and yet so welcoming and gracious. When I was twenty, I spent half a year in Paris, where people’s dour demeanor matched the cold stone buildings and rainy gray sky. My experience of these lands and their people forever altered the way I see myself and the world, but I always knew that they were temporary places for me.

I made Chicago home for a decade. I met Willa there, in that place both bustling and companionable. The university had pulled us to the city like a great humming heart, together with so many other young people.  It was those people that made Chicago home, more than the many apartments we lived in. But with each passing year, the heart beat again, pushing our friends out into the far flung capillaries of academic life. We felt our home slowly draining away. 

Soon it was our turn. Willa had been offered a temporary position outside Philadelphia, but we knew it would only ever be a way station. We unpacked our boxes, but in my mind we were always just camping there, waiting for what was next.

When I was younger, it all felt like an adventure. Each new place a new self, a new group of friends, an expanded set of experiences. I had a sense that I was transcending the parochial. What does a place matter, anyway?

With time, my rootlessness has become gnawing. I am always on the outside looking in, not quite a part of the community. I have friends in many places, yes, but they are not here. We cannot not invite them over for dinner, or take a walk around the woods, or visit a garden together. We hear their voices on the phone and see their likenesses on the screen, but their bodies, their beings are scattered far from us. We cannot give them a hug. The pandemic has revealed for some the isolating and disorienting nature of this kind of physical separation. For many others, it has only intensified a pre-existing condition.

As we have passed through cities and houses and groups of friends, Willa and I have become knit together in a different way. Home is wherever Willa and I are together. But without a sense of place, our home has lacked a foundation. Without a child, our family has felt hollow.

These two desires — for a child and for a place to call home — became intertwined for us. I suspect these twined desires run deep in our species-being: the urge to nest is elemental. As we waited for Jules’ arrival, we were overjoyed to have a child. We thought his presence would be enough to offset our feeling of placelessness. Now, Willa’s job in North Carolina opens up the prospect of a home built on a stable foundation. Yet our child is missing, dead, not to return.

We kept the question of where Jules’ could live in the forefront of our minds as we looked for a place to live in North Carolina. The house we found is in a semi-rural community, yet another new place, not too far from two new small towns. 

This place is different from anywhere I have ever lived. But it has a large yard, where we can imagine Jules playing in the trees and digging in the dirt. There is a pool where we float in the evenings, like Jules’ floated in the womb. We picture what it would have been like to dip his froggy legs in the cool water on a hot day. Across the street is a small, narrow pond with an old wooden dock at the end and a small green fishing platform on one side. There is also room for his nursery.

If someone had told me before all this that they not only kept their dead child’s nursery, but moved it to a new house, I would have certainly found it odd. Chimpanzee mothers are said to carry their dead children around with them for some period of time; I am carrying not just Jules’ ashes but all of his belongings, just to build a significant Place.

Nonetheless, when I took down Jules’ nursery on Father’s Day I was newly bereft. While his belongings remained in boxes, I strained to hold myself together without my usual axis Mundi, without being able to retreat and reconnect. I only felt a sense of relief several weeks later, when we finally reassembled the crib, put his clothes back into his changing table, and arranged his books on the little bookshelves.

Even as I write to you, I am sitting in a rocking chair in his new nursery, which has been transported from one state to another. A photo of Jules’ sits across from me in his crib, with his jumper and swaddling blankets, and the stuffed animals Willa crocheted for him.

The stream of sadness still runs through our home. There are still days when, before or after work, sometimes even between meetings, I find myself in tears. Now at least, I can retreat here once again, and lose myself in this world without time, the world where Jules is. Because through some magical transference, Jules has moved here with us. We have carried him in our hearts, yes, but we moved his axes Mundi,too. 

In the evenings, the pond across the street is dappled by warm sunlight. Amber hues tickle the the tops of oaks and pines, and mellow the billowy clouds above. The pastoral scene is completed by the regular presence of two young brothers, maybe 6 and 10 years old, who walk down across the grass, along the cattails, to fish on that little green platform. In their dark silhouettes, and the shadows they cast, I see Jules here with us — or at least who he might have been.