Today is what Willa and I call “Jules’ Day,” the day of the month when Jules was born and when he died. He would have been eleven months old today and I miss him dearly.

Willa was the first to say, “I miss Jules,”after we returned home from the hospital in December. At first, the locution sounded odd to me. Ordinarily we miss people who are far from us, people we have not seen in many years, people with whom we have lost touch. In all these cases, we miss people we know, people of whom we have memories. 

Sometimes, we miss Jules in this everyday sense. We miss the Jules’ who transformed from non-being into being over the course of 40 weeks and 5 days. We miss the Jules who was so active in the womb, kicking and squirming and rolling. We miss the Jules whose beautiful body we held in the hospital, after he had died. Here the activity of missing someone corresponds to recalling memories of actual events, to relational encounters of some sort. This everyday sense of missing someone is no doubt central for many who mourn. They can conjure memories of their loved one to mind. They know who it is that they are missing.

But what is it to miss someone you never really knew? What is it to miss someone who death stole from you before you could even meet fully them?

That is a different kind of missing. Missing here means: someone who you expected, who isn’t here. It means: someone who possessed a set of very real possibilities — Jules was a fully-formed human, after all, entirely capable of living outside the womb — but whose life was taken so early on that you can imagine his person in a nearly limitless number of ways. It means: a world you inhabit, but are no longer at home in, because the person you want to be here is absent. 

Though that isn’t quite right either. Here, absence fades into a kind of omnipresence. Have you ever been in an elevator with mirrors on two sides? You see reflections of yourself stretching backward and forward to infinity. That is what I see in my mind I when I think of Jules and Willa and me. We are standing there, and there are hundreds, thousands, millions of us, stretching backward and forward.

There are some places where I expect to see such reflections. A few weekends back, Willa and I decided to go out to breakfast. It felt like an accomplishment of normalcy — letting ourselves enjoy a lazy weekend. Not always easy. We drove down the road to a little café. The place was packed and the kitchen took forever with our order. As we chatted, a lovely granola-looking couple appeared outside the restaurant with their baby: a sweet red-headed girl, maybe five months old. Her hair was a deep red, not strawberry blonde like our Jules, but still, there was his reflection. There was an image of our family. 

Here I can see what I am missing: life through a looking glass. I couldn’t quite decide whether to look on the family with my hungry eyes or if it was best to avoid looking for the sheer sadness that came over me with every fleeting glance.

They sip lattes in the late morning light as the mother bounces the baby against her chest. They are unthinking, of course, about the possibility that their arms could be empty. The dad is frittering his time away on his phone: reading his email, or checking social media, or catching up on the news. There will always more time to spend with baby, won’t there? They do not know that she could vanish in an instant. That they could vanish in an instant. How easy it is to take our lives for granted. Even now, knowing what I know, I feel myself doing it.

Just as our breakfast arrived, the waitress seated the little family beside us. We were horrified. In the looking glass world, this may have been the moment when we became friends: Oh, you have a redheaded baby, too. What’s her name? How old is she?  In this world, Willa and I desperately rearranged our seats at the table so we didn’t have to behold their sweet child, their everyday, sleepy-eyed contentment. Sometimes the mirrors are too painful to look into. But you can’t really ask the waitress for another table mid-meal, can you? Or tell the couple that their little family is too gallingly beautiful to look at, your look-alike infant being dead and all?

We studiously avoided eye-contact, then made for the exits. Of course, we could not find the exit we are looking for most, the exit from this world where we are missing Jules because he is missing from us. There are mirrors and windows in which we can still glimpse other possible worlds, but those worlds are now set at an infinite distance from us. There are no portals, no doors to the parallel world the little family reminds us of, the world where we are with Jules and he is with us.

These encounters with parents and children happen frequently. Over the summer, the Farmer’s Market was always a set of double mirrors for us: family after family reflecting our own missing family back to us. Images of Jules as a newborn, an infant, a toddler, a young boy pass across each little face we see. Fantasies of what life would be like for us here, now, with him, his little hand reaching out, exploring, grasping this and that as we passed through the produce stands. 

Before, when we were struggling to have a child, I felt growing anger and jealousy and resentment towards other parents. Now, I mostly feel hollow and numb, drained of desire as these reflections pass before my eyes. 

Always, though, I am torn between looking and not looking. Because Jules was our first child, we cannot even properly imagine what he might be like now. We bought the Mayo Guide to a child’s first years so we could have some inkling. By now, he would likely be able to say “dada” and “momma.” He would be sitting upright confidently, and learning to stand. He would be crawling everywhere and learning to throw things. No doubt we’d be exhausted keeping up with him. Now, only his reflections can exhaust us. I look at them until sorrow forces me to turn away. 

Other mirrors are unexpected, the refractions more oblique. I have long lived in a disenchanted world. I have never seen a miracle that bends the laws of science, I have never met an angel or a ghost, I do not believe that when this world ends we will find ourselves in some new Jerusalem. Yet, again and again, my yearning leads beyond my pre-conceptions, opening me to some sort of symbolic communion with the dead. Certain moments spark a sense of tenderness and connection in me, whatever I may make of them.

I saw Jules in the two sparrow hatchlings that tottered around and tested their wings on our walkway in Pennsylvania in the spring. And I saw Jules the next morning, after the storm, when one of the hatchlings lay dead, its parent perched on the power line overhead, looking down at the little corpse. (Nature: extravagant in wastefulness and cruelty.) I saw Jules in the frogs that were everywhere around our new house this summer, their fragile legs and skin so reminiscent of his own. I saw Jules in the hummingbird that flew from the feeder to hover before my face, looking deep into my eyes, close enough to touch.

I have heard of other parents — mostly parents of older children, who have more memories to work with — encountering their dead children in dreams. I want some reflection of Jules to visit me in my dreams, but mostly he is absent. I did have a dream in which my great uncle Louie and my grandfather Bud (who I never met) were with me at a family gathering. Oh, how I loved the holidays with Uncle Louie and my Auntie Edna Louise (Jules’ namesakes). Just being there in the dream with Uncle Louie brought a kind of comfort. I did not see Jules, but Louie and Bud assured me that Jules was with them, that he was a good and wonderful boy. How could I not wish that it were so?  

Some parents talk of these strange and powerful moments as robust relational encounters, actual meetings with the children they have lost. Before all this, I would have said they lack the courage to face up to the reality of their loss and the finality of death. Perhaps. Yet these beliefs originate in a particular kind of experience. We are meaning-making animals. The world speaks to us in signs and symbols. Their metaphysical explanations are an attempt to do justice to the strength of their connection to their loved ones, to the fact that “love is stronger than death” as the author of Song of Songs writes. 

Yet, I cannot quite bring myself to join them. When I reach out to touch Jules, I find that all these images in all these mirrors are but shallow reflections. Whatever it might mean to say that love is stronger than death, it does not mean that Jules is here as flesh and blood.

So, many times, when I say that I am missing Jules, all I feel is Jules’ absence as absence. All I wish is that he were here. Here missing means: to discover again and again that Jules is gone. It means that I cannot ever really know what Jules might have been like because he was denied the very thing that matters most: his life. It means that whatever connection I might feel with him, it will never be the connection I most desire.

Missing Jules in this way is less of a particular experience, than a moment in which I become aware of a certain quality of all my experience. Just as Jules’ death both is and is not an event, so the experience of missing him both is and is not a particular experience. 

Perhaps it helps to draw a distinction between the activity of missing someone and the experience of someone as missing. Missing someone involves holding their presence in the imagination: memories and mirrors and so on. When someone is missing, something more general is at work. In every encounter with the things of this world, the things that are present, we cannot find the person we are looking for. To miss someone in this way is to experience them as absent. While it is true that when we are missing someone in this way, we can undertake a particular activity of the mind, an audit in which we recognize that our searching has been in vain, it is also true that all our experience is marked by the ever present quality of their absence. 

Following Jules death, the whole world has taken on this uncanny hue, colored by his absence. A perpetual state of missing. I suspect this is a widely shared experience of grief, particularly following a sudden death. Perhaps this is all the more true in the case of stillbirth and infant loss because one knows so little about the person who has been lost.In all cases, however, I suspect that the existential nature of this kind of loss is one reason why sadness is always there, beneath the surface: the presence of the entire world is a reminder of someone’s absence.

There is a kind of religious experience in which one encounters the divine precisely in the combination of absence and desire. That is why, at Jules’ memorial, I wanted to sing this song from the brothers at the Taizé monastery in France:

De noche, iremos, de noche, que para en contrar la fuente,
sólo la sed nos alumbra, sólo la sed nos alumbra.

By night, we hasten, in darkness, to search for living water,
only our thirst leads us onward, only our thirst leads us onward. 

In this tradition, we encounter God not as a Being among beings — for how then could God be God? Would God not then be another just another thing, one among many? — but as a kind of absence that nevertheless marks all of our experience and who we grasp only by desire. Different mystics and thinkers have described this experience of presence as absence in different ways: in the encounter with the world around us as “gift” or in our “feeling of absolute dependence” or in the transcendent reality of the beautiful and the good.

This way of thinking has a long history within Christianity and the Abrahamic faiths. We find it in the very first chapter of Genesis, where God, ‘Elohim, is absent from creation. His pervades the garden only by his image (man) and his word (creation). He Himself is not there. (Only later, when the creation story is told for a second time, does the Lord God, Yahweh, appear in a bodily form upon the earth.)

The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil belongs to this tradition of religious experience. She writes, “God can only be present in creation as a kind of absence.” Creation is not, for Weil, the result of God’s ecstatic “expansion,” but an act of love by which God empties Himself through a kind of “restraint and renunciation.” Creation and Christ’s crucifixion are thus one and the same act, a perpetual act through which God distances Himself from Himself and thereby creates space for us to exist as independent beings. Yet, even in God’s absence from creation, desire leads us to see in our experience that which lies beyond it. Weil puts it this way:

Case of contradictory truths. God exists, God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am completely sure that there is a God, in the sense that I am completely sure that my love is not illusory. I am completely sure that nothing real resembles that which I can conceive of when I say that name [God]. But that which I cannot conceive of is not an illusion.

The task of the religious believer, according to Weil, lies in living with and maintaining this contradiction between absence and desire. “The one who we must love,” Weil insists, “is absent.”

There is much that could be said about Wel’s conception of God, which she connects directly to the experience of suffering and evil. What interests me at present is that the situation faced by the religious believer in this conception of the world parallels the situation of the parent whose child has died. In both cases, the beloved is missing. One is left with the difficult task of loving — of maintaining a relationship with — someone who is absent. 

Weil herself remarks on the experience of death in terms that echo the experience of God:

To lose someone: we suffer because the dead person, the absent one becomes imaginary, false. But the desire that we have for them is not imaginary. One must descend into oneself, where the desire that is not imaginary resides. Hunger: we imagine food, but the hunger itself is real: hold onto hunger. The presence of the dead one is imaginary, but his absence is truly real. It is from now on his manner of appearing.

Weil’s words carry an implicit command to her reader. She is urging us to resist substituting the imaginary for the real. For her, we encounter the one who is missing in our love for them, not in the reflections that pass across the mirrors of this world. 

Here, I find myself recoiling from Weil’s thought. Like the existentialists, she presents her rejection of the imaginary in heroic terms. She implies that it takes a kind of courage that others lack;  for they content themselves with various kinds of illusion. But for me, it is of vital importance that I can encounter something of Jules in my imaginings of him. There is a sense in which Weil is right: they are not real, for he is dead. But only by allowing myself to see these reflections can I fully comprehend what both he and I have lost: his life. Through the imagination, I paradoxically grasp something real, something about the shape of who is missing: my son.

Nonetheless, Weil’s words do speak to my experience of living in a disenchanted world, a world in which I cannot find an active God: no God who might have listened to my prayers to save Jules, no God who punishes the evildoer and rewards the faithful, no God who conforms to any human conception of goodness. 

Weil’s words speak to my experience of living in a world where Jules is missing, where every image remains imaginary, a mere reflection of my desire. 

Weil’s words ring true when she suggests that the place where I most fully encounter Jules is in my own love for him, now that he is nowhere to be found in this world. One might detect a kind of romanticism at work. Perhaps. But even here, I can find no consolation, no resolution of the contradiction that I encounter. All I am left with is the perpetual experience of loving Jules who is missing, of desire that can find no satisfaction.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash