The World is Full of Fair Unfinished Things

After my son Rainer died – he was all of six weeks old – we hung the yellow and white knit cap he wore on the mirror of our dresser. He could not regulate his body temperature (among other things) so he needed a cap to help keep his head warm.

It sounds pitifully sentimental in hindsight, but throughout the day or night I would pick up the cap and breathe in the smell of his head and hair – that wonderful baby smell. You hold on however you can, eh?

Eventually the scent faded.

Here is a poem from a book-length collection of sonnets, Mimma Bella, by Eugene Lee Hamilton, on losing his child.

Lo, through the open window of the room
That was her nursery, a small bright spark
Comes wandering in, as falls the summer dark,
And with a measured flight explores the gloom.

As if it sought, among the things that loom
Vague in the dusk, for some familiar mark,
And like a light on some wee unseen bark,
It tacks in search of who knows what or whom.

I know 'tis but a fire-fly; yet its flight,
So straight, so measured, round the empty bed,
Might be a little soul's that night sets free;

And as it nears, I feel my heart grow tight
With something like a superstitious dread,
And watch it breathless, lest it should be she.


I, too, would be breathless before the spark. Godamn those empty rooms.