Maybe it’s easier not knowing—easier to feel entirely helpless. My mother says, “What if they had done the autopsy and said, if you’d brought him in a day earlier, he would have been fine?”

When my mother talks about my brother, I think that she sounds wise. “When you have a baby there’s no guarantee of anything,” she says. “A life is just that. And he had a life. If I knew I was only going to have him for three years, I’d still want him. Everything about him I liked.”

My brother died and he kept on being dead; each time I remembered that he had died it was as if I had just remembered a whole other aspect of myself. My brother died and I hadn’t appreciated the way we had been alive together, so elemental that he was my brother even when my back was turned away from him; so elemental it was my whole life itself. We lost him and the sense of family we had made, the way my mother remembers when my grandparents brought Paul and me to the hospital when our sister was born, when she looked at us and thought, this is our family.

In the years that followed, I would stare at every little brother I saw with blonde hair, thinking that he could be mine, misplaced. Back then, there were other mothers at the playground where my mother brought my sister and me. “You’re so lucky you have only girls,” they’d tell her sometimes. “Boys are such a nightmare.”

There were things that I wouldn’t learn until later. That the blood came from his mouth, or maybe somewhere deeper, in his lungs. That my mother waited outside the room he was in and it was the way the nurses looked at her—that was how she knew. That the doctors told her about the brain damage, before, when that was still a possibility, and they said, “Think about what you want to do.”

My mother says, “I remember thinking that I didn’t know if I could be that kind of mother.” I know what she is imagining; the ways things might have been if it had turned out differently, that day. A bed, tubes, apparatuses. Him, still, but growing larger.

My parents waited together, and my mother kept saying, “We have to decide, we have to decide what we are going to do.” And my father said, “No, we should just wait and see what happens.”