*Rowan

It can be a girl's name, too!
Rowan was born December 31, 2000-and...uh...2011. That sounds right.
She swallowed meconium on the way into the world, pre-infant waste that can cause all sorts of complications when ingested.
She was incubated and one-of-a-kind as Sarah and Peter looked on, helpless.
I was in Halifax, wishing I was home so that I could be in the way, trying to cheer everyone up. Over the phone Sarah told me that the baby may have brain damage because of this. She may have respiratory problems. She may not get to be at all, in fact. It was a waiting game.
Teary-eyed, I got off the phone and immediately went to the Halifax Shopping Center and bought an Xbox 360. I didn't know what else to do.
Rowan is healthy and very clever and she rides the bus to school and her mother would be so proud of her fashion sense and inquisitiveness.
I keep a sort of diary for Rowan now, telling her all about her mother as best I can, intent on giving her the whole collection in some sort of odd ceremony when she's around 14 and I'm God knows how old. Maybe it's my own attempt to fight back at my personal trauma. I try to provide the best representations that I can before years of mourning have convoluted and obscured the exact truth of things.
I am eager and terrified to watch her grow up. I think of the quips yet unuttered, the jabs and clever punchlines I feel she's destined to deliver. That's the danger of a reality such as this one--I'm expecting something of the child that she cannot be.
Remember that Hartman stuff I mentioned earlier? And the Lacan? In his paper, Hartman refers to Lacan, who says, "The relief so commonly expressed on awakening from a dream comes from the realization that (unlike the psychotic) one has not after all fallen into the chaos of the real" (this is on page 539).
I get this, but what does it mean for those who are still living (according to Lacan) within the realms of the real, due to their age? What about those just emerging from the real into the symbolic and imaginary? Those on the cusp? Does it work differently for them?
A day or two after Sarah died, we all sat around the kitchen table of the house on Finn Street. It was dark and we were all quiet, all thinking to ourselves.
We heard crying then, and Rowan was ushered out by one of the concerned adults, to stand before all of us. She said she'd had a nightmare that "Mommy was in a dark room and couldn't get out."
To this day, it is the most chilling memory from all of it--the funeral, all of it. And do you wanna know what popped into my head when she said that to all of us?
"Smart kid..."

 Here's something else I wrote for Rowan.