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for the illegal possession of marijuana. A month after his release they made possession a misdemeanor, punishable by a twenty dollar fine. Worse still, Glenn Wilson, whose only utteranceafter a six pack of beer was always “Far out, man!” which he would say, for no apparent reason, at the most inappropriate of times. Harmless drunks and ne’er-dowells, my father looked suspicious of my choice of friends.
    My mother thanked God I had not been killed, then fixed her eyes on me in a way it seemed she’d had some practice at—casting the cold eye of the long suffering in the face ofa boozy loved one. My father had quit drinking the year before, joined A.A., began going to meetings. My brothers and I had been a little surprised by this as we had never seen him drunk before. I had overheard my mother’s sister once, complaining aloud about my father’s drinking. I must have been six or eight years old. Imarched down to Aunt Pat’s on the next block and told her outright thatmy father wasn’t a drunk. And once, the Christmas after his father had died, I heard him and my mother come home late. He was raving a little. I thought it must be grief. He insisted the doctor be called. He said he was having a heart attack. The doctor, I think, tried to cover for him, behaved as if there was something wrong other than drink. In any case, by the time I’d taken my dive off the balcony,my father had a year’s sobriety under his belt and should have been able to recognize an inebriate when he saw one. But instead of a curse, he saw blessing: his son, somewhat broken but reparable and alive.
    Now they are both dead and I reckon a fixture in my father’s heaven is the absence of any of his children there, and a fixture in my mother’s is the intuition that we will all follow, sooneror later but certainly.
    W e parent the way we were parented. The year they began to make real sense to me was 1974. In February the first of my children was born. In June we purchased the funeral home in Milford. I was a new parent and the new undertaker in a town where births and deaths are noticed. And one of the things I noticed was the number of stillbirths and fetal deaths we were calledupon to handle. There was no nearby hospital twenty years ago; no medical office buildings around town. The prenatal care was not what it should be, and in addition to the hundred adult funerals we handled every year in those days, we would be called upon to take care of the burial of maybe a dozen infants—babies born dead, or born living but soon dead from some anomaly, and several every year fromwhat used to be called crib death and is now called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
    I would sit with the moms and dads of these babies—dead of no discernible cause—they simply forgot to breathe, trying tomake some sense of all of it. The fathers, used to protecting and paying, felt helpless. The mothers seemed to carry a pain in their innards that made them appear breakable. The overwhelmingmessage on their faces was that nothing mattered anymore, nothing. We would arrange little wakes and graveside services, order in the tiny caskets with the reversible interiors of pink and blue, dust off the “baby bier” on which the casket would rest during the visitation, and shrink all the customs and accouterments to fit this hurt.
    When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past weimagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.
    But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners andfencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams.
    And I remember in those first years