In 1983 I turned fourteen, under the wings of low-flying planes out of Logan. I dreamed of becoming a famous novelist. I had read the first five John Irving novels, and tried to emulate. Mr Greenblatt was kind enough to red-pen my ten-thumbed efforts at fiction; this is how I learned the difference between "lie" and "lay." The Police had a smash with the Synchronicity album. Modern English would “stop the world and melt with you.” Donna Summer was working hard for the money. And Jennifer Beals was igniting the screen with welder’s sparks and precision footwork in Flashdance.

It was the year that Mom and Dad and I travelled to Wisconsin to visit Dad’s cousin Stephanie and her husband Teddy, who lived outside Green Bay: Mom suggested that we all visit the shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Champion: the site where the Blessed Virgin Mary is said to have appeared and spoken to a little girl named Adele over a hundred years ago. In a miracle rivalling that of the reputed apparition, Dad agreed. Mom said a few short prayers as she knelt before a statue of the young visionary, and we left.

Mom had some things she wanted to pray for. Back in Boston, Nana (Mom’s mom) was at St Margaret’s, a Catholic facility for the incurable. Alzheimer's had already claimed her mind, and was putting her body through its last ravages. It was August. I was about to start my sophomore year at the Waldo, Emerson High, to navigate once more the teenage world of unrequited crushes, forbidding cliques, cool and uncool music.

One afternoon, Mom told me that she was expecting, that after years of only-childhood, I’d soon have a little sibling to cherish and be a brother to. Not long after that, Dad announced that he'd be leaving unless she got unpregnant. Wowzers. One and done for the big guy, I guess. I tried self-deprecation to soften him: "Are you worried it'll be another me?"

But he was resolute: he wanted nothing to do with second fatherhood. For her part, Mom was determined to give birth. Still, being nearly forty and under stress, Nana dying, husband about to leave, Mom was having attacks of anxiety.

Before I left for school the morning of September 15th, the day the Church commemorates Our Lady of Sorrows, Mom told me in a quavering voice that she had woken during the night in pain and bleeding, and had lost the baby. (Lost, but now I wonder: was the loss engineered to save a desperate marriage? Did Mom see a bleak prospect for life as a single working parent in her forties? Did she capitulate to Dad, saying in effect, “Thy will, not mine, be done”?)

In any event, no need for Dad to pack his bags. He turned to me later that day and said: "Well, I guess there'll never be another you."