Content warning and author’s note: This post discusses infant death. While the theme for this month is reflecting on a previous essay, I asked permission to forego the theme to address a topic that’s very sensitive and specific to June 2024.
I remember the first time I learned how to construct the conditional past tense in French, back in high school.
Conjugating was my favorite part of learning a language, so I was pumped up and ready to put this dull new superpower to use. As God was my witness, I was going to forcefully shove the conditional past into my assignments like nobody’s business. Unfortunately, as I was soon to discover, this is tricky to do—you have to be clever to find ways to sprinkle a “would have been” in a sea of passé composé or imparfait, and the opportunity didn’t always present itself.
At least, not in a classroom setting.
Because in real life, whether spoken or thought, we find ourselves using this tense constantly. It ties us to wonder; it ties us to regret. If only I’d gotten a role in that play, I would have become such good friends with the other actors. If only I’d gone to school elsewhere, I might have encountered some new extracurricular. If only I hadn’t quit that instrument, if only I were abroad right now, if only, if only.
If my brother had lived, he would have been 23 this Sunday.
A golden birthday refers to the year when someone’s age aligns with the date they were born on. I celebrated mine at a whopping three years old, but some people are lucky and get to celebrate when their frontal lobe is a bit more developed. This year would have seen Nolan’s golden birthday come along at a ripe age to celebrate it.
I can’t say why I’ve begun to think about him more in recent years—maybe struggling through the transition through my twenties gives me a phantom empathy for the brother forging the same path behind me. I’m fortunate in that my feelings about him usually take the shape of curiosity instead of sadness. He died when he was three months old, which means we all didn’t get much time to know him. I can’t help but wonder how his life might have unfolded.
Thinking about loved ones passing away through the conditional past tense is not a new thought. But when someone dies so young, the conditional is all you really can ponder.
Would he have been musically inclined? Maybe he would have taken up the guitar or banjo like my brothers and Dad, or maybe he’d be a choir nerd like me. Maybe he wouldn’t care to make music, but maybe his favorite genre would be something obscure, like alternative electronic ska. I wonder if he’d live in Ohio with the rest of my immediate family, or if he’d live closer to me in Michigan. Or maybe, God forbid, he’d live a life that didn’t mirror everyone else in the family, as a plot twist. Maybe he’d be en route to Antarctica right now.
Or maybe the difficulty of living with a severe heart condition would make that kind of travel challenging.
Would we get along? Send each other memes? Would he be into gardening like my oldest brother? Would he have fallen into an interest in game development at the same time my second brother did, in middle school? Joined my mom and I for our yearly summer tradition of reading a book together throughout college?
Maybe he wouldn’t have, I don’t know. My family spends a lot of time visualizing the different branches one’s life can take, as if to retrace a blueprint and see how things would have turned out if we’d made a different choice along the way. If my mom had attended a different college, maybe she would have stayed in dance longer after graduating. If I hadn’t had health problems, maybe school wouldn’t have been so challenging. But the inevitable realization at the end of these imaginings has to be that life is too complicated to predict such things. If you were miraculously the rare and impossible human that managed to snap themselves into shape and only make wise and courageous choices and never be hindered by fear or trauma, you could still have fallen ill or disliked the route you were on or made a mistake down the line. There is no path that ends perfectly.
I don’t know if there’s a parallel world where he does any of these things. But I like to imagine it, sometimes.
I suppose, depending on your thoughts on what happens after death, maybe he already has. Maybe he still will.
Happy (almost) birthday, Nolan.
Hannah McNulty graduated from Calvin in 2021 and stuck around Grand Rapids, against all odds. She has spent her last few years singing in choir, teaching herself to love reading again, and trying to learn every fiber art simultaneously. She currently works at Eerdmans Publishing, where you can find her burying her nose in old paperwork and forcing anyone within earshot to listen to her bad puns.