At the end of this post is a short short story I wrote which is about the death of a child.

I wrote it a few years back for a short short story competition. (It didn't get anywhere.)

Last year, my friend Sarah Laing had this to say about dead children in literature:

'I am ambivalent about dead children in literature. For me, it's the ultimate taboo, I don't want to think about children dying, I resist engaging because it is one of the saddest things I can think of. Sometimes I think it is a cheap trick by writers, to force emotion out of their audience. It feels like a device, a tool. But perhaps that 's the point of art, to provide semulcrums of grief, love, rage – practice runs so we are better equipped for the real thing...' (see link for her full musings on the topic).

When I read Sarah's post, I thought of my story. She is right of course. How awful, how mawkish and manipulative to write about a child dying, because anyone with an ounce of humanity will have an emotional reaction to even the two words in close proximity: 'child die'. You could potentially get away with terrible writing because the reader will be so sad about the dead child they won't notice.

I think she is also right in her idea that sometimes writers go to these ugly, unthinkable places as a sort of emotional rehearsal. I know that is what I was doing when I wrote this story. I was undergoing a different kind of grief about one of my sons. (He wasn't dead, but I had lost him all the same, for a while anyway.) I think I wrote this to prod at that grief a bit, to push it into fiction and see how the grief looked there. Also, I think mothers writing about dead children is like a Mexican sugar skull – laugh at death, defy it, dare it to come near you, show it that you will bite it's head off if it tries...

Sometimes a more skilful writer than me, can write about a dead child and handle it with great grace. Two examples are this New Zealand short story containing a dead child by Tracey Slaughter. & I recently read this beautiful memoir by Elizabeth McCracken  – she writes deeply into and through her grief at losing her child (a still birth) yet this book is not 'therapy writing' but beautifully crafted prose which intelligently shines light into some murky emotional places.

& Here is my wee story. The little boy dies, OK? so don't go getting attached.

THE BLUR By Helen Lehndorf

My mother peers over the top of her glasses at the photos on my wall.

'You never did get studio portraits done of the children, did you? I sent you that voucher.' She lifts a picture of Toby down. 'This is a lovely one of his face, but his hands are blurry.'

*

The toaster is faulty and always burns one side. It annoys me but I only remember about needing to replace the toaster while I'm eating the half-toasted, half-charred bread. The rest of the day it doesn't cross my mind. Sometimes it seems my life is full of these small irritations – easily fixed, absent-mindedly neglected.

It drives Rod crazy that I don't lace my sneakers properly. The laces are a random cross-hatch with uneven knots. It drives me crazy that he automatically puts another round of toast in the toaster when he takes one out. There's always cold toast sitting sadly in the slots. It's such a waste of bread.

“I'm from a big family” he says. “There was always someone who wanted toast.” But now in our family there are just the three of us and I usually eat cereal anyway.

When I wake there is always that dozy sense of morning optimism. Then I remember. The remembering seeps across my chest like an ink stain on linen.

After he turned five, it was harder to get a good photo of him. He'd spy the camera and pull his 'camera face' – an unappealing fake smile, more of a grimace really. I had to sneak up on him, snap photos while he was absorbed in playing, or pushing cars around.

Children these days expect to see photographs instantly on the little screen on the back, so he was annoyed that day, I had dusted off my old SLR film camera. It was the day we bought the second hand swing set from a Kindergarten garage sale. I snapped him swinging, shimmying up the bars like a monkey. His summer-brown legs wrapped around the metal, a plaster on his knee where he'd come off his scooter.

“Where am I, Mummy?” he said, running his fingers over the back of the camera.

“You'll have to wait for these photos. I have to get them developed,” I rubbed his back, “now go and wash your hands. I've made pasta for lunch.”

He was always in a hurry, always in a rush. He made us faster, too, as we raced to keep up with first him, and then Priscilla. But we aren't so fast any more. Now we are quite slow.

I went inside to finish making lunch. He was there in the yard and then he wasn't and then he was gone, out onto the street. I heard the accident before I saw it. Every day I hear it again.

It was over a year later that I found the film in the fridge door. I got my friend Susan to take it into the shop for me. I couldn't do it. There was too much I'd had to do already. She came in, pale and serious, with bagels and the green envelope. I made coffee and we sat.

There he was, climbing and swinging. The chickenpox scar on the side of his nose. The tomato sauce trail down the front of his t-shirt. In each photo he was moving. In every photo, arms open, legs in motion. The very energy of him. The blur.