It is a small plot in a section for children in a cemetery on the west side, and there is a flat marker with his name and one date on it, because when there is a birth and a death three days apart people put one date, and I did not choose that and by the time I saw it, it had been in the ground for five months.

And then in the evening, at 7:44, I sit down.

I am going to explain this and it is the last strange thing in this account.

I have read those three hundred and sixty-one pages perhaps forty times.

I did not set out to memorize them.

But if you read a nursing flowsheet forty times you end up knowing it, and what I know now is my son’s fifty-one hours, hour by hour, in a level of detail that no mother who was in the room would ever have.

I know what his temperature was at three in the morning on the third of March.