La Dispute - THE CHILD WE LOST 1963 lyrics

There were shadows in the bedroom
Where the light got thrown by
The lamp on the nightstand
On your mother’s side, after midnight, still
You can see it all you can see it all
And the closet in the corner
On the far back shelf with the keepsakes
She hid
That box there full of letters of regret
By the pictures of the kids

You get faint recollections of
Your mother’s sigh, countryside drive
And the landscape seen from the window of the
Backseat with some flowers in a basket
That afternoon after school you
And your older sisters
Found your parents in the
Kitchen at the table
Father lifting off the lid of the box

And a hush fell over everything
Like a funeral prayer
A reverence, ancestral, heavy in the air

Though you didn’t understand what it meant
That they never said her
Name aloud around you
Even sitting at the table with
Her things they’d kept
You recall faintly cards, tiny clothes
And the smell of the paint
In the upstairs bedroom
Until then you didn’t know that’s
What the box had held

Your parents tiptoeing slowly around
Always speaking in code

No, they never said her name aloud around you
Only told you it was perfect
Where your sister went
And you didn’t understand why it
Hurt them so much
Then that she’d come and left so soon
Could only guess inside your head
At what a "stillbirth" meant
Only knew that mother wept

You watched while father held her
Said "Some things come but can’t stay here"
You saw a brightness like a light
Through your eyes closed tight

Then she tumbled away from here, some place
To remain in the nighttime shadows she made
To be an absence in mom
A sadness hanging over her
Like some Pentecostal flame
Drifting on and off
She was "Sister, " only whispered
Sometimes "Her" or "The Child We Lost"
You were visions a vagueness, a faded image
You were visions

You were a flame lit that burned out twice
As brightly as the rest of us did
When you left, you were light
Then you tumbled away

There are shadows that fall still
Here at a certain angle
In the bedroom on the nightstand
By your mother’s side
From the light left on there

There’s the box in the closet
All the things kept
And the landscape where she left
Flowers on the grave
Marble where they etched that name
And mother cried the whole way home

But she never said it once out loud
On the way back home from
Where you thought they meant
When they said where sister went

After grandpa got hospice sick and
He couldn’t fall asleep
They wheeled his stretcher bed
Beside her at night

And I saw the light on the day that he died
By their bed in grandma’s eyes
While us grandkids said our goodbyes
She said "don’t cry" somewhere he holds her
Said a name I didn’t recognize
And the light with all the shadows combined