This is one of those posts where I am going to toss away all of the fiction and be as accurate as I possibly can. I’m also going to expose a couple of the fictions that exist on this blog. Anything that I don’t want to reveal will simply be {redacted}.

My mother had two sisters and a brother. The two sisters are eleven and fourteen years younger than she is. The brother was around her age. She described the family as sort of “two families in one” with a real sibling and a couple little ones with whom she shared parents. When Mom was fifteen or so, she got a call from her mother. Her brother Billy had been in a sledding accident. He’d gone the wrong way down the hill into traffic and was run over. Mom was sent back from boarding school and a couple days later, Billy died. It was a turning point for Mom. There would be no more boarding school. In a way, she lost her parents, too, as they descended into alcoholism. Mom was left to half-raise her sisters in their mental and emotional absence.

When Mom talks about Billy, she mostly talks about how much like him I am. He was a creative sort and a big storyteller. His head was always in the clouds. He was kind of an odd duck and a little bit of the black sheep. Much more like her than either of her sisters were. I get most of my traits from my mother. She got a lot of those same traits from the same place that he got them, too.

When I was conceiving of Hit Coffee, one of the things that I needed was a pseudonym. I knew what my last name was going to be (well, I knew it was going to be one of a couple options), but I didn’t know the first.

My older brother and I were both surprises, conceived after a doctor had told Mom that she wouldn’t be able to. In between Mitch and I, Mom miscarried. The pregnancy had never felt right to her. The doctors were dismissive of her concerns, but when she miscarried she was devestated but not surprised. The miscarriage was always something that fascinated me for reasons that I will get to later. But it was sort of like having another brother that I would never know. She talked about it freely, but sort of the same way that she talked about the man she married before she married my father: in the narrowest of contexts. In the case of the brother, when talking about her pregnancies. Often in the context of why I was born in a different state than the one she lived in at the time. There are a few stories of varying degrees of accuracy about that, but one of which was that she did not want me to be handled by the same doctors and health care system that she felt had let her down with the miscarriage (not so much that the miscarriage happened because it was likely to happen anyway, but that nobody took her seriously until it did).

I decided that since I needed a slightly fictional backstory for my slightly fictional blog (that was going to be more fictional than it turned out to be), I decided that I would root it in some sort of reality. Unless I had inherited his name, I was going to use it. And I was going to take his birthday (in my year). It turned out that she was going to name him after Uncle Billy. William Sherwood {redacted}. His birthday turned out to be a bit more complicated than I had anticipated. I was going to take his due date on my year, but it turned out that he was due on Leap Year Day. So “Will Truman” became slightly older than I am.

It could be considered morbid to take the identity of a miscarried brother, but since deciding on it there was something that felt right about it. The thing is, he wasn’t “another brother”. Had he been born it’s exceptionally unlikely that I would have been conceived. In a way, I am alive today because he was never born. So I thought of this as sort of a tribute. And given that he was named after the uncle that I so closely resemble, the pieces seemed to emotionally fit.

It’s not something I think about a whole lot, but when I do there is an odd feeling about being the product of a tragedy. I’d imagine it’s a less severe manifestation of marrying a widow or a widower where you are at once sorry for what happened to the deceased spouse and yet know that you benefited from it. It’s one thing to have a bad thing lead to a good thing within your own life where you took the hit and you reaped the reward, but another when you didn’t take the hit and were just the beneficiary.