We don't talk about her very much. We seldom did. More than 35 years ago, we lost a little girl just weeks before she was scheduled to enter the world. If there was any possible consolation from sinking into depression, we survived by utilizing the time and responsibilities with two other children to soften the pain. They helped us let the memory fade to somewhere into the backs of our minds.

When we lost the little girl, there was already a three-year-old boy in the family, and within two years, a live, healthy little girl arrived. Fortunately for their parents, they brought enough joy into our lives to almost, but not quite, forget the tragedy. We are very thankful for the gift of the lives of those two wonderful children, and the joy they brought into ours.

Our children grew up in a home dedicated to giving them every opportunity for happiness and success through their years at school, college, working careers and as they entered into their own marriages. We often wondered how we all would have enjoyed having their sister tag along with them through all of their childhood and growing-up experiences.

We parents haven't mentioned the subject of our lasting sense of loss with our two adult children for at least the past 15 years. However, now that they are out of the house and we are alone in our retirement years, we sometimes wonder what our family life would have been like if our middle child had survived and thrived as well our other children have. We sometimes wonder what her life would be.

She'd be in her late thirties now, a woman no longer very young, but still vital and productive in pursuing a career, raising a family or both. We wonder if she would have been a beautiful child, pale, blond, green-eyed and curly-haired like her brother, or ruddy, brown-eyed and dark-haired like her sister. Would she have successfully gone through all the stages they did, from innocent, loving child to questioning, edgy teenager anxious to try her wings as an adult? Would she, like her muscle-building brother, have excelled in sports and filled her room with certificates and trophies?

Would she have been, like her ambitious and strikingly-beautiful sister, an articulate talker from age two, a sports announcer on a local radio station at age 14 and an honors graduate of a prestigious Ivy League university at age 19? Would she have then gone on, as her talented sister did, to a successful career in TV, climbing her talented way to producing and writing for major talk shows by age 21?

We'll never know what our third child could have been. Because she never took a breath of earth's air, we never gave her a name. Maybe, as we still think about her in our later years, we should have, just so that we could have had another real person, however briefly, in our family to remember with love. We can hope that somewhere out there, she knows that her brother and sister are doing such a wonderful job of living their wonderful lives for her.

Learn more about this author, Ted Sherman.
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