I’ve always regretted the fact that I never had a chance to teach Aleksandar Hemon‘s “The Aquarium” in a narrative journalism class. If you don’t know it–it’s reprinted in Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (2013), and you sometimes see it online–it tells the heart-wrenching story of the fact that Hemon’s family lost their baby daughter Isabel to complications arising from a brain tumor in 2010, when she was but a year old.  At a minimum, the “aquarium” is the trope Hemon uses for the experience of being overwhelmed by this tragedy, absorbed by it, and disconnected from the outer world.

Among many other things, it can be read as a beautiful and terrifying account of what journalism scholars call the experience of the “subject,” the person in a news story, who can feel encased in its trauma.  But here the “subject” talking to us is a writer, one who has, in recent years, traversed the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, novel and memoir. Thus we get not only a profound meditation on a family’s absorption in having to face terrible “facts,” their coping with medical terminology that both explains and obfuscates, and how they experience a different sense of time and of human scale/importance/ vulnerability than the “normal” world they no longer get to visit. Moreover, this is a story about what writing such a story touches, evades, copes with, because it also features Isabel’s older sister. This is the felicitously double-named “Ella,” who as it happens, is learning language (her father’s adopted English), and who soon uses it to invent an imaginative friend who is and isn’t with the family as Isabel is lost to them.

It’s really rare to see all these subjects and boundaries (life/death, parent/child, facts/fictions) explored so powerfully: the story is moving because it’s true and because of the layered way it’s told. If you’ve never come across this essay, please spend time with it–and, if you’re willing to take all the risks that come with something so intimate and painful, please share it with a classroom, too. Thanks.