"You can't imagine what it's like to lose a child."

So I'm a fan of the TV show Fringe.  I watch it on hulu.com, so I watch them later than aired.

Anyway, the latest episode Dr. Walter Bishop is telling Agent Olivia Dunham about his son.  Peter had a rare disease that he died from when he was young.  But they had been watching through a window to an alternate universe where an alternate Peter was living just a while longer.  The Walter in this universe found the cure, the Walter in the other did not, so our Walter created a wormhole to the other side to go get the other Peter so he could save his life and not have to watch him die again.  And of course, in spite of what he promised other Peter's mother, he couldn't take him back to the other world because he couldn't stand to lose his son again.

It was so hard to watch, and I was totally unprepared for it.

At the very end of the episode, as a way of explaining the reason for the actions that lead to the separation between the two universes crumbling, Walter tells Olivia "You can't imagine what it's like to lose a child."

So here I am, wishing that there was another Cora out there somewhere that I could see, to see how she'd grown up, to see what she'd look like.

But maybe that sort of thought is like Harry Potter in front of the Mirror of Erised.  I don't want to be one of those that Dumbledore described, wasting away in my desire for the impossible.

One day.  One day.