Constellations

by Sinéad Gleeson

  Another night, our bad camera

  Picks out only you and me

  On our host’s roof.

  Under electric city light

  The World Trade Center

  Is unphotogenic, immune.

  They’re now gone, along with you.

  The photo is full of ghosts.

  When we were a couple, Rob and I discovered many musical overlaps. One was Nick Cave, and he bought The Boatman’s Call for me in those first months, which we listened to on repeat. In bed all day, on shared headphones on a bus to Galway. It was one of the many albums that soundtracked our relationship. In the long history of album opening tracks, ‘Into My Arms’ ranks highly. With its implored chorus of guidance, of wanting someone you love to be safe, it seems to me like an obvious suggestion for a Mass. A song he loved, that had a shared meaning, one that hinted at the sublime and the religious. It’s almost out of my mouth when I remember the opening line. I look at this priest, remembering his earlier dismissal, and am certain that he will not approve its context. That he will not hear what made it special for us. That he will veto it. What to do, what to do, what to do.

  Someone presses play and we sit in an anticipatory circle, waiting for the solo piano to give way to Cave’s sombre voice:

  I don’t believe in an interventionist God

  But I know, darling, that you do.

  Five notes pass and I decide that I will not let this man – a stranger to us and our sorrow – reject it. So I think quickly, and act accordingly. I fake a coughing fit and hack like a tubercular Victorian, all over those two gorgeous, declarative lines. Nick’s voice fills up the room, in a song that pleads for non-intervention, ‘not to touch a hair on your head’. I think of Rob’s head lying in the next room, with its open wound, his hair matted with blood from where he struck the iron girder during the fall.

  Standing on a corner,

  a skyscraper made flesh.

  Yellow cab horns blare

  And you feel at home.

  That night, the house is quietened, down to the obligatory quota of close friends, relatives and neighbours. For the only time that night, I am alone in the room. Standing beside the coffin, I look at him. His quizzical face, problem skin, lisped mouth; his long body, a still hyphen. Someone leans on my back, and I turn to comfort them, but the room is empty. It feels as real as the weight of a person. I have no explanation. In the following weeks, this happens twice more when alone, and again at a Lee Scratch Perry gig. A gang of us go along to mark Rob’s month’s mind, the four-week anniversary of his death. The venue is half full, and while S is at the bar, I stand in a circumference of space, and, again, feel someone lean heavily on me. The nearest person is five feet away, and after that night I never feel it again. In a job years later, an unnerving colleague tells me I have ‘a gift around newly dead people’. An uneasy inheritance from my grandmother and great-grandmother, something I am slightly reluctant to accept, or believe.

  In a downtown bar

  The flash makes an orb

  in the mirror

  The only photo of you

  looking drunk

  – but so happy.

  The last day I saw Rob alive was my birthday, four days after his. A group of friends, including S, had celebrated him turning twenty-four, toasting all the possibilities in a Japanese restaurant. None of us at that table could have known that two weeks from that night, we would be gathered at his funeral, the sun beating down incongruously. Swapping stories and sipping beer with his family. When someone dies suddenly, I always think of what they were doing at that exact time a week ago. What they would have done differently if they’d known. Declare their love for someone, take shamanic drugs, fulfil a fantasy, visit another country. An accidental death has no schedule: one Tuesday, you’re working, sleeping, laughing. The following Tuesday, laid in the ground, covered by three metres of soil.

  How could you do all that you wanted to by twenty-four?

  The door closing, the light gone, the sorrow of it.

  But, tell me, were there moments, summer skies,

  Birds threading notes, a last song at a party,

  that made your heart soar? Was it enough?

  Before Rob’s death, I was already certain about S. Sure that we would be together. The trauma of what happened drew us closer, and we have remained together ever since. Those first months were intense and electric, but significantly blighted by loss. We may resist our how-we-met story, but it is the story of us, despite how bound up it is with sadness. This new thing that came to be has endured, and without our beloved friend, it would never have happened. Our son has Rob’s middle name and we talk to our children about him. I regularly speak to his oldest sister, who was a teenager when he died. The world turns and another year passes without Rob in it. All the places he never went, the sisters he never saw grow up. I had never known him to be ill, ever. His body was resilient until the catastrophic fall. Our lives all went on, but his was recalled, over in a moment. Perhaps there is another ending: a parallel life where he fled the country; not gone but somewhere else. I imagine him back in San Francisco, promiscuous, making music, smoking on a fire escape. I see his tall spine moving easily across Haight-Ashbury, weaving up and down those hills, ducking under the Bay Bridge, and out of the city lights.

  On the Atomic Nature of Trimesters

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a womb and a decent supply of eggs must be in want of a child. We know this, us women. The directive that every one of us must produce or will want babies even predates the Virgin Mary miraculously birthing Jesus Christ (without the prerequisite fuck). The urge to procreate and propagate is as arbitrary as any other act of free will, but has been imposed on women like so many other ideals of womanly perfection. Be thin! Be beautiful! Be pregnant! The entire concept is predicated on biology-as-destiny, as though the acme of being female is to be a mother. But not everyone wants to be. Not every woman has a womb, is able to conceive, or has instant access to semen. The assumptions about what female bodies are, should be, or can do have progressed, but the expectation of eventually choosing motherhood has persisted.

  There are many terrible things you can call a woman. These terms have their own poisonous corner in the glossary of ‘woman slurs’. We know these words, with their harsh consonants, are the favoured insults. Their genital etymologies are meant to remind women of their function and worth in relation to men.

  Unmaternal. It’s un-ness implying its oddness. To be un-something is to be the opposite of it, at odds with it: that un is unnatural. ‘Childless’ is another word. Women who choose – happily, with no burdensome thoughts – not to reproduce are cast as unloved loners. Self-absorbed harpies. Bald-headed Roald Dahl creatures that want to torment children, not bear them. A lesser kind of woman. As though the only way to express caring and kindness is to create – or parent – another human being. Enter any female celebrity’s name into an online search engine and the word ‘children’ invariably follows in the auto-complete search options. It starts early, this message that girls should be nurturers; that emotional labour in life is unavoidable if you identify as female. Dolls – those pseudo-babies – are a right of passage, and each one I owned was perambulated and lullabied,

  their permanently pursed mouths shushed, their plastic limbs bathed and dressed. One doll endured an experimental haircut, and post-scissors looked like Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex. Amid all the booties and bibs and fake bottles that refilled when turned upside down, motherhood must have flashed before my eyes. It wasn’t a singular moment of there! freeze-framed on a screen, 1980s VHS-blurry. Somewhere along the line, I must have thought that I would be a mother, mostly because I liked the idea, not before I realised there was an expectation that women should follow through on this pre-destination.

  I am an only girl, born in between two wonderful brothers, but growing up the longing for a sister persisted past my mother’s fertility window. There was pleading,
begging, offering-to-mind-it supplication for her to have another daughter. During the decade when my brothers and I were all teenagers, it was only me who was cautioned daily about coming home with news of impending parenthood. Warnings about lives ruined, prospects gone, the physical jolt of being left holding the baby.

  In our twenties, post-college, pregnancy was the last thing I or any of my friends wanted. A baby was akin to an albatross. A dead-weight barrier to dreams and jobs and travel. Friends who had children at the time are now out the other side of parenthood. They are free. But back then, children were considered a faraway land that some day we might dock at the pier of, marching down the gangplank to look motherhood right in the eyes. Those decades of youth were also spent figuring out the body, listening to it, swimming in its cycles. Warnings about not getting pregnant were constant, but no one talked about how our bodies actually worked, the good windows and bad, how to navigate our own fertility in the time before period apps and ovulation sticks. The entire concept of ovulation was hazy, our own wombs mysterious to us. It wasn’t until actively deciding to have a child that people talked in hushed voices about cervical mucus. How crucial it was, in all its egg-white consistency. The conception equivalent of ambergris.

  I did not pine for a child when I was younger. It did not inspire longing, unlike the lure of US highways, or faraway time zones; but I back-pocketed the feeling, tucked it away for later. Even with studied carefulness, most women will have a pregnancy scare. Days of checking and waiting. Our biological lives are numerically driven; twenty-eight-day cycles (a rarity) and a two-week wait before peeing on a stick. Then the fork in the road: if this was the desired outcome, there were the excited nerves of waiting to hit twelve weeks before announcing the news. Or the other option: an unplanned crisis with horror-struck calculations: tallying of dates, totting up the cost and realising its incompatibility with one’s financial situation; the decision – until very recently in Irish history – to travel to another country that offered reproductive rights.

  It is natural to put our faith in our bodies. To trust that they will be ready for the task when we are. Life is lived in the present tense; calendrical from paycheck to period. Every woman assumes that they will be able to get pregnant – until they can’t. There is one attempt, then three, and the months roll by. Friends talk of nasal sprays and self-injecting, of countless internal examinations, of no heartbeat, of go home and take the drugs.

  A woman is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have. I had never thought about this until my lungs were gurgling with a clot and tubes were being inserted into my body. I was twenty-eight. Science decreed that I was in the middle of the optimum fertility window of 20–34. I imagined myself on a Tron-style grid, a small curve on a maths graph, an oscillation. Thinking myself responsible: I was on the pill and assumed that there were still years left of avoiding pregnancy. But then it is 6 a.m. on a cold Sunday, still dark when the ambulance arrives. I am diagnosed with blood cancer and someone tells me that chemotherapy will start tomorrow. Everything always starts on a Monday. Working weeks and new beginnings and the rest of my life will start on Monday. The first full day of nothing ever being the same again will be a Monday. In this rush of twenty-four hours I have one recurring thought (not death, because I can’t allow myself to think about death). My eggs. What will happen to my eggs? All those ova I’ve steadily bombarded with artificial oestrogen and progesterone all these years.

  When the doctors intimate that there may be a chance of dying, time both speeds up and stands still, becoming a precious commodity. I am told calmly that there is no time to freeze the eggs, for what doctors call ‘oocyte preservation’. In my body, the bad lymphocytes are trying to kill the good oocytes. At this time in Ireland, there are no preservation facilities for eggs.

  When the bad news lands, I experience a flash-forward – of the children I won’t have. I avoid dwelling on the cancer horror that’s unfolding, so I think about the eggs. I attempt a calculation. How many I have, how many I’ve used up, all those years of menstruation, all those months of relief. I imagine them as white, then red, then clear. I wonder if they are ovate or ovoid or elliptical? The latter, perhaps. My fertility as the open-ended question of an ellipsis . . .

  Will I have children?

  . . .

  Am I infertile?

  . . .

  How did life end up here?

  . . .

  As well as the shock and the bags of blood and the vomiting something that looks like blood, there is another drug. This is not the pill, but a variation on it often used with HRT or to treat other gynaecological issues. I am a clot risk, from a non-pill clot, and the consultant prescribes Norethisterone. It is similar to the body’s natural progesterone, which can suppress gonadotropins: FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) and LH (luteinizing hormone) – all the hormonal elements a woman’s body needs to make a baby. Like illness, pregnancy has its own vocabulary, of things you never knew existed, or there were even words for. This drug can also be used – in my case – to inhibit ovulation, and for endometrial transformation (which makes me think of a gaudy makeover show, a curtain pulled back to reveal a patchy womb lining now sleek, shiny and swanlike). I wash down these pills to quell my ovaries, and a baby becomes an impossible feat. There is no blood for close to a year, which is unnerving. This must be what pregnancy is like, I think, listening to the night sounds of the hospital. Nausea, no bleeding, life-altering bodily changes: they both mimic and are the opposite of pregnancy. There are new, unfamiliar cells growing inside me, multiplying and dividing, but they are not a baby.

  After six months of chemotherapy and complications, the doctors declare remission. A gynaecologist tests my hormone levels and likens them to those of ‘a post-menopausal woman’. Her secretary phones when I am driving. I pull over and cry on the hard shoulder of a motorway. Out the other side of cancer, I am also nervously embroiled in maintenance treatment, involving three different kinds of medication. One is ATRA, the drug that has saved my life, and only works on my specific type of leukaemia. It is extremely costly, and each time I return to order another batch the pharmacist exhales softly and raises a sympathetic eyebrow. The capsules are unremarkable but there is a legion of expensive toxic damage contained within their plastic casing. Along with two other drugs, I take nine of these a day for fifteen days, every three months, for two years. In total, I ingest 1,080 ATRA capsules. The side effects are numerous. Headaches, which were rare for me, now arrive with eye-blinding frequency, due to ‘benign intracranial hypertension’. My skin is always dry, shearing off in mini blizzards. One of the more unusual side effects is an odd kind of visual disturbance. The source could be retinal or corneal, but for months I see odd shapes in my visual field.

  Two years of ATRA and maintenance pass (with one complication, connected to Ireland’s then draconian reproduction laws), and I am closely monitored for relapse. The prospect of having children felt too difficult to think about while recovering. A baby was not the first craving, like post-surgery ice chips, or a meal after days of illness. Because of the ATRA, all proffered advice suggests waiting at least six months before trying to get pregnant. I wait longer.

  My body feels in limbo, getting better, but still very much in the medical world. Mentally, there is a weighing up of what has happened and what it means. The road ahead will be long and there is no way of knowing the outcome of continued remission. In pregnancy terms, the statistics are against me. There is one certainty: after years of surgery and waiting rooms, wards and curtained-off beds, I know I will not try IVF. I have reached my limit of invasive procedures. My body needs a rest. Enough, it whispers. My husband is fine with this, and we decide to try naturally, nervously. The decision to have a child should be so joyful, so fun, but to us, it is so daunting. I am filled with fear, not wanting to be disappointed in myself, to feel my body fail again. I push these thoughts away.

  My birthday is in summer, on the eve of Lúnasa, an ancient Celtic festival that pr
ays for a good harvest in the autumn. Earlier in the year is Imbolc, the feast of St Brigid, associated with fertility. I turn thirty-two, ready for whatever happens. Motherhood has become something else. A state that I think about and try to ignore. Its abstractness long gone, as it hovers around my life. Eleven weeks later, there is a faint pink line on a test. An illusion. Then another test, a more expensive one, with words not lines. The wait for the results fills up the room. Eyes move from sink to bath to floor, anything to anchor on to. This is not joyful anticipation, or expectation, this feeling. It is familiar. The same as the one experienced when waiting for bad news.

  And then Pregnant appears in the tiny window.

  There is so much disbelief, not just then, but in the first few weeks. As though I’ve pulled off a huge hoax, fooled my body into giving me something I longed for. I have carried off a heist, jumping into a getaway car, leaving alarms and sirens blaring behind.

  I wait for something bad to happen. It is always peripheral, like the rotating swastika side effect in my eye, this waiting for my body to mess up. My bones, my blood have form, they have done things they weren’t supposed to. I convince myself that even though my body is now attempting to do something that most women do with ease, I will fail. I can’t let myself believe it and am too afraid to tell anyone.