by Kate Inglis
Four years after Liam died, I left my marriage. I bought an old house by a little creek. I felt like a perpetrator. I had pulled it all apart. We wound up on different planets and didn’t find our way back. Now, we work again as coparents, reformed. We’re alright. More than alright. Our boys run through the world in leaps and bounds with big smiles and bright eyes. I’ve got big smiles and bright eyes too, as does he. But the years it took to get here were a storm of wracking, sobbing pain.
That morning, in the thick of it, I sat up in bed and looked around and thought My house is a mess and I could clean it up. The mess was no longer a symptom or proof. It was no longer bigger than me. The cloud had lifted, that chemical misfire appearing and dissipating like those in the sky. The cloud that poisons the air, turning all the muscle and slime inside you from a healthy pink into a foul sort of gray, like old ground beef, and it makes you stink just the same. Thoughts, heart, flesh. It casts a film over your eyes so you only ever see, all around you, evidence of how you’re unworthy, inept, undeserving of fresh pastries and cut flowers because those are way down the unaddressed list after (1) put those fuzzy leftovers in the compost, if they still qualify as compost; (2) stop walking past that crumpled sandwich wrapper with the smear of mayonnaise on it because it really shouldn’t be on the couch; and (3) hey look—ants in the sugar bowl.
For a spell, I was a self-absorbed walking catastrophe. I was angry at everything, angry at myself. Shut up, trees, with your stupid blossoms and your stupid swishing. Stupid universe. Suck it, universe. You used to be magic and all you are now is stupid, stupid, stupid—dumb just like me. I spat at everything.
Then, one morning, I swung my legs around, rose from the bed, and began picking stuff up and putting it in drawers. And the stuff I picked up, sniffed, and categorized wasn’t evidence of anything. It was just stuff that needed to be put away. The house noticed: Oh look, she’s back.
* * *
Getting over it? The words are ambiguous. To say the patient gets over it after appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg cut off is quite another. After the operation, his fierce, continuous pain will stop. He’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has “gotten over it.” But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, all will be different. His whole way of life will be changed. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.
—C. S. LEWIS, A Grief Observed
All of us are learning. Over time we get accustomed to the shock of amputation, of crutches and wooden legs that keep us upright. The most urgent discomfort will ease. You’ll walk again. But it’s not that simple, is it? It’s a strange business to be both grateful and resentful of forward movement. We dread the pain almost as much as we dread the return to ordinary life.
I remember being on the gurney. I remember the way they pushed me and ran, yelling ahead to the OR for the crash cart. I remember thinking: I might die, or at least knowing I would never again be who I was, which is a death. My uninjured and whole self would be gone. Lewis continues:
…I once read the sentence “I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache and about lying awake.” Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s own shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
Oh, for a nice chowder supper with C. S. Lewis.
It feels like it will never end, this broken state of being. But it does. Or, not exactly. It gets easier. Maybe not easier. Maybe less broken? Maybe the brokenness gets more tolerable. We become acclimatized to sadness and our perception adjusts. Or, sadness is diluted by life continuing on—displaced by other struggles, made softer by welcome distractions and the odd bit of good fortune.
All the clichés are true. Money makes the world go around. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Glass houses and stones, early birds and worms, laughter as medicine. Want to know if he loves you? It’s in his kiss (shoop, shoop). Our little random blip of time on earth is miniscule and precious and rolls downhill with cumulative speed. The older you get, the more you’ll shake your head at it. After you are gone—after the yard sale, after new grass has grown over your patch, after the bullfrogs eat—all that will be left are your stories and stories of you, and they fade too. Cue the question that has pinned every philosopher and maudlin drunk in history to the floor: if everything fades, what’s the point? Why bear the perfect epitome of hope—a big round belly—to have it go so wrong? Why bother with all the excitement and preparation? Why, for a baby to die? Why, a decade later, am I not tripping over Liam’s winter boots?
* * *
Death, however unwanted and unfair, is one of the most effectual teachers. It’s right up there with splinters, dull kitchen knives, and woodstove burns. I happen to everyone. So you better live.
The second proper funeral I’d ever been to—with pallbearers and a eulogy and people in black—was for my grade twelve prom date, Derek. He would hear a siren in the distance and he’d leap to his feet like a live wire and say DAMN! How I wanna be in that car. I’m gonna. I’m gonna be in that car, Kate. You heard it here first. And I’d say No Derek, I heard it last week too, and the week before that.
I hadn’t seen Derek for more than twenty years. I had moved away. He had become one of the many high school people you never see but still wonder about, like I always did: Did he make it? Did he get into that car, finally?
He did. He became an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Not long after, responding to a call for help in Saskatchewan, he hit a moose with his squad car. He was killed instantly.
The church was packed. There was no getting inside. I stood in the rain with hundreds of others, with rows of red coats and black boots. I looked down at the grass, at a box with a door and hinges at my feet and a temporary marker and a velvet bag that waited. It was Derek’s hole in the ground. The piper led his ashes down the hill, past an unending block of saluting RCMP and paramedics and cops and firefighters. It was silent except for the vibration of hundreds of people remembering him. Then, from where I stood, I heard the purr of Derek’s smallest daughter—she might have been two years old—snoring, exhausted, on someone’s shoulder from the middle of the family huddle.
(Everything is finite. We should be more kind. Anything else is frivolous.)
At the time, I’d been in the middle of another punishingly self-absorbed phase. I wasn’t depressed exactly but in a constant state of agitation at what I figured was my life narrative: Baby died + marriage died = alone for the rest of my life. That was the loop—plus financial worries and shallow vanities that never felt shallow or vain, but were.
After Derek’s funeral, I went home. I emptied the fridge and scrubbed it out. I pulled weeds. I vacuumed ceilings draped in haunted house cobwebs. I washed the floors and brought wood inside. I straightened the books and hosed down the car and found lost things. Then I took the kids camping. After that, it was wall-to-wall sleeping bags and valley dirt and string-cheese wrappers and festering T-shirts but somehow, when you’ve recently tidied up, you know you can tidy up again.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hello, Flotilla
How it feels to identify as part of a group with shared experience and the exhale that comes thanks to that belonging.
BEET GREENS and portobellos and croissants with dark chocolate on the inside. Seedy rye bread and Munich sausages from the German baker. Zat veel be seven hundred million dollaz! He’s a joker. I smile, pass him a handful of coins. He adds two orange-almond stollens to my basket, preten
ding to be sneaky. He won’t let me pay.
Evan is running wild, he and his posse with pockets full of change casing vendors for berries and apple turnovers. Ben sits by the sandbox in a patch of sunshine. He is wearing a superhero cape and a newsboy cap and is licking the icing off the top of a chocolate cupcake in slow motion. There are fiddles and hot drinks, and a man yells solicitously from behind a cloud of steam about crepes with smoked ham.
People smile and laugh, friends with arms full of green and goodness, and suddenly I can feel it stirring, that wind that chills you from skin to bone. The memory of what happened and the demotion-by-statistic when you realize nobody else feels a thing.
The only cure is to say out loud God, this wind. It freaks me out sometimes. And for someone else to say Yeah. Me too.
* * *
The year after Liam died, I went to Edmonton, Alberta, to give a speech at the first Walk to Remember, a memorial event for bereaved parents. A death parade, I nervously joked to Bon, my friend and fellow in grief. Not one of those regular-people jokes. Other than a marching band being unlikely, I didn’t know what to expect. It was a bright golden day on a green field, with balloons and wishing trees and donations and people embracing. I went every year after that for six years, each time giving a talk from a band shell to a thousand faces with stories just like mine.
The first year, before I knew what this event would mean to me, a young girl stood alone looking dejected, her camera swinging from the wrist strap in her hand. She stared at chalk letters stretching from her feet into the distance along the edge of the sidewalk. All the lost babies were noted along the way, hundreds of them lettered with care by artists. We would find them as we walked. Liam’s name was there too, somewhere.
“I liked all the names so I gave them all to her,” she said to no one in particular.
“It’s pretty,” I said.
“Yeah,” she replied. The rest came out in a tumble. “Everyone thinks we spelled it wrong but we didn’t. It’s Irish. That’s the right way. She died and then she was born. They said, ‘We can’t operate, she’s less than a pound!’ and I said, ‘She’s bigger than that, do something!’ but they said no. She was born three pounds nine ounces, but she was dead, and I said ‘told you so.’ I just knew. I was only sixteen when I had her.”
“How old are you now?” I asked.
“Seventeen,” she said simply. “People keep telling me I’m strong, but I just don’t like to cry in front of people. I need a picture of her name, though. I can’t make it fit.”
I took a photo of her baby’s name with my wide lens.
“Could I take your photo?” I asked, pressing the shutter as soon as I saw her begin to nod. In that brief moment before she composed herself, I saw her as she was. Thoughtful, peaceful, uncertain. Her name was Shawna. In the second frame she smiled habitually. I like the first one best. Later, after I sent it to her with a compliment, she wrote to me: I don’t feel I’m Beautiful ’cause I feel like Nothing right now, ever since this happened.
I know you feel like nothing. I did too, I wrote. Don’t feel like you’re not okay because you don’t understand or because you’re not yourself anymore. You don’t need to be more or less than what you are right now. You’ll probably never understand, but you’ll get better at not minding that you don’t understand. I promise.
Is that true, though? Maybe not quite.
Maybe our eyes get accustomed like the never-seen sea monsters who survive at the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches by electrifying the murk. Our eyes dilate, pupils engorged to suck up remnants of light from miles above, and we swim on, uncataloged by social science.
We can all see eventually, I think.
* * *
I stepped up to the microphone and the field went silent.
I didn’t want to cry. A thousand bereaved parents would be the most patient, empathetic audience in the world, but I wasn’t there to grieve for myself. I was there to say something—anything—that might lend a little light to someone else in the thick of it. My own snuffling would get in the way. And so to fend it off, standing at the microphone in the heartbeat before beginning to speak, I recalled the sight of Liam’s dead body in my lap in as much detail as possible.
As odd as it sounds, that memory has been my silent superpower. When I’m knotted up with fear or anxiety, I take a breath or two and remember the way his face went slack, the pallor and coldness of his skin, the absence of his essence. I remember the hard work of death as my baby endured it and everything
slows
way
down.
When I remember him, ego and fear and insecurity—usually a feral pack—heel like greyhounds, perfectly still and subdued. So what if it only lasts fifteen seconds or four minutes? That’s plenty long enough to begin.
This—whatever I’m about to do—is not scary. Not compared to what I’ve seen. I can do this.
* * *
People would arrive early. Some sprawled on quilts or in the grass. Others would move from one place to the next, reading and writing messages on a tree or asking for body art, for a paintbrush and a little bird. There were always so many kids. A big stage! A thousand balloons! Two thousand, all in great big floaty clumps! Music! Sunshine! They would eat snacks and run and run. The field would fill up until each balloon had an owner. Each balloon was a baby to be let go. The first year, it felt a bit forced, an affectation I wouldn’t fall for. It was too on the nose. But sure enough, holding the ribbon and feeling it slipping through my palm, the wind tugging, the nice lady with the microphone saying, LIAM INGLIS, I felt a strange, tantrummy knot in my belly. I don’t want to let him go again.
LIAM INGLIS
LIAM INGLIS
All the other balloons waited, the sky pausing like
BUELLER
BUELLER
BUELLER
I let it go and it went up so fast, so high.
The next morning I went for breakfast with Jocelyn and Chris, the organizers.
“Did you feel Liam yesterday?” she asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “Did you feel Lincoln?”
“Not really,” she said. “But this morning my mother-in-law was driving to the walk and she heard Lincoln’s voice in her head, and he was happy. He said ‘I’m here, Grammy! Here I am!’ and she looked out the window, and there was a baby moose running along beside the car. A baby moose, just out of nowhere, running with her.”
“He knew you’d be busy today,” I said. “He knew she’d pass it on.”
“Yes,” she smiled, and we spoke freely and frankly about everything to the clatter of neighboring tables, and the hollandaise was luscious.
* * *
The second year, watching his balloon get smaller and smaller, I cried. In a crowd of people who were all with someone, a long way from home, I had my own little clearing and felt naked in the middle of it. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Shawna standing there, now eighteen, her face wet too, and she helped me watch his balloon disappear. She’d brought a crew with her this time, with matching T-shirts, CEILI painted on the fronts. The MC called Ceili’s name, and a mass of pink balloons went up. I looked for Shawna, but she’d been buried in a loving huddle.
Later, I spoke into the microphone:
Spirits sometimes land in bodies that can only take them so far. How long has it been for you? Speak it aloud, right now, or whisper it, or just remember. How long has it been for you?
I paused, wanting to open up a common pointedness of thought. From the crowd I heard Shawna’s voice, clear as a bell.
“ONE YEAR.”
We’re here today to remember our babies, our lost potential. But I’m standing with you to honor you, too: mother, father, brother, sister, grandparent. Every tear, every sleepless night. Every moment of sadness, guilt, or regret at slowly becoming human aga
in. I stand with you in remembrance of who we used to be before loss.
But I don’t need to be that woman anymore. I mourn the ease of her, but I’m proud of who I am. I found the emotional muscle to be Liam’s mother. He made me bigger, as are you.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, the Polish aphorist and poet, said, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.” But you will feel responsible. You’ll need to inhabit the dark as much as you need food and air. Then one day you’ll open your eyes and realize you’ve crossed from one side to the other, across a boundary you didn’t think existed. Recovery is defiance. We have to nod at the blackness and dig to recover our sense of family, parenthood, partnership, hope, and ambition. It’s hard work to get to the point where you can indulge again in food and wine and laughter and have it feel okay.
That explosive moment during which everything in the human experience existed simultaneously—love, rage, gratitude, despair—is the same as a bleed on the brain. The heart can’t heal from being so stretched, so drowned. It can never go back to what it was. You’ll never see anything the same way ever again. You’ll pause where you didn’t pause before. But it won’t always make you cry.
Someday—if it doesn’t already—what happened to you will magnify everything that has you get up in the morning to scramble eggs and get clean and dressed and seek out light and learning and company. That explosive moment is everything nudging you back up.