Notes for the Everlost

by Kate Inglis

  * * *

  Some years, at the walk, I’d feel weepy at how exposed and resistant I felt. In others, I’d be weepy at how I felt so full of peace. Either way, the tears were never taxing. It was the healthy welling up that happens when the sad story you carry is embraced, his name spoken out loud among so many others who stand up straight despite their own sad story.

  As I spoke, I’d find a half dozen faces and cycle through them, one to the other, to see if they were okay and if what I said was resonant. A father would sigh, his eyes wet. A grieving grandfather would nod, holding his daughter’s hand. For the sixth and final year, my friend Eve came to the walk with me. On the way to the field I told her how it feels to see people break down (good, necessary), and she mimed me seeing tears and pulling the trigger like a goal-scoring hockey goon. Breaking down is breaking open. If someone else relates, their emotion vents and so does mine. We integrate suffering by sharing it.

  * * *

  Thank you for helping me feel like I’m not alone, wrote Selena, who had contacted me out of the blue through shared acquaintances. I’m pregnant with triplets, but we just learned our girl is slipping away, and we’re so sad, just when we’d bought the stroller for three.

  She was a short drive away in Halifax, having heard sad news from the same doctors who had given us our own sad news. We made a date. I walked into the café and scanned each table. She smiled at me, blooming in a way that attracts public enthusiasm.

  “I don’t know what to tell people,” she said, after we’d settled. “The doctors tell me to say it’s twins but I can feel her in there, kicking beside her brothers. I want to say, ‘she is here too, and we want her so much, and we’re proud of her.’ But we’re losing her and there’s nothing I can do.”

  I could think of everything and nothing to say to her. We sat together with Ben in my arms, then in hers. She glowed with anticipation as he gurgled, propped on the shelf of her belly.

  Not long after that, her baby girl’s heart stopped. She would be stillborn with her two brothers. I had a dream last night I was having the C-section, and the two boys were delivered, she wrote. Then they took a young fawn out of my belly. The fawn slowly found her legs and went away. I woke up feeling peaceful for the first time since we were told our news. I am not sure what it means but it brought me comfort. My husband thinks it means she is free.

  Of every cohort of parents, one or two disappear into an abyss. Forever after that we speak a shared language, the ones who fell. It’s safe for me to tell you that when I die, I’ll magic myself into being thirty-five again, full with milk, and I’m going to cross the good end of the River Styx with one foot up on the bow, mei tai around my waist, to find Liam. To feed and burp him and pat his rump and coo in his ear. This will be my second motherhood. I am not afraid. I will have a job to do.

  You look at me and smile.

  It’s safe for you to tell me that you feel like you’ll never leave the house again.

  But you will. One day the hole blown through you will have a layer of cheesecloth stretched over it. Then two layers, then three. Sometimes it will tear. Sometimes you’ll not even feel a draft, like it’s been blocked up for good with mortar and brick. You might resent that protection for how it buffers you from the moment you held your son or daughter.

  The hole in you will always be there. I have one too.

  I look at you and smile back.

  * * *

  Kathleen Turner dangles from a collapsed rope bridge above a high gully in Romancing the Stone. In that moment, her character is not aware of being in Colombia, in South America, or on this planet. She is only on the end of a rope, with a great horrible empty space pulling her to certain death if she lets go. Every last fragment of her consciousness is focused on the end of that rope, and her grip on it, and the pull of gravity. There is no world. There is only holding on.

  You are Kathleen Turner dangling from a collapsed rope bridge above a high gully in Romancing the Stone. Now imagine people with bullhorns on either side of the gully are watching you, with commentary: YOU ARE IN DENIAL or ANGER or ACCEPTANCE or NOT CARTAGENA. You want to shout YOU ARE SHITHEADS, STEAMING SHITHEADS, SOMEBODY HELP ME, I AM ON THE END OF A ROPE but you can’t. You just have to hold on and listen while robots who look like people lecture you through bullhorns about how grief is a linear process. You wake up every day either smashed on the rocks at the bottom or still flailing on the end of the damn rope with your fingers gone white. And it doesn’t feel linear. Not at all. Those people need to quit treating you like a specimen. What do they know, anyway? There is only pain. There is no before and no after.

  But there is, I whisper. You hear me and you look and I’m hanging on to my own rope, next to you. You didn’t see me there at first.

  The only ones who can say with any credibility that grief is linear are others like us.

  People who say Time heals all or You’ll get over it or As long as you get past the anger you’ll be okay are shushing you. Some are shitheads. Others are at a loss and are currently acting like shitheads but think they are helping. From the safe zone, they instruct bereaved people on the ends of ropes that EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE.

  People like us know the feeling of that rope in our grip. We are distinguished by the shocking intimacy of this shared experience. Context is everything. Our words are never corrective or punitive. We are you and you are us. When we sit with you, we time travel. We join you. We don’t lecture you. We were there too. We are, perhaps, a ways further from our loss than you are from yours. That’s why we can say, sort of, with a sigh for the exasperating riddle of it: Grief isn’t linear. Except for when it is. And it always is. But only from a long way up.

  How “time heals” works:

  A bomb goes off.

  People are shouting, screaming for medics, digging frantically to find each other through the debris and the smoke.

  Bodies are taken away.

  The cloud settles.

  A bulldozer arrives to push away mangled cars and remnants of buildings.

  A dump truck arrives to take away boulders and rebar.

  A broom sweeps up smashed glass.

  A Shop-Vac takes away the dust.

  The season changes; grass grows. Something new might be built.

  Someone drifts through one day and thinks I heard something bad happened here once.

  Someone drifts through another day, a while later, and thinks nothing at all.

  You can’t see it’s linear when your ears are still ringing or when you’re buried under rubble. The linear nature of healing only reveals itself much later, after the years required before anyone can stroll through a place where a bomb went off, carrying something to eat in a greasy paper bag, thinking only Yum, look what I’ve got.

  You survive miserably, barely. The minutes and hours and days pass despite you. To spite you. You continue to open your eyes, to breathe in and out. This will be maddening. For a long time. You will have dreams and nightmares, and you will see and hear and sense things you can’t explain. You will be subject to unending mental chatter. You will want everyone to stop everything. They won’t. Minutes and hours and days will drag you further from your loss. You’ll be grateful for the distance and you’ll rage at the distance. Time won’t care how you feel about it. It goes on. I’m sorry it will. But it will.

  When people sermonize about how well or poorly you are recovering measured against Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, you are justified to shout (or wish you could shout) SHUT YOUR SHITHEAD TRAP. When other bereaved parents sit with you and softly say It never goes away, but I promise it won’t always feel like it’s suffocating you, believe them.

  Grief is circular. Until it’s linear. Sort of.

  What? Seriously?

  Yeah. I know.

  Will I always be on the end of this rope?

  Yes. Until you’r
e not.

  * * *

  I was nervous to meet Wafaa. It’s not fair I was born in Canada, passively lucky, and she and her family had to work so hard and wait for so long to get here. Meeting her made me hyper-aware of all the good fortune I didn’t earn—and of the unfairness that her own ancient country, full of so much history and spirit, is now reduced to rubble, her little sparkle-eyed Noor lumped in by bigotry with black-hooded jihadists. Noor is five years old.

  “Pleeease,” she whined, with the barest hint of an accent. She had known English for three months on the day I visited. “Please I wanna go to Marianne’s house. We wanna see the chickens. Pleeease!”

  Marianne, my friend’s daughter, joined in. “Pleeease!” they singsonged in unison, eyelashes fluttering, both of them jiggling on tiptoes.

  They had arrived in an English province speaking only Arabic. Ce-re-al, my friend Susy had instructed Wafaa in the grocery store, holding a box of Shreddies and giving it a shake. See-ree-all, Wafaa would repeat, smiling. O-range, said Susy, holding one up. Or-inge, said Wafaa. That was eight months ago.

  “I will make you coffee!” she said to me, after proudly taking me around their new house. She chattered on about how she got a rug from a neighbor, and it’s lovely, and how nice. And they have a pile of wood to stack. And her husband Ziad has dug out a huge garden! And they have more tomatoes than they can eat. Would I like some tomatoes? Sunshine streamed in through the front windows. A soccer game was on TV. It was her younger son’s favorite team.

  “Oh thanks very much, but I don’t drink coffee,” I said. I’ve only ever drank tea.

  “Aah, but you have not had my coffee! I make the best coffee.” She swished industriously to the kettle. I imagined there aren’t many Arabs who don’t drink coffee.

  “Cream? Milk? What do you think of my English?” She was beaming, settled.

  “It’s amazing!” I said. “You have done so much. Are you feeling okay about the winter? You’re all set?”

  “Oh, yes! We are!” Every sentence felt punctuated with an exclamation mark. “No problem! We get so much sun, you see?”

  She gestured to the windows overlooking the beach.

  The rest of Wafaa’s family are either waiting endlessly in Jordan or trapped behind closed borders without food, water, electricity, or medicine. They have WhatsApp, she told me, her eyes a little glassy. Her brothers, their wives, their children. And then there’s her oldest son. He was killed a few months ago. He had stayed behind to fight.

  Someday, I’d like to ask Wafaa about him. About all the ways he was strong and healthy and full of ideas. And about how he was killed, taken in an unjust and ridiculous fashion, as war always does. He was her baby. Like I say to Evan, still, at almost twelve:

  You are still my baby.

  No I’m not, mom. I’m too old to be your baby.

  No. Never. Always my baby.

  She was making coffee, talking about how they’ve got the hang of the woodstove. And I was doing that thing, I realized. I was imagining the last time Wafaa said goodbye to her son—leaving him in a war zone—and I was repeatedly shuddering, daydreaming the horribleness of it in shamed contrast to how easy my life has been. Wait…was I that jackass?

  I forgot how much I have to be grateful for

  Then I met you

  What with your dead kid and all

  Gotta go hug all my everyone TTYL

  We all must suffer jackasses of a kind. We all must be jackasses of a kind. Remember that. You might not be so good at holding eye contact with someone who is dealing with drug addiction, mental illness, or c-c-cancer. Divorced people might make you want to throw salt over one shoulder. From them you might walk away feeling a contagion, a frightening relatability, or a judgment, even against your will.

  My friend Emily, a Canadian diplomat who was evacuated from Syria when the war broke out, is head of the local refugee resettlement group. She let me know it was time to go. We got up and hugged, chattering about this and that. They talked about upcoming social plans in a mishmash of English and Arabic, Wafaa adding more to her vocabulary with every How do you say…?

  My mind was churning. The urge was to say Emily told me about your son. I’m upset for you and I can’t believe how much you’ve all achieved and I am so sorry the war took him.

  And maybe, very quietly: My baby died too. Differently, totally differently, and so quickly, instantly really, and I couldn’t know him. Maybe that’s less painful? You saw yours become taller than you. Your baby was a man. You saw what made him laugh. You might have seen him fall in love. He might have barreled into the house with a sweaty brow, asking what smells so delicious. He had jokes and favorite things, and you knew them all. You had time. Is the way you feel a hundred times worse? A thousand? Does he itch like a phantom limb, too? Can you hear his voice still? I don’t know your pain, but I know a tiny piece of it. A flash of it. We have both outlived our babies. It’s not right. No matter how old we are, how old they were. I’m glad you’re here and safe, but I am sorry your son is not.

  I don’t dare equate anything in my life with daily bunker bombs, and I’d never want to put her in the position of having to console me. And so I hesitated. But I related, magnetically, if from a different entry point. The pull to self-identify is strong. Our children suffered and left us in life, and here we remain.

  I doubt I’d ever say any of it. I could never make it come out right. But she might be wishing she could wear a lapel button: I HAVE AN INVISIBLE SON. Just like me.

  I rail about the chickenshits, and yet I am one, too.

  We pulled out of the driveway and waved. She waved back, bending to pull something from the garden. Noor singsonged to Marianne and Marianne singsonged back.

  * * *

  The stillbirths, the preemies in the NICU, the bad news at the twenty-second week. The heart-wrenching medical terminations. The loss of a first pregnancy or a fifth. The multiples, the singletons, the accidents, the nonviable complications. The SIDS. Those dealing with infertility or infertility plus any of the above. Within this unlucky bunch there are smaller circles, each with its own unique gauntlet. But that’s not all, is it?

  At the Walk to Remember in Edmonton one year, a couple came up to me after the speech and said, “We wanted to say thank you, but—” the woman paused, shaking, and lowered her voice, “we’re not sure if we belong here.”

  Their son had lived to eleven years old. From the day he was born, doctors told them he wouldn’t survive beyond two years at most. He lingered, but not without great pain for all of them.

  “He died a few weeks ago,” she said. “We loved him so much.”

  Her husband pushed up his shirtsleeve to show me a dragonfly tattooed onto his arm. His eyes were glassy. They looked tired, so tired.

  “We spent eleven years pushing his wheelchair and changing his diaper,” his wife continued, almost in a whisper. “We have this giant modified van and ramps all over the house and now he is gone, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We don’t know who we are anymore, without taking care of him. We didn’t do anything but take care of him. We hardly even know each other anymore. But we saw about this memorial, and I just…we wanted…but we don’t know if we belong here.”

  They were humbled by the thousand people on that field; by the grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and mothers and fathers to lost babies. Mine died too, she had said, more or less. Differently, totally differently. We had more time with our son, though. Maybe that made it less painful? They related, magnetically, from a different entry point. They were afraid anything they would say couldn’t possibly come out right. But it did.

  When I was little, I used to daydream in that fantastical, apocalyptic way about the dilemma of which recruitment line I would have joined, had I been my twenty-year-old grandfather in 1939: army, navy, or air force? Would I have chosen tanks and grenades and foxholes? U
-boats and torpedoes slipping silently through the deep? Or an aerial minefield, as my grandfather did, flak shooting through his Lancaster bomber until it looked like a salt shaker, as he described it? My grandfather survived four tours of duty. For the rest of his life he suffered nightmares and survivor’s guilt, hated brussels sprouts, and forbade the color black. But the choice put in front of him was an abstraction for me, a horror fantasy not much different from imagining which might be a more brutal fate: shark, alligator, or giant squid?

  The stillbirth parents envy the NICU parents, perhaps. At least they had a little time, just a little, to say goodbye. Baby might have made small sounds to remember. They saw pink flesh rather than gray. But the NICU parents look at stillbirth and think—hope—at least those babies didn’t suffer. It was over before it began. The multiples, like me, sometimes have one that made it. I would consider those who had lost singletons and think about Ben, who drank my milk. I never needed cabbage leaves. But then there’s the SIDS parents…they might have had a funeral for a baby who was held and known by their community. They have months of memories, making for an attachment and a shock I can’t know.

  None of it is better or worse. It’s all shattering reverence for you. I meet you and I wonder about what you have seen. I wonder how our parenthoods have intersected. I turn your story over and over in my hands—feeling the shape of it, how its volume is unique to mine. I wonder about what was most cruel for you and what was the blessing, if there was one, as painful as that blessing might be to acknowledge. Will I see something of Liam in something of what you knew of yours? Will I see me in you? We seek out this company, looking at each other and for each other, thinking: What if we had more time? Less suffering? Who else is out here?