by Kate Inglis
PHANTASMAGORIA: a sequence of real or imaginary images like those seen in a dream.
When we turn a kaleidoscope, we rearrange the same essential elements of color and light. That satisfying little click-click-clack of shapes moving into place forms something familiar but totally different. You and I look at each other through kaleidoscope windows, seeing faint glimmers of the recognizable with each twist and turn.
This is our phantasmagoria. Sound it out. Fantasy plus gore. From this angle, we see yours. From another, mine. As we congregate, look how different we are. Look how much the same.
* * *
I had been walking through the aisles of a grocery store just before Christmas thinking nutmeg, pastry flour, pecans. My phone vibrated. An e-mail had landed in the inbox of Glow in the Woods, the online community I’d founded for others like us:
Please help us
Our baby died
(Please bring him back)
(Please wake me up)
(Please rewind time)
(Please make this not true)
Thirty-six hours after, all any of us can muster is an instinctual scream. He couldn’t yet formulate the questions that might begin to patch together his reckoning of what had happened, let alone his life after. He was a long way from that. But somehow he found a community of bereaved parents through a search engine, desperate. My heart broke in the baking aisle. What is “help” the day after a baby dies?
Please help us
The e-mail stared at me.
What is this hell
I know. I know. I’m so sorry.
* * *
To fall into a black hole is a one-way trip. The escape velocity is so high that light can’t even get out. But you don’t just disappear. The gravity at your feet becomes rapidly greater than the gravity at your head. Your feet start falling faster than your head does. This is a bad situation to be in. We all stretch when we wake up—initially, it’s cosmic yoga. But that stretch continues, and the force becomes so great it exceeds the molecular forces binding your flesh. So you snap into two pieces at the base of your spine. Now, you are two pieces. Since there are no vital organs below your waist, your torso will stay alive for a little while. These two pieces then stretch and snap into two pieces and then eight and sixteen and you bifurcate your way down until you are a stream of atoms descending towards the abyss. The fabric of space and time is a funnel. As you are stretched and split, you are squeezed, extruded like toothpaste through a tube. We have a word for that: “spaghettification,” invented for just this purpose.
—NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON, Death by Black Hole (CITY ARTS & LECTURES, HERBST THEATER, SAN FRANCISCO, FEBRUARY 19, 2008)
The astrophysicist sermonizes about the wondrousness of the physical world, and we call back. His speculations are theoretically sound, but they’re implausible enough for us to giggle from the safety of solid ground.
When your child dies, there is no solid ground. You split and split again.
Inside the black hole, you are not able to contemplate the nature of black holes, where you might go next, or what will happen to your consciousness. You can only stretch and split and continue stretching and splitting as this pain happens to you. You might wish for a passing spaceship or infinite improbability drive from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—you push the button and turn into a teacup that is then rescued by a sperm whale. Normality returns at a safer point in hyperspace. But contemplation? No. This loss eats all the light, pulling at your body, and gravity is everything.
You say Please help us.
I don’t say There is no such thing as an infinite improbability drive
Or a DeLorean with a flux capacitor
Or a kindly alien with eight legs who can swallow you up, all of you, sheltering you in her gullet as she swims backward through space-time to the moment where everything was still okay.
I wish there were.
I see you, but you are a million light-years away. I see the clothes that still carry his warmth, the pile of laundry still dirty with spit-up. I see your frantic family on a plane, and the two of you clinging to each other.
You say Please help us.
You arrived to me through a website in a series of zeroes and ones. I can only watch from a million light-years away.
We are strangers connected forever by shared astrophysics. Years ago, like you, I was pulled apart into atoms and molecules. Like oil in a dish, my specks magnetically drew to one another, almost imperceptibly, until there were enough atoms and molecules for an arm, a kidney, an ear. Until I was myself again, sort of.
If there is a god, she is Time. She is the only interventionist, but she works on an exquisitely, mercilessly fine scale. You will feel abandoned by her until a while later, when you realize she has been doing her work all along. Atoms and molecules, the cosmos. Your son made a little flutter, and they all noticed.
* * *
Is she lactating? I asked.
Yes, he replied. It is hell.
I sent him to the online library at Glow in the Woods for the article on how to stop milk when there is no baby, but there’s not much else to do, is there? Other than So you have found yourself in this black hole. I make sure he knows I have been there too. I am writing to him from the other side, reconstituted, though that’s not relevant right now. The day after his baby died, he cannot consider life. He is still in the death. He is still in shock, stretching and splitting exponentially.
That is the black hole. I am so sorry you are in it.
* * *
The deadliest storm ever in the United States was a massive hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, in September of 1900. The books that fictionalize the storm and its aftermath are pornographically catastrophic—like books about the Titanic or the Halifax Explosion—making readers wish they could shriek Run far away! Install extra lifeboats! Step back from the windows! On that fateful day, the Ursuline Sisters at St. Mary’s orphanage tied children to lengths of clothesline to try to keep them together. In the ensuing flood, ten nuns and ninety children drowned in a hopeless tangle.
Is a circle of bereaved people a length of clothesline? Do we drag each other down? Or are we rafts and buoys? Do we condemn or save each other by way of holding this space? I think the very act of posing those questions means we’re fine. More than fine.
Is anyone out there?
Yup.
I feel so alone.
I know.
I can’t believe this happened to me.
I’m so sorry. It’s horrible. Just awful.
People in my life tell me to buck up and move on and I want to glue their lips to a wall. I know I’m not supposed to feel this way, but I do. Is that okay?
I know it has to be hard for people to talk to me. Especially if they just want me to hurry up and be myself again.
I don’t know if I can ever be myself again.
I don’t know how to process the way I feel.
Am I forgivable?
I can’t possibly stuff anymore guilt into this head.
I can’t sleep.
Is this normal?
I want to be myself again.
I know. You are normal and sane and the way you’re feeling is just the way I felt, and still feel sometimes.
By seeking and offering company, we form a cohort. We talk about cremation and share tears over scent-fading onesies, damn it all. We talk about rebuilding relationships and restarting careers and heart-opening rituals and being brave and redefining life and how a film has been peeled off our eyeballs to reveal the mystery of the world, the constantly imminent peril, the love. And sometimes we don’t talk at all. We’re just here.
Together, we are a flotilla.
CHAPTER SIX
At the Mercy of the Bootstraps Barbershop Chorus
Dealing with fami
ly, friends, and bystanders after loss. Many bereaved people report lost relationships, abandonments, and toxicity. Sharing is the antidote.
IRENE MESSAGED ME a few months after her son Oliver had died of SIDS, another episode in our ongoing conversation from one continent to the other. Looking for you today. I hope you don’t mind.
Oh! Are you okay love?
No, but I’m getting used to it now and don’t expect it to be any different for the next while. The biggest thing for me is the anger at people who are being jerks. Even those close to me. I can’t shake it off. It’s exhausting. How are you?
I still feel that way sometimes. It’s softer now than it used to be, but when I talk about it (rare these days) it triggers everything all over again. When I remember how someone called Liam a “gynecological mishap,” it’s like an electrical current of anger through my body just as vivid as a decade ago. Back then I was in shock, and I didn’t have the energy to stand up for myself. But I saw it for what it was, somehow. I knew the problem wasn’t me, but them. It was a wellspring of self-protection, but it comes with some pretty painful revelations and complicated feelings. Keep talking to me. When we connect with each other, we take the power away from the jerks. That’s how you realize everything is universal. The loneliness, the dismissals. You can talk back or walk away, but either way, quietly rearrange your circle to keep allies close to you.
I feel like a bullshit magnet.
Yeah. Your reaction—naming and pointing at the jerks, even if it’s just in your head—that’s your dragons stepping up for you. That’s your wellspring.
THANK YOU.
Doesn’t matter if you give your dragons an explicit voice or not. They will stand in between the soft parts of you and the bullshit. They’ll fade when you don’t need them anymore, but they’ll never go away. They’ll always be watching. They’ll be proud when you don’t need them and instantly onside when you do.
* * *
What is it about the death of a baby that either brings all the bullshit out of the woodwork or inspires otherwise decent people to say bullshitty things? It’s a phenomenon.
I have a vested interest and will therefore snap her out of this, they think. Then out it comes. Paraphrased: Look at the Millers, the family with the daughter who lives in the bubble for her immune system. Or the Robinsons with the alcoholic and the foreclosure. You’re not the only one in the world who hurts, you know. Stop dwelling. Think of all the people around you who need you to be uplifting. Be like so-and-so with the Down syndrome boy. She’s always so positive.
My only regret, in hindsight, is that I’d sit there with my mouth hanging open, flies buzzing in and out like Homer Simpson at the control panel of a nuclear power plant. It was too much to unpack. I went outside myself, observing from some other place, as detached as I could be. It was bizarre, but thank god, I knew it at the time. With my mouth hanging open, I’d think What that person just said is sociopathically awful.
The corrective/punitive stuff would come from people beset with forcibly submerged pain on the inside, a tidy spit-polish on the outside, and an aggressive commitment to keeping it that way. I was a threat to be neutralized. Turning me proper—sweeping the unmentionable under rugs, like Kleenex draped over a garbage heap (Nothing to see here, folks)—would have been proof of everything being in its place, with no place for me as I was.
If you’re going to be a Coper—not one of those Non-Copers—you should just forget it. So-and-so did. She doesn’t even remember. She never complains, because she’s great. She’s optimistic! You should be like her. You should be strong enough to pretend it never happened.
Homer Simpson…buzzing flies.
I knew what health was. And I knew I had it. I was doing well, given what we’d been through. I wasn’t curled up in a ball, crying all day (had I been, that would have been fine). I wasn’t talking nonstop about what happened (had I been, that would have been fine). I rolled around on the floor with my two-year-old. I grilled cheese and chained daisies. I cried sometimes. Then to bed and up again in the morning for the NICU commute. I’d push those swinging double doors open and step across the threshold to scrub in like Jesse James.
Sometimes, when someone would ask me how I was doing, I’d answer vulnerably. Truthfully. I’d say I’m upset. I’m scared. Slowly clotting blood is leaps and bounds better than infection, and I was willing to bleed. Made to live through it again I would choose to be, do, say, and feel the same way with no hesitation. For two months I pumped and cuddled, loving both of those boys regardless of what their outcomes might be. I forced myself to stare unblinking at the horror until I could see the beauty underneath all the wires and tubes because dammit, if one or both of them were to die, I wanted to know as much as I could of their hearts, their eyes, their soft skin, their grunts. Not only their machines and their misfortune.
My pain has always been a clean pain. People with garbage heaps swept under rugs can’t say the same. That has nothing to do with me, nothing to do with you.
On the flip side of the forcible bootstraps barbershop chorus is the silent majority:
“What a crummy spring we’re having…too much rain, eh?” he mumbled as he stared at his shoes. I hadn’t seen him since Liam died. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew. He stood in front of a wrinkled, gray, twenty-foot trunk spitting peanuts against his forehead with a shwuck! schwuck! schwuck! as he shrugged: Elephant? What elephant?
I’m being considerate, the silent majority congratulates itself.
I’d always walk away thinking less of you, silent majority. You were smaller than I had thought you were. You were afraid of death cooties. It’s years later and I still think you’re a chickenshit. You, just as much as the grief-shaming barbershop chorus.
* * *
Years later, I’m in a café writing this chapter with my shoulders all jammed up against my ears. The outrage—the self-protective mechanism—kicks in, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to let it go.
In my head:
Good for you for seeing toxic people for what they are.
That’s harsh. Tolerance for compassionless people is the master class of compassion.
Screw tolerance.
You gonna be this prickly forever?
At least I’m not prickly on the outside. Most of them don’t know what I really think.
Doesn’t matter if they know or not. You’re still carrying it around.
We’re nuts, huh? We’re all nuts.
Here’s a new outlook on ineptitude of all kinds. I’ll share it with you because someone shared it with me.
You’re at the dinner table, on the street, bumping into people who either know exactly what to say (the wrong thing), or who say nothing. You’re standing there with your mouth hanging open. You feel abandoned, shamed, isolated. You might feel like nobody cares. You might feel damn near abused by thoughtlessness.
Here’s your mantra: Jane is doing the best she can.
This abhorrent scene represents the very best she can do. That’s what all of us are doing at any given moment, given our demons and distractions. Our contextual best. And this particular criticism, dismissal, or peanut-gallery correction has nothing to do with you. Absolutely nothing. You need not respond to it, and you need not take it on as something to consider.
So close your mouth. Flies are gross. Flies land on poop. Nod, mutter something, get away. Find some fresh air. Spend your life with people who don’t stare at their shoes, and who aren’t afraid of the dark.
If you can’t get away, embark on a lifelong practice of expecting as little as possible—nothing, if possible—from certain people. You know who they are. What sounds like pessimism is peace. As soon as you detach from the expectation that Jane might someday change her behavior, you’re following a sliver of the Buddhist way, the right way, and you don’t need to know anything about the Rinpoche to do it.
Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It’s similarly fruitless to attach meaning to someone else’s pattern and to let yourself be repeatedly hurt by it. It’s not worth the energy to even inwardly grumble about it. So don’t. Jane’s pattern will repeat itself again and again and instead of feeling like your face is going to explode, again and again, stand there and say to yourself: What we have here is Jane being Jane. This is her way of…
Who knows? Who cares? She is unlikely to ever change. Neither will Dick.
* * *
I wrote. I wrote so much. I hadn’t yet found anyone else who was bereaved in this way and needed the exercise of trying to find words for what was inexpressible. It was satisfying in the same way it’s satisfying to pressure wash something filthy. You animate the inanimate with attention. You hear it say Aaah. A surface feels pleasure at its dirt being noticed and addressed, running in rivulets down the road. Even though it knows the dirt—the pain—will collect again. The practice of exposure to light and air is worth it, even for an afternoon.
A farmer friend of mine watched my doves taking a bath in a tourtiere plate. They shook and dipped and shook gloriously, thrilled. “Giving an animal what it needs to clean itself is the most wonderful and basic kind of caring,” she said, smiling. “Even for the little ones.”
To write—to make any art and be generative, either in solitude or with company—is animal husbandry for dragons. It calms them.
The day after the twins were born, a distant relative came to the hospital with a gift. The drugs were still wearing off. I was unable to move, but I was conscious.