by Kate Inglis
“Here,” she said. “This is for you.”
I reached out to take it with shaky hands. It was an empty, lined book.
“You can write in here,” she continued, explaining. “Since you can’t write about this anywhere else. I mean, nobody would want to read it. I mean, you wouldn’t want anyone to think…anyway. This is so you can keep all this to yourself. Obviously.”
Remembering that moment years later, I transport myself back to that hospital room. But not as the Kate with the freshly stapled incision. I am today’s Kate, the ghost of her future. People will say “there’s no right way to grieve,” but there is, I whisper to her. Or at least there’s a wrong way to show up, and that’s what you see in front of you. Carry on.
The Kate of 2007 hears the Kate of 2017.
“Right, I’ll do that,” she lies to the roomful of people, who watch approvingly. She is carrying on. Good girl.
I filled the notebook and what felt like a hundred more. I look at them sometimes. I flip to a page and see myself hanging on to cliffs with my fingertips, near hysterical in how alone I felt. But I didn’t keep it to myself. I shared everything as it unfolded because that’s what was right for me. I founded a community for us, a place safe from mixed company where talking about feeling suffocated helped us all to breathe. I spoke at memorial walks. I made my own light and air. In all kinds of ways I allowed my pain to clean itself. I cared for it. And I wasn’t alone at all.
FIELD NOTES
80-Page Steno Book
Ruled Paper / Durable Materials
Double-O Wiring / 6 x 9
February 2, 2016
In a performance hall watching this brilliant, accomplished woman talk about innovation. Feeling quite a bit like a caveman, from the woods by a Nova Scotian creek to shining glass in downtown Vancouver.
What is the takeaway? In business they call it “disruption,” and they—the smart ones, anyway—say disruption is integral to positive change. Nothing happens without a shock. She is talking about market strategy and team dynamics and I am listening, mostly, but in my mind, everything she says points to Liam. Not to reduce him to a prop for personal growth. But I am left here without him. There is no bigger disruption. The shock still unfolds, though more gently than it once did. For the rest of my life I will grapple with his absence. Grappling is growth.
I can’t love him by wiping his nose. I can’t open his bedroom door, see he’s all gummed up in his blankets, and creep into the dark to untwist him, clammy limb by limb, for a fresh tuck. I can’t shampoo his hair or turn his socks right side out. I can’t stand it that he’s not here. But would I have rather not known him at all? The mass of this pain is still inside me. I wish I didn’t have to carry it. But I’d be his mother a thousand times over. I appreciate his imprint on who I am more than I resent the pain of witnessing his death.
Covering a lecture for a client, I flipped to an empty page to doodle LIAM in block letters, with one star that looked like the hand-cut cookie of a three-year-old. LIAM. It was almost entirely absentminded, his name existing for me somewhere on the spectrum between sacred core and curiosity. One moment I’d been riffing on what I was hearing about experience design and corporate social channels and the next, my thoughts had drifted to him. I was almost a decade beyond him, yet I was adding polka dots to the M before I realized what I was doing: noting the disruption that made me.
Disruption. When the twins were born three months early, I didn’t have access to a particular faith or philosophical array, but I didn’t feel a lack of one either. A hospital chaplain knocked repeatedly on the door, leaving notes about being available. I’ll come back tomorrow at 3:00, he’d write, and the next day at 3:00 I’d hide in the bathroom until his knocking stopped. But I worried, a little, that all I had was writing. Would it be enough? Was it the right thing, or was it “dwelling”?
Disruption. Suddenly, you’re in over your head. You are flailing, panicking. Your faith or philosophy is not the life jacket you’d thought it would be. It is a Victorian ball gown with hoops and layers, forty pounds of ruffles and bustle and a corset designed for admirers, a shallow breath, and a straight back. It identifies you, as long as you’re on solid ground. It is your swank and swagger. But as soon as you hit the water, it wraps around your legs and lungs with the buoyancy of cinder blocks.
To be shaken, uncertain, and searching for answers is to be naked. No god has betrayed you, no prayer had gone unheard. No theory was catastrophized into an ultimate test. If you’re going to be dropped into water over your head, you may as well be in your skin. Keep the ball gown. It’s a part of you too. But know when to let out a seam. Don’t buy into everything they tell you that you should be and shouldn’t. Make it as easy as possible to find the rhythm of your dog paddle.
* * *
Don’t Complain. You are not so special. Other people have it worse than you. You need to get over it. Don’t Complain.
Good Christians don’t. I expect the good Muslims and good Jews and good Hindus and all the other good devotees aren’t supposed to either, because to complain is to take issue with the grand master’s plan. Swishy proper types don’t. If you want everyone who meets you to marvel at your perfect manicure and perfect disregard for all emotions in the UNDIGNIFIED category, to complain is to invite the side eye of other swishy propers. The nouveau Bohemian types aren’t supposed to either. See also: The Secret and viral Facebook memes and airport self-help books about how Positivity! rewires brain synapses to Manifest! Good! Things!
But—
But—
But—
If nobody ever complained, nothing would ever happen. No change, no growth. Like that movie about the town stuck with black-and-white pin curls and pressed slacks, every shirt tucked in and every button buttoned, but with no fistfights and no back seat hand jobs, no midnight ice cream, no musty basements, no French kisses, no gay uncles, no cotton candy cavities, no thrilling risks, no vagina-as-flower art, no smashing glass, no rose cream macarons, no keggers, no stray farts or nipples, no Thanksgiving politics, no caramel wrappers found stuffed between the couch cushions. No complaints. No one to say Why can’t I (scream when I need to / say what I mean / be who I am)?
We are lusty and outrageous creatures. Our lust and our outrage is the furnace of our aliveness. Complain, dammit. Incorporate this new heat. Your baby died. Complain, darling, and weep and sob or talk about it to everyone or only yourself. Whatever is best for you. But complain. Complain until the heat of it brings you into your color. Gray and untouched is a half-life. The next time your peanut gallery winds up, say it out loud: Gray is the only true nothingness. Then walk away. Or imagine walking away.
* * *
My mom, cooped up with a toddler and an infant, went to her first quilting bee and found art, meditation, and friendship. I’ve grown up surrounded by straight pins and fat quarters, bundles of fabric from floor to ceiling, baskets of ribbons and hoops, the hum of her machine, and a house full of women of all ages chatting and laughing and sewing with hot pots of tea and fancy cakes. They were all soft, to me, like my mother. Some were wrinkled and plain and beaming, others wore bright lipstick and hand-knit socks and smelled like flowers and lemon squares. They all were delighted and occupied, laps heaped full. They knew my name and asked with great interest how school was going, where I’d go to university. They’d pass around stacks of half-finished piecework to marvel at each other’s tiny stitches and rare cottons, their voices blending into a chirpy, contented murmur downstairs, their busy hands warming our house.
One day not long after our release from the NICU, with Evan at daycare having a Big Kid Day, I wandered the bins of the Bridgewater Frenchy’s—a chain of thrift shops that has punctuated the Maritime experience since before I can remember—with a sleeping, perhaps six-pound Ben wrapped up in the mei tai. I was pulling little long johns from the TODDLERS bin when I sensed
someone walking my way. It was Polly, one of my mother’s first mentors and closest quilting friends. She has written books and had exhibitions. It was Polly who taught my mother how to sew.
“Oh! Hi,” I said, dropping the clothes in my hands and stepping toward her for a hug. She stopped in front of me and took me by the shoulders.
“Oh god, Kate, I am so sorry,” she said. “I heard what happened with Liam, and I am so upset for you. It’s awful, and I am so sorry. I just can’t believe it. How are you doing, Kate? Tell me, how are you?”
Polly, you should understand, isn’t one of the particularly flowery ones. She’s witty and sharp. She doesn’t stand for any fluff, if that makes sense. She’s passionately opinionated and direct, so when she said “I’m sorry,” she didn’t say it the way most people do, drifting-off. She said it how it’s supposed to be said. With fervor and agitation.
I can’t remember how I responded. I only remember she didn’t look away. She was angry for me. She felt it was wrong, backward, and unfair for a baby to die, and she wanted me to know it. We talked a while, had a long hug. She peered into the mei tai to see the top of Ben’s head. It’s rare to encounter people who say the words That sucks with loving attention and outrage. And how lovely it is to exhale like that. I have never forgotten it.
* * *
Faced with someone who’s terribly upset, almost nobody knows how to be. The best people simply say I don’t know how to be. But they listen, and they try, with no agenda other than to listen and try. The most important part is not the being, but the trying.
When you’re wounded from the carelessness of others, remember all the other misfortunes and traumas that would land you, flummoxed and speechless, in some other poor soul’s peanut gallery. Because you can’t forgive your own peanut gallery until you recognize you can be clumsy too. You might say But not when a baby dies! My god. I would never say to anyone what people have said to me. I would never call a child a gynecological mishap. I would never tell a grieving parent to “get over it.” Never ever.
I believe you. You wouldn’t. But it might not be someone else’s dead baby that makes you thoughtless. It might be someone else’s car crash and subsequent wheelchair. Once something happens to you, it no longer feels extraordinary. The shock becomes familiar. And so you can’t fathom how someone could just clam up and stand there gaping stupidly at you. But you might be the first time they’ve ever known someone whose baby has died. And they might be reaching. They might say LET ME TELL YOU ALL ABOUT MY BALL GOWN. Or they might have their own pain that they pushed away and tried to ignore, and yours makes them remember it. They don’t want to. And so you get chastised.
Even if you are without your child and without any others, other parents—once they aren’t so loaded for you (what with all those uneventfully living children and all)—can be a safe haven. The smart ones, anyway. The allies. The ones who put on the tea and say Now tell me what happened. The cantankerous quilters. You will find them. They will find you. I promise. They will share with you their own stories of infertility, miscarriage, and loss that might surprise you. Eventually, they will outnumber the jerks.
About jerks. Three things: First, recognize your own gaps in compassion. You’ve been through a lot, but there’s still plenty that is unfamiliar and terrifying. Being aware of your own gaps helps you to understand the failures of others are not about you. I might do that to someone, someday, in some small way and not even know it. Every victimhood is best tempered with an inward look for perpetration. This is empathy.
Second, detach from this particular jerk moment—the passive-aggressive remarks on your apparent inability to cope, the pace of your healing, or your mental state—and become an observer. Add every slight, snide remark, or lapse to an imaginary comic strip called ADVENTURES IN JERKLAND. Whatever Jane says, ask yourself: What would I say if I wanted to have the opposite effect of the shitty thing she’s saying? And take it on as instruction for the next time someone in pain needs you. A good friend calls you, with a shaking voice, to tell you he’s just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It is a realm for which you are wholly inexperienced. You know nothing of this suffering. Not to this point. Remember Jane. Reach for the grace she lacked. Add her jerk moment—in which she dismissed you, marginalized you, demanded a Positive! outlook, criticized you for fussing so much—to your instinct of how not to respond. As the future’s inevitable sad disclosures, crises, and cries for help unfold, your detached observations of Jane will make you a more gentle, emotionally intelligent, and intuitive human. Thank you for this gift, Jane. I will consider it. Just not in the way you think.
Third—I’ve already said it a few times because it’s worth saying more than once—give every Dick and Jane a wide berth. You need not give them anything else.
* * *
A caveat: You are alright. You are normal. You are exactly where you need to be. Fiercely protect your grieving ground from jerks and bullshit and other people’s exorcisms. Do not let anyone else’s opinions or attachments or expectations interfere with how you tend to yourself. That is much of this book, and it is true and important.
But: There is a difference between people who seek to silence or shame you and those who know you well and who may say I think you might need a different sort of help. There is such a thing as loving intervention. They may not be wrong, and they may not be insensitive. They may just be heartbroken, watching you suffer. It can be hard to figure out which is which, but try. Take a pause:
Is this silencing, criticism, or someone else’s discomfort—or could they be right?
Could this person be trying to get through to me with love?
Might this person see my grief as completely warranted but worries the water I’m in is starting to turn to concrete? Would I be able to tell if I were in concrete?
Perhaps my therapist isn’t the right fit for me?
Could it be time for antidepressants / a move / a support group?
In taking this pause, you’ll often find you are alright, normal, and exactly where you need to be. The vast majority of the time, your baby’s death and your continued existence has simply rung a bell this person didn’t want rung. They want to hurry you along. They want this chapter in your life closed not because it will make you feel better but because it will make them feel better.
Your sacred and lifelong dialogue with death is yours distinctly. We are all having the same dialogue in parallel, but it is to each their own. Your relationship with death is yours to forward, grow into, and bargain with. But don’t dismiss those closest to you out of hand just because they may be standing in the vicinity of your peanut gallery. It could be Dick being Dick. You know the people in your life best. You will know when to carry on and when to allow their feedback, however clumsy, to prompt some contemplation.
* * *
You’ve thought it. I’ve thought it.
Oh god I can’t do this. I can’t get through this.
Everything is falling.
The sky!
We will be crushed
There will not be enough understanding
Money
Stuff
Time
Love
My baby
Oh my god my baby
Slow down. Pay attention to what is in front of you.
“Black tea, please. And macarons—one crème brûlée and a lemon and a salted caramel. And…”
The pastry chef’s hand rests in the air over a tray.
“…one rose cream.”
As long as you’re paying attention, discord can’t exist in the same moment as this. Even if the moment is just a few seconds. Just enough for one good, deep breath.
The sun smiles on everyone, all of us pained and fearful and wanting. We feel so viscerally responsible for failure, lack of control, disappointing others. And yet there are macarons! French confectio
ns that are crispy and chewy at the same time, weightless but capable of slowing the spin of the earth. You might be in great need of a sigh like that, the untwisting kind that wraps you in the barest hint of lavender. When your brain or your obligatory social circle is a bloodthirsty mob, find a fresh macaron. It’ll go quiet, for a moment.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Chat with Death
A dialogue worth having: reconciling the irreconcilable.
IT WAS HER last day of ninety-five years. Figures stood against the wall and sat in chairs at her bedside. They were people she knew when they were children, and whose children had children. I imagine it must have been strange for her to leave her house, to be carried out knowing she wouldn’t be back. To think Well, this would be it, then. It was strange for everyone. She was the dame of the town.
“Yes, there is something I’d like,” she replied to the nurse, who had asked. The tale was told long after she was gone. “A rum and a smoke.”
* * *
At her funeral I breathed deep for the scents of an old wooden church: polish, incense, perfume. The ticket booth of god. Pomp and circumstance, a show. Everyone participates, responding when we’re supposed to respond, in the same way we smile politely at a magic trick we know is a slight of hand. But I had peeked behind the curtain. As we marked her death we noted her life and when we did, something else was there. I had felt it before. Not a burning bush but a tired, kind accompaniment of energy that doesn’t live in a church at all.
It’s hard to be around the leaving of a soul, even when that soul has had its due and more—peace, prosperity, affection, decades. But it’s still unfair and deeply unsettling to have them go before us.