Notes for the Everlost

by Kate Inglis

  People who are bereaved—what a petal-soft, round, and whispery word to describe this state!—spend day after day cultivating callouses that might bear the constant pressure of living beyond people we love. With every month Liam felt more distant, fading down the smudgy viewfinder of a pinhole camera, the memory of him breaking up and drifting in all directions. I sat in the pew and the ceremony turned into white noise. In my mind I talked to ghosts: It’s hard to be his mother and not know where he’s gone. I’m supposed to be on top of that.

  They heard, but said nothing.

  * * *

  Henry Scott Holland, Professor of Divinity at Oxford and a canon of Christ Church, gave a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral following the death of King Edward VII in 1910: “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room…”

  That there is a next room might be a cowardly hope, but we all share it. Even if we pretend to be too cool, too rational, this wish crosses all cultural boundaries. If we’re honest with ourselves, it’s one of the most persistent wishes in human consciousness. To imagine retaining links with our most beloved dead—and as the beloved dead—eases the burden of being the only animals who know we will die. Cosmology, astronomy, transpersonal psychology, physics, a holy book, Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. The semantics might differ but the instinct is the same. We cling to the suggestion of heaven, an afterlife, reincarnation, or a five-layer casserole of space, time, matter, energy, and physical laws that converge for the barest hint of quantum insurance. I die, and lo! I penetrate an alternate parallel dimension in which I pass the twenty-seventh week of my pregnancy. Nothing happens. I grow bigger and bigger; they arrive; I push them both out, fat and screaming, as am I; I laugh with my friends about how I pee a little when I sneeze; I walk into the sunset with a double stroller and a toddler.

  Some of us wish literally for a god-hosted reunion in the sky, to which more and more adored friends and family come through the door in turn. Others daydream about atoms recycling as stardust and dragonflies. Even the most dust-devoted atheists among us would keep a candle lit just in case, if only there were something—anything—to Ghostbusters. If there’s a Slimer, there might be something to a contented afterlife. Or unattended hot dog carts, at least. There might be a chance to see what’s next. To see again the ones we love.

  Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

  —Henry Scott Holland, from sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral following the death of King Edward VII

  * * *

  At another funeral—the one for Derek, my high school prom date and the RCMP officer who died when his squad car hit a moose in Saskatchewan—I looked down to the grass and saw a little door put there to civilize the hole in the ground made for his remains.

  All of us have a place waiting to contain us. A place that’s going to be ours when we no longer have or need anything else. Mine is a winding water path of lily pads and beaver dams leading to a gnarly maple that leans out over the water. Eel and bullfrogs and tadpoles and trout live there, and they will gulp me into their ecosystem as they did my son.

  Why me? is the king of unanswerable questions. It will exhaust you. It will make you ache. It will make you loathe other people who seem every kind of lucky. I resented them, newly removed to the unlucky side. I peered across the void at them and wondered Why my son? Why him? Why me?

  Then I woke up one day and realized it’s the easiest question of all. Why not me?

  All of us are the same no matter how we presume to intellectualize, talk to a god, reconcile, beg, perform, or strive to be worthy. We are all exactly the same. Randomness doesn’t discriminate. There’s no fault. There’s no lack of wanting or deserving. There’s no blame. None of us are entitled to an uneventful life. It’s long straws and short straws and that’s it.

  You might say to your baby: Where are you? Where did you go? Why?

  You are the parent. You’re supposed to know these things. Forgive yourself that you don’t. You never will.

  You might wonder Why us?

  Why not?

  * * *

  I’m not afraid of you, you know.

  I know.

  I’ve seen you before.

  I know.

  I just don’t like it when you hang around my family.

  Not many people do.

  You’re just so damned arbitrary.

  Am not.

  Are too.

  Am not.

  Oh Christ. Stop that.

  Oh Christ. Stop that.

  Quit copying me!

  Quit copying me!

  (Kate glares.)

  (Death snickers.)

  The whole world wails because of you. Every day. Is that really how you want to spend your life?

  (Death pauses, confused.)

  * * *

  The Tinguians of the Philippines dress the dead and sit them by the front door with a lit cigarette. For the sky burials of Mongolia and Tibet, the body is chopped into pieces and placed on a mountaintop to be dispersed by vultures and wind. In South Korea, the ashes of the dead are compressed into gem-like beads and put in the keeping of those left behind. There’s the New Orleans jazz funeral parade, the turning of the bones every few years in Madagascar, and Balinese cremation pyres with their wooden dragons. Our culture dictates how to free the soul so it may rest, go to an afterworld, or inhabit a new body. Our culture sets the rules of this sacred work, of asking for and conveying blessings to honor the dead.

  How to mourn? That depends. In some cultures, we are all to cry and thrash. In others, the measure of the public torment of women (not of men) is the measure of how much the dead were loved. Unless death is seen as a liberation, as it is in other places, in which case restraint is the norm and crying and thrashing is improper. To be silent is to make the family proud. To fail to do so reflects badly. And so we bear up, as expected. Or we cry and thrash, as expected. Or only some of us. We are instructed how to perform grief by the boundary lines of our birthright, which are just as random as the instructions themselves.

  For those left behind, disharmony is the friction between your feelings and how others think you should feel. Especially in the deeply meshed and mingled West, the only answer is cultural secularism because there is no winning. The swank Irish person you sit next to at dinner will think you’re disgraceful because you didn’t just say I’m Fine. The back-to-the-lander who makes her own goat yogurt will think you’re suspiciously robotic because all you said was I’m Fine. Your pious aunt will tell you you’re not trusting in god, which is a vanity and an abomination. Sway without breaking, she’ll say. Like a tree. Which is the same thing your electrician will say, attributing it to Biggie Smalls. Your yoga teacher will not stop with the forlorn, all-knowing gazes. You will snap at her one day to leave your sacral chakra out of it. Your stylist, her hands on your head, will say quietly that your hair is falling out. She will apologize and cry. You will comfort her and part with a hug. Then your sister will te
ll you, in a flash of frustration that has more to do with her mortgage than you, that you’ve gotten bitter. You won’t speak to her for two months. You will lash out at some people who need protecting and protect others who have earned a lashing out. Your talk will make people uncomfortable. Your lack of talk will make people uncomfortable.

  For the bereaved, there is no winning.

  How to mourn, if not in Bali? Make a pyre of expectations. Speak what feels right to speak. Be quiet when you need to be quiet. Say you’re fine when you’re not in the mood to talk about why you’re not fine. Do what you’re compelled to do. Make someone uncomfortable. You have enough to deal with without worrying what people think of your performance. You have death to deal with, and death has to deal with you, and that is enough.

  In the free world, government has to be secular because everyone believes different things. And in the free world, that’s cool. Besides, anything other than devoted secularism makes for a legislative and social mess. And so, at least ideologically, government keeps religion separate. It’s up to each citizen to worship or not worship in whatever way they like, and we make the rules for everyone based on our inclusive, humanist, compassionate good sense as an ever-maturing and self-aware collective. That’s the intention, anyway. The same is true of how to conduct oneself as a bereaved person. You can’t please every other citizen. They are as devoted to their judgments as the devout are devoted to their commandments—their opinions about the right way to be.

  Your dialogue with death will be one of the most intimate relationships you’ll ever have, with ongoing arguments, reconciliations, truces, calls to arms, and late-night heart-to-hearts under the sheet with a flashlight. Some people will think you’re doing it wrong, but there’s no need to whitewash or legislate your grief so it suits someone else. Suit yourself. Be secular. Be free.

  * * *

  A dream.

  Skeletons clickety-clack their heels down a diner aisle to a booth. “Fish chowder and rhubarb pie, please.”

  Skeletons prune rose bushes left too long. Tsk tsk. Gone right wild.

  Skeletons ride bicycles, waving as they pass.

  Skeletons climb ladders, wash windows.

  Skeletons share seats on school buses, watching you as they rumble by: You fleshy thing with your juice and bruises and scratches and knocks, twinges and nerves. What I’d give for some fish chowder and rhubarb pie.

  Skeletons were hacked and chopped and pushed and shoved and crushed and just plain withered, fell asleep, here for a long time, veins and kidneys and cheeks left to dry, all the glisten gone. Gone and then the people who remembered them gone and nobody left to remember the remembering, and they look at us, at all of our chewing and swallowing, watching us, curious and hungry.

  It’s more peaceful than it seems, really and truly. There’s no point in minding bones.

  * * *

  I feel like I’m always going to be suffocating in my own sorrow. How do you come back from this? Will this loss always define me? Should I feel guilty for not wanting it to define me or guilty because I want it to? How am I supposed to navigate this new life?

  I remember wondering the very same things.

  How do you find your way back?

  You don’t. Not like that. But you won’t always suffocate.

  There’s an old-timey cartoon of the good guy magically ingesting a ticking bomb to spare everyone else around him. The hero eats the killer. The bomb detonates, the belly comically expands and contracts, the hero burps smoke. Everyone is saved. After Liam died, I didn’t feel like I could speak plainly to anyone. Among some people, anything other than I’m fine was unwelcome. Others were loving and open, but I didn’t want to make my mother cry, you know? I didn’t want her to worry about me. She was grieving a grandson. I didn’t want her to fear for her daughter too. And so for all those reasons I ate the bomb. To vent the pressure, I wrote to you. You wrote to me. I found others among us and together, we leaked smoke in safe company.

  We took on a feral cat once, or perhaps she was just lost. She climbed up the back steps, starving and covered in burrs. I’d never before heard an animal wail so miserably. I opened a can of tuna and called her Toots. She was a little Maine Coon, if there is such a thing, with thick long fur and a bushy lion’s mane, and she was light as a bird.

  We took her to the vet who said, “Good lord, this cat…this cat is shaped like a bowling pin! Oh, hang on. This cat is pregnant. Congratulations…?”

  We paid him money and took our pregnant cat home. We played with her, and she brightened up. We went away one weekend and came home again to a dried splat of blood on the floor. She walked around it shifty-eyed. We took her to the vet again.

  “Your cat’s not pregnant anymore,” he said.

  “What?” I looked stupidly at him.

  “She miscarried. That would have been the blood.”

  “What?” I looked stupidly at him, still. “But…the…”

  “She probably ate it.”

  “She ate it?”

  “That’s what they do. It’s instinct.”

  “…?”

  “If a mammal miscarries in the wild, they need to hide it in order to protect themselves and any other litter. Prey will smell it.”

  To not clean up a bloody mess is to ring the dinner bell, heralding your doom as much as we do if we let that bomb keep ticking. The cat knows she is not safe. She has to hide it, absorb it, no longer be vulnerable due to it. This is survival. Like the hero and the cat, we swallow what is dangerous. Sometimes to save everyone else in the blast radius, sometimes to save ourselves. It isn’t healthy or unhealthy. It’s instinct.

  * * *

  I had never seen a dead body before. My baby was my first.

  In the same way time becomes its own contradiction as we age—the days going slowly and the years going quickly—death is both the most natural thing and the most difficult. Unless it’s in an accidental instant, death is hard work. For Liam, poor love, getting out of his body was a prison escape. Afterward, he looked awful. Battered. I laid his body on my lap for a while.

  This will be the last time I will see him, I thought. And so I looked. But I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at an awfully battered shell. Something he used to occupy. His body didn’t look peaceful, as some other witnesses might describe a body. It looked empty. There’s a difference between peaceful and empty. It was not him. His body was a snakeskin. He had, with great effort, shed it. Maybe that’s why people use the word peaceful. We see the empty shell, see the animation of the soul is gone, and we are struck with a tiny bit of hope, relief, or confirmation. “Gone” is elsewhere, and there is no more obvious gone than the gone of seeing the dead body of someone you knew and loved. And so the peacefulness we imagine doesn’t come from them. It comes from us. We are wracked, but this inanimate thing left behind—the empty body—helps us to understand it’s over.

  Dr. Duncan MacDougall (c. 1866–October 15, 1920) was an early 20th-century physician in Haverhill, Massachusetts, who sought to measure the mass lost by a human when the soul departed the body at death….In 1901, MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis in an old age home. It was relatively easy to determine when death was only a few hours away, at which point the entire bed was placed on an industrial scale which was reported to be sensitive to two-tenths of an ounce, or five and a half grams. He took his results (a varying amount of unaccounted-for mass loss in four of the six cases) to support his hypothesis that the soul had mass, and when the soul departed the body, so did this mass, leaving the corpse “a soul lighter.” The determination of the soul weighing 21 grams was based on the loss of mass in the first subject at the moment of death.

  —Wikipedia

  Physicists today chuckle. By modern standards, MacDougall’s experiments have no scientific merit. The scale he used was comica
lly inaccurate, his sample size was six people (two of whom were not counted due to equipment breakdowns), and his conclusion was not replicable. What’s more endearing and notable is that MacDougall tried. If death makes our bodies empty—as so many of us have seen—then where does consciousness go? What once animated what has become inanimate? Beyond our sneezing and coughing and all the bluster of our soft machines, what makes twinkles in eyes? What makes us, Us? What organic material commands our sense of humor, our body language, our attractions? Where do our feelings come from?

  There is no such thing as a failure of science. We make a best guess; the answers scurry further away from our assumptions; we iterate; we make another best guess. Every study that disproves a hypothesis lurches us closer to a breakthrough in understanding, as every bad date gets us closer to love. The question of the soul is one of many that makes scientists throw up their hands: We just don’t know. Isn’t it wondrous? All we know, and yet there is still so much we don’t know.

  You might think scientists love knowing things. And they do. But they love not knowing things even more. Death is a question less penetrable than the Mariana Trench, more infinite than outer space, more closed to our observation than the constant crumbling of mountains. Some people insert themselves to point and say, “Ah-ha! Jesus!” filling the uncertainty gap with a package deal of pearly gates and lightening fingertips. But I love not knowing too much. Not knowing is an opening. Scientists worship the state of not knowing like the sacred gift it is: when we get even a small sense of just how much we don’t know, we get something marvelous: humility. A carrot on the end of the stick of human growth. Will we ever catch it? Nope. But the chase is more important than the catch. The chase is what makes us dream. Isn’t it wondrous?