Notes for the Everlost

by Kate Inglis

  They know how the brain works—a circuit board with crisscrossing currents like a map of the London Underground. Shivers and yawns, the fight or flight instinct, whatever it is that keeps our chest rising and falling when we’re asleep. But they also have no idea how the brain works. How memory gets into our bones. How we have premonitions. Whether you believe in the paranormal or not, you’ve had a premonition, or your aunt has. I knew my babies would be born soon, and in peril, and I didn’t know I knew until after. Last night I dreamed my babies were born too soon. Where did that dream come from? What was its purpose, since no warning could have averted the outcome?

  Months after our release from the NICU, we were walking in the city. A man approached, waving, and shook hands with my husband. The two of them chatted while I smiled politely. I didn’t know him. I looked up at the trees, at the leaves swaying. I thought about errands, getting home through traffic.

  Then I smelled morphine. I startled and looked from one face to the other and back again. They were talking about weather, sports. The scent grew stronger—almost enough to make me interrupt, but I was too stunned. The pungent chemical was dripped through Liam’s scalp intravenously as he died, the contraption a third participant as I brushed my lips to the fuzz on the top of his head. I know the cold squirt and metallic tang of its administration. The battleground angel at his death. I know it, and it knows me.

  They carried on as I inhaled frantically, confused. He said Nice to see you and we said goodbye. As the man went along down the sidewalk, the cloud left with him.

  “Did you smell that?”

  “Smell what?”

  We walked a while more.

  “Do you know who that was?” he said.

  “No. Should I?”

  “That was your anesthesiologist.”

  The battleground angel at his birth. I remember a blue mask leaning over me upside down, inches from my face, telling me I would feel cold. I never knew who he was. But my body did. He was attached to my disaster, our disaster, a straight line from him to me to Liam. Something in me knew it.

  We have always perceived what eventually turned out to be science as sorcery. But I want this particular sorcery to stay. I don’t want my understanding to penetrate this magic, to ruin the mystery of gut instinct and muscle memory. It’s like people who don’t dare ever meet their heroes. If Bon had met David Bowie, she might have heard his stomach growl. Her Ziggy Stardust might have gone POOF. Where does the soul go? Sorcery. What comprises MacDougall’s twenty-one grams? Sorcery. How can I still feel the grit of hospital under my skin? Where does the blind memory of trauma live, if not in my conscious brain? What other, more primal thing lives in the gut or at the base of the spine? Are we rooted by more than the cerebral? Could those roots be stronger than what we think we know? Is memory cellular? Goodnight moon, goodnight plasma. Goodnight membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus. Are we more an environment than a being, a community of blood witnesses? Was one of them screaming on the sidewalk that day? Are we our own keepers and guard dogs?

  Don’t tell me. Shh.

  * * *

  Someday, you’ll get as far as suppertime before consciously remembering. You’ll be adding butter to rice, worried you’ve burned the almonds again. Your mind will chatter, as minds do:

  Power bill

  Snow tire appointment

  Pretty sunset

  Meeting tomorrow

  Skype keeps crashing

  Suddenly, putting on an oven mitt, you’ll remember you ate a bomb.

  The baby died

  The timer will ding. You’ll open the oven door and take out the frittata. You’ll fill plates and sit down to eat and realize you’ve gone one whole day without actively thinking about what happened to you. Until the almonds begin to over brown:

  That was me. That was us.

  But then, Wow. What time is it?

  6:12 p.m.

  It’s been all day. I haven’t thought of it once, and it’s been all day.

  Loss defines you as much as everything else. Sickness, love, career, marriage. Things coming apart and things coming together. Every relationship, pothole, and happy coincidence. Right now, loss has overwhelmed everything else. Someday you’ll remember, and you’ll wait for your eyes to get hot and glassy. But they won’t. Loss will be a big thing, but still, just one thing. The first time it feels this way, you might feel strange. But at some point, we all have to give permission for our baby to be lost. Disbelief gives way to giving way. Your child is not with you. And you’ll say Alright, baby. This is the great and fearsome letting go. This is you, as a parent, saying Be good, wear your mittens, and don’t forget to bring a snack. This is Bye-bye, sweetheart.

  This is your active care of that lost soul, and of you in the losing. This is you no longer smelling like fresh blood, no longer quite so vulnerable to prey. The bomb is still in you, but your body has grown around it. This is phantom parenthood.

  You will eat frittata with Reggiano that cost too much. It will be delicious. You’ll sip a glass of wine, balancing a plate on your lap. You might be alone. You might not. But you’ll remember, and you will not fall in a heap.

  You’ll say Alright baby, alright and turn the oven off.

  Your stress will change: from grief triggers and panic attacks to the fact that your car smells like compost. Compost with fabric softener tucked under the front seats. Perfumed compost. Do I still qualify as an adult with a car that smells like this? Income tax season plus the fresh anxiety of coparenting made my hair fall out in clumps. It was the regular, cumulative bumble of daily life that brought on the asthma. Not the baby death. What sense does it make? I held my child as his heart stopped, but dating as a forty-year-old is what had me gulping into paper bags every twenty breaths. How could I outlive Liam and be undone by the prospect of Tinder and a solo mortgage?

  “I’m eating a metric shit-ton of butter,” I wailed to someone. “I can’t see the butter without my glasses. Everything is getting worse. Age! Years! Passing! My hair is falling out. I can’t breathe.”

  “I suggest Reiki,” the someone said. I went for Reiki.

  Is it working? I don’t feel anything. WAIT. I feel heat. She’s all hot handed. Heat. Oil bills. TV sucks. Who watches sitcoms anymore? I can’t forget to pick up that thing on the way home. Things. Ugh groceries. My car. The engine light is on. Is it just that Volkswagen thing or is it really something? Brakes? The exhaust? Daphne. I have to call Daphne. Whoosh. I feel a whoosh. Wait. What? Her hands. Plane. Ticket to North Carolina. Hurricanes. It’s almost…

  “You need to quiet your mind,” said the Reiki lady. “And uncross your arms and legs. You’re blocking me.”

  My mind quieted, but only sort of. It whispered to itself at double speed, just like everyone else’s.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Anniversaries

  Almost more than a birthday, bereaved parents can’t help but mark a death day. An exploration of how grief changes and softens over time, as it has for me on June 15 of every year.

  YEAR ONE

  A FEW WEEKS before one year to the day the twins were born, I fall apart, but oddly. Not only with the pain of losing him but with tolerating the minutia of life after losing him. I lament everything. How to take time away from paying work to write a novel after losing ten thousand dollars buying and then immediately selling an unnecessary minivan. How to lurch on ahead, getting older. How to sleep without thinking. How to shake this angry pallor.

  One year in, I am exhausted by the grief. The pressure to be in a state of constant spiritual vigilance and remembrance is a weight on my chest. There is too much to remember, too much to shrink from. Too many anniversaries: the first day he died (the day he was born), the second day he died (the day he died again), and the six weeks in between. His heart surgery, his steroid-fueled bloom, the day his brain began to flood. And June 14: the day they tried
to fix it with a shunt in his head, and it failed, and the flood got worse, and the doctors finally decided (he decided, they said) he had had enough.

  I feel the same way.

  YEAR TWO

  My baby died. Where’s that gallon of Varathane? Time for another coat.

  Two years after it happened, I hide from it. My brain is a looping replay of what might have been, as it always is: The pregnancy carries on and we are safely delivered. I have three sons. Or the pregnancy does not carry on, and everything explodes as it did, but Liam’s hydrocephalus is manageable. Our life is one of power wheelchairs, vans with hydraulic lifts, lifelong diapers, repeated brain surgeries. I have three sons. This is how I hide from what really happened. Two years later, I am glad to be busy and I am ashamed of being glad to be busy. I don’t know what to do with myself. To think of him, even fleetingly, triggers the only words I have: I’m sorry. I’m sorry we’ve gone on without you.

  Eighty-five percent of lost mountain climbers die on the way down from the peak. Not on the way up. On the climb, every adventurer gone before them cheers in spirit. But on the way down, those voices go silent. Ghosts fall after the peak. On the way down, you are fatigued. Your legs are throbbing and you’re oxygen depleted. Your mind starts to play tricks. You’re hemmed in by impending weather and night. On the way down, you can’t see footholds. Outcroppings are more likely to crumble. We land more heavily, with less grace. We fall.

  In the first year, everybody knows. There is an odd sort of glory in making it to the one-year mark, the impossible peak. People say We remember and You’re so strong. In the first year, your continued existence is a spectacle, a wonder. Your loss was the foremost thing. But by the second year, this social contract has faded. People will think all kinds of things when they see you and perhaps not at all about your baby. Now, other things are more prevalent. There is new drama, yours and theirs. They want to move on. You want to move on. The only person who feels awful in this longing is you.

  It’s lonely on the way back to regular life. Every step is painstaking. Returning to base camp, let alone to a hot bath in the village, is many times slower and more perilous than the climb.

  YEAR THREE

  Three years after the night they were born, I can’t sleep. Three years ago right now…he was alive.

  What happens next is strange. I am not flooded with the nightmarish memory of how he looked that night, or with the conditions of his white-knuckled diagnosis. I am flooded with the way you feel when you’re twelve years old, waiting at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning.

  He was alive!

  Happiness, as if it had all turned out some other way. Unreasonable, irrational happiness. My brain says But he was in pain and he died.

  And my heart says Oh, shut up.

  And my brain says You’re not supposed to ever say SHUT UP to anybody. It’s the rudest thing you can ever say.

  And my heart says I’m tired of all your death and purpleness and misery. He was here! He was here. I made him and he was beautiful, and knowing him, even a little, was sublime, and I don’t care what you say.

  Three years after, in the middle of the night that marked the moment just before everything went wrong, that he was ever here at all makes me feel like the luckiest unlucky mother ever. My brain walks away, shaking its head. My heart spins around giggling in a field of sun-drenched daisies.

  * * *

  Everything is new and dewy and fresh. I roll down the window along a green stretch. We live in the country where it’s quiet except for small birds and rustling leaves and the churn of the ocean. A dump truck passes with a clinking of chains and an airy whomp. I look into the side mirror to see a teenage boy walking on the shoulder of the road, with boots and a pack over one shoulder. He’s on his way somewhere. It’s Liam. I blink. The boy vanishes. Where he was walking there is now a small wheelchair left out on the side of the road along with unwanted sofas and lobster traps like it’s spring cleanup. I blink again.

  I try to imagine how he might have survived, how he might have been alright. These are separate worlds. In both, I love him. But neither can be true here, where I am.

  Every year, the night of June 14, Liam will die again. For the twelve hours it took, I will cry. Every year, the next morning, I will make a bleary pot of tea. I will light a fire in the woodstove and I’ll just sit.

  Was it true?

  It felt true.

  It felt like we weren’t alone.

  He went somewhere. Something took him. I don’t know where.

  I felt him lifted from his body.

  I don’t know what it was, but it was true.

  My uterus drowned one baby, drained the other, and exploded. I could get lyrical about it. I could presume to forgive it, except my womb is a mouthy mofo who thinks anthropomorphic reconciliation is for pussies. We can’t figure our way out of an experience like this. We can’t muscle the grief of loss to “heal” any more than an alcoholic can outsmart his alcoholism. We either integrate it, humbled, or we don’t.

  You will encounter new things and good jokes. You will visit unknown places, putting geographic and chronological distance between you and the site of your explosion. You will learn to surround yourself with people who understand that occasional sadness is not about them, and who never begin sentences with You should…unless they end with…come over ’cause I just made soup.

  Loss, like motherhood, never ends. He will always be mine. He will always be gone. This specter will always be attached to me. I’ll never be sure which one of us is holding the leash.

  Woof.

  YEAR FOUR

  I lie on my back with one leg bent, foot propped on the other inside knee in horizontal tree pose. I sprawl under the familiar heaviness of my duvet, with the luxury of line-dried sheets I didn’t grow to appreciate until I grew to appreciate other grown-up things like capers and gorgonzola. Just before sleep, I curl into a ball. Left hand cupping the right shoulder, right hand cupping the left. I am a knot. I wake up that way feeling stiff, like I’d been only pretending to sleep all night long.

  Poor body. Poor faulted thing, host to this ungrateful creature who never noticed you. Not until you slipped, body, and when you did, I cursed you, never mind the almost four decades of perfect uneventfulness you gave me. You are aging. You ache, I think grumpily, for no reason. You decline, reminding me of what’s inevitable, and I resent you for it. You lose the subtle elasticity I didn’t know I had until it began to be lost. The feet on you, body, grow gnarly in that way I swore they never would, and the heart too, and the mind.

  Starting when we’re young, we abuse our bodies. We deny them sustenance, care, worship. We think our bodies owe us something. Functionality, at least, if not also attractiveness, svelte lines, the right kind of curves and not the wrong.

  But it’s charmed. All of it.

  Even what you diagnose, in your arrogance, as unpleasing: Here is where I fail. You grab it, a fistful of evidence. Sometimes hating it righteously, not only vainly, on behalf of the other soul or souls it failed in addition to your own.

  Try, with every step: Thank you. Every scent and stretch and squeeze and yank and knock and growl. Thank you.

  YEAR FIVE

  On the fourteenth of every June—marking the beginning of his end—I feel like I’m not doing, feeling, writing, or saying the right thing. I get quiet and notice his absence. Did that really happen? Well, yes. It did.

  I used to feel an odd sort of peace. I had loved him. I held him. I was sad, but it was a functional sort of sad. But in the fifth year, I dismantle his family. His father and I separate. This stirs up so much pain, and in a dark way. Like in dumb horror movies where cheerleaders and quarterbacks evade death only to have death hunt them down by way of fence-post impalement or swarm of bees or falling gargoyle or combine harvester. All that golden sorcery the year after he died was my evasion. Trees spok
e to me and Liam spoke to me. I felt watched over. Ben needed milk, Evan needed trains. Things grew. But five years after, the dark thing wants its reckoning. I see my name on divorce papers and it says right there, brutally: PETITIONER. What I have done feels like I set him adrift, and his father and brothers too, no matter how amicable we manage to make it. I become a full-time catastrophizer, and for plenty of reasons. I am fundamentally more to blame for this than I ever was for his death.

  This year, I go in the canoe again to see his place. It’s pretty in there, always calm. I touch his water to my lips. I run my hand through the pebbles. His urn is under there somewhere, right there, tucked in. I feel clumsy and ashamed. He feels farther away than ever. I stay a while, then paddle away.

  YEAR SIX

  The kids are shimmering with happiness and the sun smiles through the window and the onion rings are crispy and the root beer is a two-handed frosty mug and we spin on the stools and the ketchup is splurty and I am in love with the moment. Then I eat the whole tray. Now it’s full-system shutdown. Ergh. I drive home, the boys chattering in the back seat.

  It is the sixth anniversary of the day he died, and I feel gross. Onion-ring gross.

  There’s a Robert Frost poem about flowers getting pelted by the rain. I could read that and think about it for a while, but it’s time to go pump ten pounds of Agent Orange into that anthill and watch them scatter.

  It is the day he died. I don’t know what to do about that.

  YEAR SEVEN

  I am sitting in the Calgary airport, waiting for the flight home, listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York,” thinking dreamily about Blackfoot drums on the prairie.

  I look down at the plane ticket in my lap for my seat assignment and see the date. June 15…JUNE 15. In realizing I had forgotten entirely—missing the night-before anniversary of when they took away his ventilator and our death vigil began, missing the 7 a.m. mark this morning of the moment he had died—my lips swell, my cheeks swell, my eyes grow hot. I can see myself sitting here. I can see I’ve forgotten. The past six weeks have been a blur. I went to Alberta to launch a new novel. During the tour, Alberta was overwhelmingly big-sky large. I shook with nerves in a motel room on the Blood reserve the night before going to Stand Off, a real-live place in my imaginary story. I gave workshops and read to the kids who live there, encouraging them to write and hoping they wouldn’t mind that in my book, Bloods were friends of airborne eco-warrior pirates. I went from school to school, driving past grain elevators and cowboys in silhouette. I got out of the car to rest at a gorgeous view of a ranch spilling off in every direction like an ocean of tall grass, and a thousand-pound bull came close, just the other side of a fence, and pawed the ground at me. The days blew by. I made money and spent it. I ordered food and ate it. I forgot the day of my son’s death.