Notes for the Everlost

by Kate Inglis

  In Stand Off, rez dogs cruise the streets like Danny Zuko’s T-Birds in Grease. A pack of them ran to me in front of the high school with tongues lolling, covered in mud and burrs, and I stood still as they tumbled toward my body at top speed. The leader, a bushy black bear, took a running leap and landed with his paws on my shoulders as if to knock me down. I braced myself and stood still, his breath on my face and his nose touching mine. Then he used my shoulders to stretch like aahhh, and I fell in love with him instantly, with all four of them. I fantasized about bringing them home on the plane. I wished I could buy each of them a seat and a meal in a plastic bento box. I gave them a stale blueberry muffin from the car and imagined living my life under a shaggy pile.

  Snarling packs run at you, smelling you from a long way off. Like Rilke’s dragons, perhaps the feral dogs in our heads only want a gas station muffin and a scratch from someone who doesn’t mind the fleas. Everyone needs love. The ghosts, the posses of wild mutts. They’ll take it when you give it, but they don’t hold it against you when you’ve just got to keep walking.

  YEAR EIGHT

  I appreciate how art rearranges the impossible into a shape we can absorb.

  How lovely he was, though he looked terrible, you know? He was lovely.

  How the light sweeps across the woods at dusk and the shadows get long and everything is golden and everything shout-whispers: YOU ARE ALRIGHT. SEE! LOOK! PRETTY! I hear her now. My conversation with nature started when he died and it has never stopped. I am glad for it.

  How things were always worse than I knew.

  How things were never as bad as they felt.

  How lucky I was. How strong I was. How unafraid I was. How certain I was that I was none of it.

  How Irene called me from France the day after her baby didn’t wake up from his nap. How her crying sounded on the phone from across the ocean. How I didn’t flinch. How none of us flinch. Not for each other.

  How the only thing I feel now, mostly, is just love for him. I remember the day he was born. I remember the day they took away the oxygen and I saw his face for the first time. I remember the day a nurse gave him the only bath he ever had, gently washing away the adhesive and remnants of intervention, leaving him so fresh and so nearly-normal it made me wonder if he might survive after all. I remember his last day when all the color drained from the world. The shame is faint now. It’s there but other voices shush it. Strong, healthy voices, all mine.

  YEAR NINE

  I make pies, cookies, chili. We bring wine, San Pellegrino, French baguettes, brie, Castelvetrano olives, and dark chocolate. We wander the lodge for musty old board games and books. We eat big breakfasts and have lunches on the porch, nibbling and sipping and exploring all afternoon. The boys fish for little rainbow trout, squealing with delight and then throwing them back. We skip rocks and play horseshoes and go on little hikes and bike rides around the point. We walk along quiet dirt roads on quiet lakes in the quietest part of the province, and birds sing. Water gently laps against the shore outside the window of our cabin, which smells not only like wood smoke, but the smoke of generations of fires.

  Nick and I—a “we” for the first time in a very long time, as I spent several years single and patching myself back together until I met him—bring the boys to the spot where Liam’s ashes are. Evan and Ben have heard about it for years, though I don’t say he rests there, exactly, because I don’t believe he does. The spirits at this old lake lodge are of me, of his father smashing the top off the urn with a Swiss Army Knife because the stopper got stuck. We set what was inside loose onto the surface of the water, some ashes penetrating the tannin to drift and float through lily roots, others skirting the surface like dancing water striders. When I come here, I see us, imprinted. I see our intention. I time travel to when he was closer to me. I touch the ancient maple tree that drapes green limbs and fingertips over the most peaceful and kindest water in the world, the creature that marks the spot.

  There is the usual bluster of getting everyone into the right shoes, swim trunks, sunscreen, life jackets. We set out from the cabin dock and watch for turtles, lilies, and bullfrogs. We haul both boats over a dam, crunching sticks under rubber boots. Sorry, beavers. We paddle until we can see the opening, camouflaged by trees: the little waterway that grows smaller and shallower as it winds and curls toward a wooden bridge deep in the forest, tall grasses touching our shoulders on either side as we float silently in the sunshine.

  Liam’s tree is the crown of this place, the watcher. I bring my sons to her, and the man I will marry, when I marry again.

  I reach up to grasp a limb, an anchor above us to keep us in place. Nick holds my boat to his. We tie ropes and get out, stepping into warm, knee-deep water and pebbles formed into waves, hills, and dunes by the current. My bare feet sink a little into them, into the burial ground. His urn is under here somewhere.

  I sit in the water, soft and sparkling. It swirls around me. Evan dangles his feet. Ben stays in the canoe to look up into the tree, almost shy of it.

  “She is such an old tree, isn’t she, Ben,” I say. “Just like Mother Nature.”

  He smiles. “I have something I want to leave for her.”

  In his hand is a white water lily found drifting off its pad. He reaches up, putting the flower on the maple’s limb, and he looks at me.

  “That is to say thank-you.”

  He has his own dialogue with death, too. He remembers. Liam told you all his secrets, I have always told him. They would put you together, you know, in the same crib, and you would suck on each other’s fingers.

  We sucked on each other’s fingers!?

  You did. He giggles, always.

  We race back, shouting and howling while we paddle, “Heave! Heave! Heave!” and “Land ho!” We sleep heavily and wake languorously. I get out my favorite journal, big and broad with soft, silky German paper, and I write about the tree, about nature and how she tended—and still tends—to my lost son.

  We have the best time, a time soon transcended by other best times. I am not hiding anymore.

  YEAR TEN

  In June of the tenth year since Liam died, I was editing this book to deadline. Reading aloud, consolidating, time traveling, deleting, crying, responding to editor queries like What do you mean by “Me being Relic from The Beachcombers is low-hanging fruit”; can you clarify? Fretting about getting all the nihilisms right. And I completely forgot the day of Liam’s death. Not like a few years back when I looked down at my plane ticket and realized it was the day, that day. I forgot-forgot. I didn’t realize it had passed until three weeks after.

  So this is ten years, you dick

  Contemplation and a reprimand—what a shit mother I am to him!—then a glimmer of relief that I am far out enough to be afforded the privilege of forgetting. Although, of course, there is no “forgetting.” I will never and wouldn’t want to. I remember all the time, my laborious mosaic, my illumination, and I miss him constantly. But June 15, the day, blew by with nothing but work deadlines and a grocery list. Then the next day and the next week and more blew by, too. I feel all kinds of ways about it.

  “I had never considered bereavement as a permanent state,” wrote Dave, a friend and bereaved dad when I told him in passing. “Life is so fleeting. We gotta make as much meaning as we can with however much time as we get. One of my takeaways from Tikva’s life is I’m now reluctant to put experience in piles of ‘desired’ and ‘undesired.’ I can’t see allowing myself to twist like that, susceptible to changing winds out of my control.”

  He added a smiley face. I thought about that, sending out, again, for the thousandth time, gratitude that I know these people. People like us.

  * * *

  Other bereaved friends plant trees, write letters, cry. I am never sure what to do. I might wonder if I should write something. Burn something. Make something. Put something into the creek. Bake a ti
ny cake and throw it as far as I can into the bay after saying something. Sometimes I go to the old maple. Sometimes I am alone. Sometimes not. The struggle is always that I should do it properly, but there is no properly. In recent years, muscle has been meaningful. When I didn’t know what to do, I picked up a crowbar and pulled the old siding off the shed while squirrels darted back and forth across the yard, and I said nothing at all. Just sweat.

  What I know now: the anniversary of his death is one day out of three hundred and sixty-five in a cycle full of thoughts of him. A well-timed crowbar is just as valid a meditation as anything else that gongs.

  * * *

  How do we mother invisible children after our bodies have stopped smoldering? If I don’t paddle to the place where we left his ashes, am I standing him up?

  The phantom teenager of what he might have been rolls his eyes. Ugh, Mom.

  It’s what mothers do. We worry.

  (Phantom kiss.)

  * * *

  It won’t be a particular day that will crush you. It’ll be next Tuesday or September 18 or New Year’s Eve five years later, when you’re in a pub with friends. You’ll see yourself in the mirror and something deep inside you will shriek DEAD BABY and you’ll go from adorably drunk to insufferably maudlin in an instant. And you’ll wind up crying on the toilet.

  The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

  —Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

  Cry on the toilet, insufferably maudlin! Einstein’s apparition fruitlessly tries to wipe mascara from your cheek.

  I am fundamental

  Say it.

  I am at the cradle of true art and true science

  I am beautiful

  Well. You look terrible. You’re crying in a pub toilet. But you’re beautiful.

  No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

  —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

  Blow your nose.

  The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

  —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

  Your dragons are going nowhere. Paint them. Write about them. Sew them and fold them and mix them and sculpt them and sing them and light them on fire. Dragons love fire. Fire is home. Fire is light. Heat is good. Heat makes strength. This is art.

  I will create something

  Decide it, if it suits you.

  I will build something

  I will make a story

  A space

  A room

  A quilt

  A thank-you

  A letter

  A song

  A scream

  I will put this somewhere.

  We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

  —Marcel Proust, La Fugitive

  Wipe your eyes.

  There will be plenty of pub bathrooms. You won’t always collapse. All the anniversaries of your baby’s birth or death will be loaded, but sometimes, the day will just pass. An anniversary can be creative and generative. It can make you feel ambivalent or connected. What feels perfect one year—lighting an origami boat on fire and watching it float away and burn—might strike you as trite and unnecessary the next year. Sometimes, you will have a long chat with death. You will part and say See you next year or See you next week. Other times, you’ll turn away in a huff or hide from it under your bed, watching as death’s feet enter your room and stand there a minute. You’ll peer out and see death scratching its head, wondering where you are. Death will amble off, not holding it against you. It will be back.

  These days, these annual signposts, will change as your pain changes. You will grow out of some rituals and adopt others. You will invite people into your remembrance some years and insist on total solitude in other years.

  You will have no clue what to do. And you’ll know exactly.

  Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.

  —Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dog Paddling in #Truth

  How to be accountable and evolve when a good chunk of your soul feels encased in concrete. The faraway places your mind must go, being among the grieving.

  NOTES FOR THIS chapter: the art, comedy—if there is any—and science of being among the misfortunate. A disgusting and beloved chew toy of fragile rationalizations and emotional Bermuda Triangles, and you are the dog. I am the dog. At what point do we abandon this active, wide-awake grief? At what point does it abandon us? Can we gnaw forever upon something that will only stink more with every slobby bite and squeak? When does self-awareness—“standing in my truth” blah, blah—morph into me being Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore? At what point does the scale tip over into unhealthy territory? What’s so bad about Eeyore, anyway? Eeyore is splendid. Eeyore is the art.

  The comedy of grief, for me, is in graduating from Eeyore to Bugs Bunny, outwitting the hapless coyotes who once made me feel small. Spring-loading trip lines and flipping the tracks of Wild West freight trains and loading cannons full of molasses. Bugs always wins, and with style. Someone would unleash another drive-by assault, and I would imagine throwing a wet fish at her face. A catapult of wet fish, a thousand.

  There’s a strange and wonderful rush you get from sitting with someone who not only shares dark feelings, but dark laughter. Tell me your worst. I’ll tell you mine.

  Holy shit. You’re joking. That’s horrible! And you still have to do Christmas?

  By the end of it, our mutual outrage makes us smile.

  The science of grief is a constant measurement: Am I okay? Yes. For now. Or No, but maybe I will be tomorrow. Or Maybe not. I need to introduce a new element. I chart my emotional temperature, watch lines rising and falling. I note patterns. From a distance I see a spectrum, long-view trends despite occasional peaks and valleys. I learn.

  Whether you share it or not, all this reckoning will occupy much of your mind for a long time. And while you might know—fiercely, I hope—that you are normal, you might not know how you are doing. Am I thinking too much? How can I not think? It’s like telling someone who’s anxious to relax. I am not capable of not thinking. Especially with so much to think about. It’s not like anyone chooses to fixate, like some people live and breathe politics or baseball stats. A dragon moved into your body, set up camp, and started breathing fire. You feel it every minute of every day. You have no choice but to make peace with it, pay attention, tame it, negotiate some ground rules. Doing so requires an affinity for all that reckoning comprises: feeling, remembering, dreams, nightmares.

  The ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Originating in Ancient Egyptian iconography, the ouroboros…is often taken to symbolize introspection, the eternal return or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself. It also represents the infinite cycle of nature’s endless creation and destruction, life and death.

  —Wikipedia

  In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process….The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e., of the shadow. This feedback process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and
gives birth to himself.

  —Carl Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung

  To integrate and assimilate the opposite—the shadow—is the work you are doing right now. Relief in pain, pain in relief. Round and round and round.

  You are eating your tail.

  You should stop that.

  That is not good for you.

  This is what they said to me, people who weren’t into Jung.

  That is disgusting.

  But I am whole, I said. See? Wholeness. This is what it looks like to integrate.

  That is disgusting.

  I am renewing myself.

  That is disgusting.

  I am renewing myself.

  * * *