by Kate Inglis
For years, I hid from babies. I’d stand ten feet back until I “forgot something in the car” or “had to do the dishes.” I couldn’t help it. I don’t know why. The only explanation comes in the form of the one word that pops into my head: unreconciled.
But a while back, there was a kid in a front yard in Calgary. His mom, not privy to my nerves, said I need to do a thing for a minute, can you…and then he was in my arms and she was elsewhere.
Uhh.
He could have been mine. You know those babies, the ones who look at you all still and goggle-eyed and their proportions are familiar and they could have been yours? I looked over my shoulder. I could see her in the kitchen. I put my nose to the top of his head for a sniff.
Ggrrrmph.
I felt a string of drool ooze down across one knuckle, then another.
Raaaaaaagh.
I didn’t know I’d been evading them—all of them—until that moment, when I realized I finally wasn’t. I took him outside, flipping him to face outward with a hand wrapped around one thigh so one leg dangled. We sat on a porch swing with the back of his head flopped on my chest, the pudge of his legs splayed out on my lap. I felt the sun, his spitty chin, his clean scent. I remembered it’s nice, when you have a baby on your person—any baby—to look at things and talk about the things you see. A ladybug! Clouds in the sky today. Green grass! I hear a mower. You chitchat. We rocked a little, one of his fists smushed into his mouth. Then realizations, like flashcards:
I am finished.
I’d be finished even if I didn’t want to be finished.
I don’t not want to be finished.
Even if I wanted to not be finished, I’m old. I’m separated. Come apart. I’m leathery. People who have b-b-babies are married and fifteen years younger than me.
I have an exploding uterus.
I don’t want another kid anyway.
…
I like this one, though.
Things got really quiet. Just me and his little heft, his sticky neck. And I didn’t run away.
Ggrrrmphaaaf.
He had a nice smell, and I liked it. My chew toy of fragile rationalizations and emotional Bermuda Triangles took a hit.
* * *
People said You’re so strong as if I’d been granted a moment to choose pluckiness and had chosen right, like Little Orphan Annie stamping on Miss Hannigan’s foot. After your very small baby dies in your arms, to exist at all is seen by others as admirable rebellion. But it’s not. When doctors say Follow me, you follow. When they say Do this, you do. The system sweeps you up, propelling you and cutting you loose at the same time. Holding your child’s death certificate in your hands, you are more zombie than plucky. You don’t feel strong at all. But somehow, you still exist, and so people will marvel, and every You’re so strong reminds you, again, of the short straw you pulled. The platitude giver throws salt over a shoulder, having dodged the need to be the courageous-in-grief protagonist themselves, at least for the time being. Saying Thank you or I’m trying or nothing at all—just nodding in receipt—is weird, isn’t it. It just is.
What is strong, anyway?
Brawny, strapping, sturdy, burly, robust, convincing.
Able to withstand great force or pressure. Secure, indestructible, fortified, protected, impregnable, well-defended.
The fastest way to weakness.
If you buy into the common illusion of strength, you’re erecting a false front of indestructability. This is what makes the world sick. To be convincing wastes energy. To be impregnable is to self-isolate. To be robust is to be static, closed to growth. Strength is a pressure cooker. Strength is deodorant on gangrene. To be strong is to be stiff, and to be stiff is to be unpliable. Strength cracks.
Antonym: vulnerable. Be open and bendy, like fresh growth on a tree. Be malleable and tender, with proficiency in movement. This way, you are able to sit with all that’s insecure, easily destroyed, unfortified, unprotected, and porous. You are unthreatenable because when you’re not afraid of uncertainty, you’ve got nothing to protect. And when you’ve got nothing to protect—your image, illusions, defenses—you are supple. This is my preferred strength. Tolerance. How ice cream melts, still delicious. How a field turns into a pond and back again.
* * *
The first dead body I had ever seen or touched was the dead body of my son. And so I know: anything can happen. Nothing can be done about it. I will live the rest of my life in a state of constant fear.
Or
The first dead body I had ever seen or touched was the dead body of my son. And so I know: anything can happen. Nothing can be done about it. I will live the rest of my life in a state of constant release.
* * *
They say if your brain registers an imminent car crash, fight the urge to tense every muscle in your body. Being rigid is how we exacerbate our own injury. Go limp.
Could I? It’s not what my body would want to do. My body would want to clench every tooth, grip, joint, and sinew, as though by hanging on to itself it might combat the force of impact. But it can’t. The inertia that would crumple a car is a thousand times more powerful than me. If I go limp, there’s a chance I might knock around inside disaster with a fraction more fluidity. Gone limp, I might break a little less.
* * *
I love a thesaurus. I love the confirmations of language. Grief Boggle! Mix and match:
TO GIVE UP
abandon | forfeit | surrender | free | relinquish | resign | release | part with | forgive | desist
TENSION
stress | hostility | friction | anxiety | nervousness | strife | pressure | conflict | unrest | aggravation | trepidation | strain | resistance | convulsion
TRY
attempt | seek | examine | endeavor | prove | taste | test | sample | practice | aim | intend | push | get | take | give | find | decide | use
GIVING UP
abandon | forfeit | surrender | freedom | relinquish | resign | release | part with | forgiveness | desist
* * *
Nobody ever says the word forbearance anymore. The Victorians are long gone. But I needed something less ambivalent than release, more sacred than a shrug. Forbearance. Is that it?
Delay enforcing rights, claims, or privileges; refrain from action; a good-natured tolerance of delay or incompetence.
My right and claim to not ever witness a dead son, for a start.
Also under forbearance: Fail. Withhold action. Pause. Abstain. Seek magnanimity, graciousness, prudence, kindness, compassion. Be liberal and lenient with what sometimes simply just is. Diligently practice humility and generosity. See the curious Latin underpinnings that link mercy and loving-kindness to apathy, which is to waive resistance in favor of forgiveness.
Release.
Sometimes, having held my dead son, I am afraid. I know anything can happen. I drift into an uneasy sleep as my brain off-gasses visions of deep water, of flailing arms and a small, scruffy head. I can’t swim fast enough. I never can.
Shhh
The fear is a thing, a noun, an occupant. It enters my space and knocks everything over, filling my thoughts with catastrophe.
What if what if what if?
It happened before.
Shhh. To give up tension, try giving up on tension.
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
—Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Flow gently around and beyond people who tell you to quit eating your own tail. There is n
o need to try. Just flow, and keep flowing.
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
—Simone Weil, letter to André Weil
Your infinite relationship with your missing baby is your own private wholeness. You may let some select people into it for an afternoon or a lifetime. You may keep it to yourself. Leave other peoples’ struggles with your struggles outside.
What the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
Vulnerability—to continue loving and creating in the face of loss—is the only real strength. When you fall prey to people who make you feel like vulnerability is weakness, you fall. Do not lose your inner wick, the green strand of persistent aliveness seen in a cut twig that would otherwise, from the outside, appear to be brittle and dead. Tend to your conversations with nature, spirit, and baby. This is your stamina. Cultivate the fortitude to be still in this place. Be brawny, sturdy, and robust in your care of yourself. Withstand great force by making your inner relationships and imagination impregnable and well-defended.
What does your strength look like? Do you look people in the eye? Do you avoid going out? Do you talk at length whenever someone asks you how you’re doing? Do you say almost nothing? Have you lashed out I am fine, leave me alone, or I am not fine, why are you leaving me alone? Do you nurse a growing heap of resentments and broken trusts? Are you buckling under their weight? Are you protecting someone from you? Are you protecting yourself from someone?
Any yes is a form of strength. You are strong enough to look after yourself like you would look after your baby. Strong enough to be clear about what you need in the moment you need it, regardless of expectations. Strong enough to either face the day, soldiering, or give it to grief, bleed clean for a few hours. The point is to define this state for yourself. It is not how you behave or what you do or the way you define healing that defines strong. It is how you safeguard your right to your instincts. Some of us will chatter uncontrollably for a year or two or more. Others will go silent. When I say Stay wick and Stay open, I’m not saying Be like me. That would make no sense. I am a dog’s breakfast, a big mess, like you are, though your big mess will be yours. When I say Stay wick and Stay open, I mean flow gently around anyone who thinks you’re doing it wrong no matter how you’re doing it. Except water is not gentle. Water is determined, intentional, softly inexorable. There’s nothing more pliable and more uncompromising than water.
Strong is strong like water.
* * *
The other day I saw a book about grief with one of those jaunty titles. Something about healing tears. It was for young widows and widowers, and it looked sweet and irreverent.
IRREVERENT: lacking in proper respect or seriousness. Blasphemous, impious, profane, sacrilegious.
It had daisies on the cover. I flipped it open. The gist of what I saw was about how anger is toxic, a horrible thing to carry around. You are going to be angry, but you’ve got to move past it or else it’ll fester. Nobody wants to be an Angry Person.
Fair enough, though the me of eight or nine years ago scowled. I looked at the cover again. Daisies. I scanned a bit more. It was a perfectly chilled glass of white wine on a beautiful fresh day. I had wandered into someone else’s house of grief, one distinct from mine. Why did it make me feel so out of sorts? I wondered if I was—or am—too angry. And in love with the anger, my chew toy. Though there’s plenty of other good things I’m in love with too, I still nose the anger around now and then. Have a bite. Make it squeak.
I thought about the word irreverent. Is she irreverent for finding good cheer and presentability despite sadness? Or am I irreverent for endorsing sadness in a world that oppresses the grieving by demanding good cheer and presentability?
Next to me, that book is wearing a head scarf tied like a 1950s pinup. She wears red lipstick and answers the door well. Is she better at this than I am? Did she #LetGo of her anger and learn how to tie a head scarf like a 1950s pinup? Am I cynical? Were those people who insisted I was doing it wrong right about me? Or was I right about me? If I claim my anger as an important heat, do I cattle brand myself with it? Am I afraid of liking that book because it’ll tell me to put down this red-hot stick?
By turning toward grief, at least for a while, we turn away from proper respect and seriousness. We are irreverent. Topless feminists at a march in 1964. Topless feminists at a march in 2016. Antiestablishment righteousness can only be loud and proud. The self cannot be claimed politely, and the same goes for a future beyond pain.
After the death of someone we love, we counter a get-over-it world with storytelling, remembrance, and good, clean, complicated healing. It’s radical to say anything other than Fine when someone asks you how you’re doing. So be radical. And when you feel like it, seek out cheer and try on presentability. Buy books with daisies on the cover. It’s good practice. But make space, too, if you feel like it, for profane rage—the kind of overwhelming bitterness that’s sacrilegious to anyone who passive-aggressively gives you a book about the power of positivity. Profane rage is irreverent, too. Don’t resist or fear it. It won’t stick to you like ticks or lice or a bad stink. Its origins are worth talking about. You’ll be more compassionate, alive, and healthy for having given it a voice. You’ll grow a deeper appreciation and sensitivity to things suddenly feeling okay. You’ll get there faster, and laugh louder when you do. Ask any punk.
* * *
Despair comes in two flavors. Rage lights the flaming bags of dog shit; self-pity is the crippling woe. Both are fed by a totally normal, temporary blindness to relativity.
Standing there peering through the window of someone else’s stress, you might think—against your conscience, your intellect, and your will—What a lightweight. This person thinks they’ve got it bad, but they don’t know bad. They haven’t had a baby die. I am Medusa. Not you.
Someone else, at some point, will peer through your window: What a lightweight. This person thinks they’ve got it bad, but they don’t know bad. They haven’t
Your knee-jerk and their knee-jerk are the jerks of early trauma. It doesn’t mean you’re self-absorbed. It doesn’t mean you’re going to spend the rest of your life competing in the Pain Olympics. It means you’re stuck, for a while, in the dreadful and circular gauntlet of Why Me? It means you’re still processing. And that’s alright. It is your weep, your wail, your dragon breath. It is the comforting taste of your own tail. With time, it will soften and fade along with the most immediate pain—softer, softer again until empathy returns.
Every now and then, someone sends kind but qualified words: I’ve had (miscarriage / sickness / infertility / loss of spouse / loss of parent) and it was nothing compared to what you went through, but it broke my heart, and I’m sorry your heart was broken too.
We saunter through life like Doo de doo and La di dah until an explosion blows the blinders off our eyes—an embryo slips, an eleven-year-old lies in an induced coma, a fearsome diagnosis emerges from a tidy doctor’s office—and we realize we’ve been sauntering along the edge of a precipice all along. Only then can we see it, so terrified we can hardly move one foot in front of the other. Backs pressed against the wall, the one misstep that will send us to our doom plays over and over again in our heads. The pathway might narrow until our toes hang off the edge. We are paralyzed.
We lose the blinders eventually, one way or another, a lonely shock no matter what form it takes. All we can do is be good company to one another, marking the most ancient of conditions: birth, love, longing, loss. Heartbreak, no matter its source, is the most universal tax on the human experience. We might as well share in the payment of it.
* * *
&nbs
p; Medusa, on her own, is the void. A room full of Medusas is afternoon tea. Snakes intertwine. The milk is warm and so is the honey. Somebody new stumbles in with her head a tangled, hissing mess. What kind of a monster am I? she wails. How did this happen to me? We give her a hot mug and a soft place to sit.
I’ve still got my snakes, but me-as-Medusa looks more like a 1970s iron-on T-shirt than a nightmare. She’s cool with me and I’m cool with her. She keeps it tucked in, mostly. There are dandelions growing in Chernobyl.
We are the mothers and fathers of spirits. We are walking proof of two worlds touching. My baby and yours, breathing for a time or not, were grown open, born open, and left open, still connected to their ancient selves. I’d like to think they knew just where to go, what happens next, and why they were here. Why not?
Once the soft machine of skin and bone is gone, what’s left? Not our plot twists. Not all that was done and undone. Take away all that and we are infinitely renewing energy, more than the sum of our experiences. More than snakes. But since we’ve got them, we will find each other in a crowd.
* * *
We sit outside by the creek. Josh and Kari tell me about someone who told them once, trying to normalize grief, that the aftershocks of loss never get better. We decide that’s not true at all. We remember how it felt when it was new. And we know how it feels now. They say Liam’s name, and I say Margot’s name, and we all feel warm.
They ask how things are, being on my own. I tell them about years of one hurt being upended by another, about how divorce pain is not more substantial but much meaner than death pain. We talk about the mystery of little reprieves, and I tell them about the kids and me and our getaways: how the three of us get greasy brown bags of french fries from Bud the Spud’s truck and check into the fancy hotel and jump on the beds and dance around to radio pop and put bath bombs in hot water with a ploosh, and they sit three feet deep in steamy bubbles and splash gets everywhere, and then we climb into a crisp white bed and read Tweety & Sylvester with Chupa Chup suckers. Josh knows wood and asks me questions about my butcher block. We talk about skiing and California. Mussels are all they’ve got up the street, so I make them with salted herbs and lemon and beer, and we eat and talk while the fire burns high into the tree canopy, and they say Liam, and I say Margot, and together we decide being open is the way to better.