Notes for the Everlost

by Kate Inglis

  CHAPTER TEN

  An Imagination Sandwich with Religious Wonder Bread Whether You Ordered It or Not

  In loss, spiritual comeuppance camps out on your front lawn no matter what your inherited or practiced worldview.

  BABIES ARE NOT born of virgins, for god’s sake, as though the only guarantee of holy purity is to never pass through the tainted channel of a Jezebel. Babies are born from the tainted channels of Jezebels! Angels sing on earth! Except the angels do not sing “Hosanna to the Son of David,” or “O Magnum Mysterium.” Real angels sing the theme song to Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu.

  My niece Molly giggles. Every time she does—which is a lot—baby blue and lemon-scented bubbles float into the air and then pop! burst glitter and sparkles all around. She is a little girl, a big girl. She reads the voice of every character with inflection. She likes it when adults are ridiculous, forgetting a dog says woof and not meow. She rides her bike, rainbow beads clacking on the wheels, and baby blue and lemon-scented bubbles full of glitter and sparkles trail along behind her.

  I like to think Jesus would object to the OxiClean bleaching of his mother. I like to think while pressing R2-D2 into Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing Fighter with Power Functions, he’d crack the thing down the middle and say Damn. And Molly would look up and say Hey, Jesus. That’s just what Lego does. Have a cookie.

  Perfection bores me. I don’t trust it. If it didn’t have such tragic consequences on the world, the lie/myth/fetishization of female purity (or lack of it) would be a real eye roller of a joke. Baby blue and lemon-scented glitter bubbles are what’s holy, and they begin with lust and arrive with an imperfect splash. I want a host of gods, and I want none of them whitewashed. I want one of them to be in charge of bubbles. I want them to be socialists, to look after each other and share accountability and resources fairly. I want a community of magicians to craft the world—all we see of it and all we don’t—and I want them to spring forth from a godmother who counts down from ten, loudly, until the Bionicles get picked up, or else.

  When I asked Molly if she always laughs like that, she laughed like that. Then she looked at me, puzzled, like there’s no line distinguishing a good laugh from this morning or yesterday or tomorrow. Deep inside, her soul shook its head. That poor grown-up, forgetting. Don’t you ever lose it, Miss Molly, her soul whispered, hoping she would hear. And I agree. Don’t let the years pop your bubbles. Your bubbles are your purity, dear sweet lovely little big girl. Your bubbles make you holy. Insist upon them.

  * * *

  We were Anglicans. My parents and my brother and I lived in England for a year, in Newcastle upon Tyne, when I was four years old. I had a Geordie accent and a swing in the yard. We spent the summer on a canal boat in Scotland. I almost saw the Loch Ness Monster from the ruins of a castle window. Almost. My brother and I worked the locks, and we ran alongside the water on ancient footpaths, my rubber boots kicking morning dew into the air like diamond bursts.

  British cathedrals called to my mom and dad because all of Britain did. It was where our families came from. There is a pub in Cambridge with my grandfather’s RAF unit and name gouged into the beams with someone’s pocket knife. Choral singing made all the hair on my arms stand up, and my dad sang, so my brother and I did too, and our Sundays were high-necked white ruffs and long gowns, descants and candles. It’s proper and good to get dressed up and to go and sing under a carved ceiling forty feet high, with sunshine streaming in through stained glass windows. You see people, and you have a nice tea, and you sing.

  I had to go to Sunday school and be confirmed. It wasn’t singing. It was boring. I asked my mom once, “The Sunday school teacher says God Is Everywhere. Is he in my milk? If I pour him on my cereal will he be mad? Does he see me when I pee? Ha ha!”

  “For goodness sake, I don’t know,” she replied, smiling from behind her sewing machine. And that was the sum total, outside of choir practice, of my religious indoctrination. Or of any moral imperative, come to think of it, other than Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. My parents never explicitly told me not to smoke, make out with boys, drink, or swear. I didn’t, in any case, because I was pretty green and stayed that way until it was well beyond the safe point to not be green. But the point is they trusted me. My parents’ only absolute rules for my brother and me were what really matters:

  Never litter. Leave places better than how you found them.

  Never say shut up. And never use the word hate. Not for anything. They are the two rudest things you can ever let out of your mouth. It is never justified, no matter how upset you are. I don’t care who else says it. We do not.

  I will not have either of you leave this house without knowing how to make pastry and mayonnaise and birthday cakes from scratch.

  Don’t make your family worry. Take care of yourself.

  Be nice. Leave people feeling better than how you found them.

  * * *

  Sorry…a faceless person hissed, trolling my friend’s online campaign against a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in Arizona. Marriage is a special and sacred covenant designed by God to be between a MAN and a WOMAN!

  If energy and atoms recycle, then we’ve all had marginalized incarnations. Each of us has been born and reborn, with ill-timed turns at being poor, female, Protestant, black, Jewish, Irish, Ojibwe, or gay. In all of those states we were a living, breathing expression of renewal, just as we were. In all of those states we have been denied. Too many of us forget to remember, when we’re most recently born into local privilege: the Other could easily be you.

  A baby dribbles cereal for the first time, and we think Oh! Look at you go. Good girl! and she is a hairline closer to making her own way in the world. We are proud, so proud. Then she crawls like greased lightning. Then she Weeble-wobble walks. Then before we know it she’s got the keys to the car, and we hear the voice of our parents from our own mouths: It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s all the other drivers, and we won’t sleep a wink that night until she is safe in her bed.

  Parenthood is one long letting go. Our children grow up, up and away, and they need us less and less, and there’s no use resisting it. But the collective of human beings doesn’t grow up, up and away. As we grow, fumbling to feel around the edges of this world we’ve been given, those edges close in. The world gets smaller and smaller still thanks to technology. We can video-conference with Indonesia. Borders are vanishing. There are planes and there is high-speed rail and we’ve never been so mobile, so empowered to seek and explore. Human beings are squashing together. There’s no longer the space to remain cloistered in like-minded tribes. We bump and jostle, forced by sheer proximity to look at each other—really look—and exist among the unfamiliar sights and sounds of others.

  In this cacophony there are now only two breeds of human: those whose judgments and self-righteousness make them wish for a fantasy yesterdayland, backward in time to when what felt different was policed and rejected:

  Quit shoving! You stink.

  I’m better than you.

  Shut up. Move over.

  He stepped on my foot! Somebody do something.

  This is unbearable. This is wrong.

  You are unwelcome.

  This has to stop.

  And there are those who shrug:

  I suppose, ten million years from now, we’ll all be just alike

  Same color, same kind, working together

  And maybe we’ll have all of the fascists out of the way by then.

  —Woody Guthrie, “She Came Along to Me”

  Social progress is as certain as a current in a bottleneck. To push against it is masochistic and misguided, inevitable failure proven time and time again. Granting more people respect, self-determination, and agency over their own happiness is the shrug that might save the world. Only when we quit spending so much energy excluding one anoth
er can we redelegate. Only then can we begin the work of solving actual problems.

  Loss makes compassion by connecting us to the human experience. With pain, with almost unbearable hurt. But nonetheless, we are connected. We are awake. First, we harden up—so bitter, so upset—but then we soften, softer, softer, and softer still until we truly understand why we are here. To share love. To share understanding. None of us have the time for anything less.

  Dave is a rabbi and bereaved dad. He and his wife Gal learned in the middle of her pregnancy their baby Tikva might not survive for long beyond her birth. He wrote:

  I always suspected that deep down inside, the person yammering on about unconditional love was really trying to set himself up to get a piece of ass. Nothing wrong with that, but don’t kid yourself about unconditional love. Until you’ve lived it, you can’t know it. And the separation between those who can grasp the concept and those who have held the feeling is a yawning chasm that nothing but experience can bridge. Until you love your child without ever knowing whether or not you’ll ever get to hold her, you don’t know unconditional love. Until your love for your child is greater than your need for her to live even one more day with anything less than the dignity she deserves, you don’t know unconditional love.

  To that particular faceless religious conservative: Imagine a crystal ball trained on the future of the child you hold in your arms. The child with the succulent, cheesy neck, the chubby folds. The child who woke up twice last night in hot tears and needed you, just you. What if the crystal ball told you she’s gay? When she grows up she’ll live far away, but she’ll be home every summer and for Christmas with her wife. They want kids, a couple of kayaks, a lakeside cottage. She’s going to be happy and smart and an engineer and gay. Does that change anything?

  If the crystal ball told you the baby in your arms would die, you’d beg and plead Just keep her safe and whole. I will cheer her on forever no matter what. As you should.

  Everybody started out as somebody’s baby. People who live and love and think differently. People we feel are our aesthetic, spiritual, or cultural opposite. People who are struggling, or who carry pain you can’t see. Give them love regardless of how they align (or don’t align) with you. Let them show you who they are on their terms, not yours. Give them unconditional hospitality, and mean it. Don’t think it’s enough to insist you only hate the sin and not the sinner. Try not hating anything that is, respectfully, none of your business. Ask them how they’re doing and mean it. It’s incredible how quickly we forget how rare that is. Look at every person and think There goes somebody’s baby. Could have been mine.

  Then go find a mirror and extend the same to what you see.

  R.E.M. might have written the next holy book. One page. Two words. Every doctrine and every mandate of compassion and care should begin and end here.

  Everybody hurts.

  * * *

  You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  In loss, spiritual comeuppance camps out on your front lawn no matter what your inherited or practiced worldview. Some of us subscribe to God with a capital G. Or the universe. Or Allah or Buddha or Shakti or Gitche Manitou, the “Great Mystery” of the Anishinaabe. No matter which particular divine prophet or entity is yours, loss is a galvanization: is the Great Mystery a senselessly abandoning prick? Delusion incarnate? Gandalf the White sitting on a cotton ball throne, the Bible in one hand and a slate of the Ten Commandments in the other, hurricanes and AIDS and salvation shooting out from the tips of his fingers from beyond the pearly gates of so many punch lines? Or, is it nature’s random dust and growth? The wind, the waves, the monarch butterflies. Then there’s ghosts and angels and spirits and souls and energy and chi and serendipity and karma. Semantics. We cannot follow the dead.

  The great cruelty of outliving children is that mothers and fathers are baptized into parenthood with the instinct to follow with mushy carrot, with a tug on slipping-off socks and the bumpering of a sharp-cornered world. Following is our assumed right and rite of passage. We follow with every last inch of gut and marrow, compelled by her round belly’s sweet rise and fall and by the smudges of milk stuck in the creases of her neck.

  The bereaved are compelled just the same by phantoms. But how can we be caregivers, the hallmark task of parents, when they are gone? How do we mind them when we can’t follow them?

  The particular loss of this particular love makes us dumb as june bugs. We rattle and hum against a light we’ll never bathe in, never reach. We can see it, almost touch it, but screens and closed windows keep us out. Bash. Bam. Crack. Follow. Follow. Follow. Bash. Bam. Crack. We are sticky and crunchy. We chase people inside. To make us go away, they say things about how the screens and the glass are all a part of God’s Plan.

  No

  No

  No

  No

  No

  Bash

  Bam

  Crack

  * * *

  Evan said, “What’s that?”

  “That’s my notebook,” I replied.

  I had gone for a three-day meditation retreat at the Shambhala Centre in Halifax, a toe dip into an interesting pool when the Rinpoche happened to be in town. Kind of neat. Something to try. It was quiet, and it was nice.

  “I want to see,” he said. “I want to know what happened today.”

  He tossed Flat Stanley and climbed up on the big bed. Ben scrambled up too. One boy here and one boy there and me in the middle and one small lamp.

  “Well, sweetness, there was a man from Tibet, and there were scary people, and he had to run away through the mountains, and he had a son, and his son had interesting things to say. He came into the room wearing bright orange and bright yellow robes and everybody bowed. And he sat up high and he talked and he talked, and I was so tired by then because I’d been sitting there like a sardine in a can for two and a half days, and I could hardly listen but I heard, I think.”

  He thought about that. “Why?”

  I told him what the man in orange and yellow robes said, in the same words: “Twenty-five hundred years ago, they discovered The Most Boring Thing Ever. They meditated to contextualize their existence. And it was boring. And they said ‘Hey! This is great!’ ”

  I told him how everybody laughed and the room got warm.

  “You cannot nullify fear,” the Tibetan man had said. “Soft elements are essential. Put human nature in a state of photosynthesis and goodness will arise. Sit with small confidences. To sit is to be regal.”

  Evan looked over my shoulder, scanning pages of fragments and doodles.

  “The mind is a horse,” he read aloud, struggling a little with my loopy scrawl. And he thought for a bit. “What’s that mean?”

  “What do you think?” I asked him. He thought a bit more.

  “Maybe…” he ran his hand back and forth over the paper. “A horse is really strong, but it needs somebody to make sure it doesn’t knock everything over.”

  After, in the dark: “Mommy. That would be good for my temper.”

  * * *

  On a long, winding descent I would gear up, flying past farms and cattle to arrive at the office feeling rosy and substantial. There’s no better feeling than to move your body around on a bike.

  A manhole marked the halfway point of a long hill. For a year’s worth of days it was my ritual to ride over its cover because it made a satisfying kathunk-thunk. One morning, the dark circle came up fast. At the last second I startled at the sudden voice of my grandmother, a cyclist who had died a few years back. Two urgent words, like a shout: TURN NOW.

  I obeyed, swerving to miss the manhole by inches, looking down to prove myself paranoid as I passed. I was going as fast as the cars. It was uncovered and unm
arked. The gaping hole would have swallowed the front end of my bike, pitching my head and neck into the edge of the asphalt at near-highway speed. Squeezing the brake levers hard I slowed, jumped off, and walked back with my legs shaking to gape at what might have been. I rode the rest of the way to work and called the municipal road crew, thoroughly rattled.

  My grandmother’s voice. The presence in the room the day Liam died. A sixth sense? Imagination? Do intense moments simply initiate a cerebral protocol, like that initiated at the split second of a car crash? A man tumbles violently inside a Toyota Corolla. A fuse in his brain blows. Later, waking up in hospital, he remembers nothing after reaching to change the radio station. Is that our physiological wiring, or some kind of cosmic benevolence? Was the breaking of my neck on the edge of a manhole—or me swerving around, and carrying on down the road—nothing more than a hiccup either way? Or did my grandmother wrestle her way through the divide, even for a flash, to warn me? Was Liam’s life a hiccup? Was he an egg and a sperm that divided and divided again, was betrayed by his mother’s placenta, and was born sick and died to be set loose in a lake, a handful of ash? Perhaps. Maybe he was never mine, fated, chosen. Maybe he was just an organic reaction, his conception as much of a “whoops” of nature as his injury and death. Is this glass half empty or half full? Should I cry? For which reason? Even as nothing more than ash, was Liam the stuff of stars?