Notes for the Everlost

by Kate Inglis

  If what happened to you and me was nothing more than biology, blind misfortune, or random chance, then there was no meaning to it. No divine entity let us down. We are part of the natural world, and the natural world is chaos. Loss is a happenstance. Some baby cells are still inside us, remaining, while others feed the roots of a maple or rest for a blink in the belly of a trout. Maybe that’s accompaniment enough, as long as we pay attention to it.

  * * *

  For the Anishinaabe people, Gitche Manitou is the creator of all things and the giver of life. Sometimes, the word means the “Great Mystery,” the fill-in-the-blank for all we can’t account for with our eyes. But Gitche Manitou is not a being. Closer to the East Asian concept of qi—life force, energy flow—than that of a holy spirit, it refers to the interconnectedness of nature and life. This force is also known as prana to the Hindus and Indians, chi in the Igbo religion, pneuma to the ancient Greeks, mana to the Hawaiians, and lüng to Tibetan Buddhists. Everything has its own manitou. Every plant, stone, organism, and even machine. Manitous do not exist in a hierarchy like gods or goddesses but are more like leaves on a tree, each distinct and individual but interacting with each other and the spirit of everything.

  But my baby is gone, you might say. I don’t care what they said about energy in ancient Greece.

  There might be something useful waiting for you in ancient Greece.

  A crow is beautiful. They’re everywhere, but we don’t tend to look. Silky, shiny black. Always with others. Fierce in feeding, fierce in protecting. Clever. Collectors. Little pirates, they are. But big. Imagine a crow perched on your hand. Doubly so for the raven, crow’s big brother. For the Haida people, the raven’s domain is tricks, transformation, and potent ingenuity. He is the deviant hero and survivor who created the Haida Gwaii—a glorious and sacred rainforest archipelago along British Columbia’s northern coast—by releasing the sun from its box and igniting the stars and moon. All over the world and in every chapter of human life, scholars and artists have always been enamored of the raven’s capacity to create by stealing, exchanging, and redistributing whatever catches his eye. It’s a sacred power.

  To the wonder and poetry of the natural world you might add a bearded prophet or a fat-bellied happy man in lotus position or an elephant deity with four arms full of useful things or any number of holy books. Throughout your lifelong practice of rationalizing loss, nothing will (or should) feel like the absolute truth. The only absolute truths can be found in puppies, cream cheese icing, and cold sprinklers on hot days. Everything else is bits and pieces. Proverbs, psalms, hymns, chants, recitations. Ghostly warnings and intuition. Temples and Quakers and monks. In the void of answers after loss, be a crow. Collect interesting things. A shoelace. An empty french fry bag. Blown-about Christmas tinsel. Tug on whatever spiritual fragment catches your eye, no matter its origin. Follow instinct more than dogma. This is your private survival.

  In the aftermath of loss, our faith—or the philosophical, spiritual, and scientific tendrils we use to make sense of our human life—is often upended. A crow survives by borrowing from ancient Greece. We have been watching babies die since then and long before that, after all. Regardless of spiritual inheritance, we are parents first because we are animals first. You are drawn to care for a baby by its sweet scent. Your lineage compels you to rear offspring and mourn them, an impulse predating all religions by countless millennia. The love of a parent for its child is more adhesive and more ancient than all the gods, hardwired into us when we were Australopithecus, mere infants in our own evolution, long before the tenets of Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad or the Torah or anyone or anything else arrived on the scene. Regardless of what you believe, I share this impulse with you. We all do.

  Tikva’s passing, on a feeling level, is exactly the depth of life I desire. I wouldn’t have asked for the conditions in a million years, but the “why” of it isn’t for me to answer.

  —David (Jewish)

  Perhaps V had his own thing to do, his own destiny, one which I could not—and maybe even should not—have prevented.

  —Rosepetal (Hindu)

  I do not get to pick and choose what I experience. Just as I know bad things can strike out of the blue, I know it can’t always be bad. The dice will come up with evens and odds—sometimes more evens, sometimes more odds.

  —Natalie (atheist)

  We held her for many hours after she died, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t have it out with God during that time. I would be lying if I said I haven’t had it out with Him every day since then. Yes, I believe. Absolutely. I don’t know how to not believe. But I don’t understand.

  —Angie (Christian)

  People outside lived their lives like nothing had happened. I thought the world had changed and everybody was in grief, but it was only us. My husband and I cried every day.

  —Souad (Muslim)

  You know how to behave to keep your tribal identity intact, if you feel you must, whether it’s thanking your aunt for a My Little Angel embroidered pillow or showing up to temple when you know you’ll get a call from your father if you don’t. But to lose a baby is a questioning of everything you thought you knew. Explore, gently. Know that no matter your context or convictions, we all share bereavement. The Hindu sounds like the Jew who sounds like the Muslim who sounds like the atheist. We have more in common than not. We all leaked milk, and we all cried.

  Take a peek in the house next door.

  Your evangelism in an uproar, find a dog-eared copy of The Soul of Rumi in a secondhand shop. Open it and see a poem:

  There is a window open

  from my heart to yours.

  From this window, like the moon

  I keep sending news secretly.

  Carry the writing of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic born in what is now Afghanistan, with you for months. Tattoo an open window onto a secret place only you can see.

  Be a Jew who whispers to Ganesha, remover of obstacles and god of beginnings and patron of letters and learning: Aum Vakratundaya Hum, Aum Vakratundaya Hum. The Sanskrit is nice to say, soft in the mouth, like music, and nicer still when you find its meaning: “Delay no more, my Lord, in straightening the paths of the crooked mind.”

  Be a Hindu and note Viktor Frankl’s words from the concentration camp in which he was held: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

  Be an atheist and adore something someone gave you from a Hebrew prayer book: “This is the vision of a great and noble life: to endure ambiguity and to make light shine through it; to stand fast in uncertainty; to prove capable of unlimited love and hope.”

  Be a Muslim and walk in the woods near the abbey where Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön wrote: “When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart.” Cape Breton maple leaves are a bit of yarn to add to your nest.

  This is the survival of the crow. Steal, exchange, and repurpose regardless of what might be proper. Make shelter in the tree you’ve now found yourself in. Take what you need. Whatever catches your eye. Invent your heaven. I did. I will open a door. I will see a baby in a crib, and I will know it is him. My breasts will be full. I will hear him gurgling, chatting to himself, all clammy and goggle-eyed. Halloooo, my baby love! I will strip him down to his skin and lift him up, and he will arch his back, stretching and yawning. I will feed him. Then I will dress him fresh and wrap him in the mei tai, and we’ll go say hello to the seagulls, his little head tucked in, my hand pat-pat-patting his rump, and this will be my afterlife.

  Souls travel in packs, I’ve decided, and I have taken that for my nest too. They drift in and out of lives, drawn magnetically to one another time and time again across dimensions
by what we think of as turns of fate. Driving in the car a long time ago, a four-year-old Evan piped up from the backseat: “A long time ago, Mommy, you and me were married in a white church.”

  “Really?” I smiled.

  “Yes,” he said. “We lived in a little house. We were married, a long time ago. You were my wife.”

  Maybe, when you’re young, the door to all the answers is still open.

  The Buddhists say life is suffering. Not joy interspersed with struggle but struggle interspersed with joy, a series of unwanted absences one after the other. This might sound miserable, but to know it is to be set free. The crow in me, satisfied, yanks on that prize and flies away.

  Some people have missing babies. Some have missing parents, lovers, friends. What happened to you—to us—was an awful trauma. The effect of it brings us to the most fundamental human state of missing and to the painfully exquisite truth of loss. This should make us eternally conscious, but we’re human. We don’t thank our lungs for filling and emptying, our eyes for the sunrise, our kidneys for cleaning our blood. Our arteries and capillaries, ribbons passing along the current of our pulse. Our ears for giving us Prince’s Purple Rain. Our skin for being in a constant state of renewal. Our muscles for keeping us upright, and the electrical panel of our brain for telling us when to blink, breathe, and run. Here we are, functioning. But to lack gratitude is as human as to suffer. We forget how inconstant life can be. We forget that with every fart and every sneeze, we are miraculous.

  * * *

  Your baby is not with us because she is in heaven.

  Jesus must have needed her more than you did.

  She is in a better place.

  Oh, ye faithful: the moment you leave the room, the bereaved person you just informed of god’s kind benevolence just flipped the bird at your back. Or they wanted to. And every other bereaved person in the world felt the energetic wobble of that middle finger and smiled.

  On a broad scale, religion is semantics dividing the land masses of humanity to nobody’s benefit. By the more urgent measures of shared interest and cooperation and community, semantics shouldn’t matter as much as they do. Who cares how we privately reconcile the riddle of our humanity? Gods or ghosts or angels or prophets or spirits or souls or guardians or energy or chakra or gospel or chi or serendipity or karma or molecules, what does it matter? We are all made of the same primal stuff. We all know not to get in between a black bear and her cubs.

  There are a hundred gods, a thousand. One for the caterpillar crossing a sidewalk; one for the daddy longlegs trapped in a bathtub puddle; one for every empty belly, tightrope walker, contracting uterus; one for every yellowfin tuna’s gaping mouth; one for every screaming mackerel; one for every tin can.

  From one angle, the gods fail every day. From another, the baby swallow’s god tumbles alongside her from nest to ground and curls around her in the grass, dying with her, fulfilling everything.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Nothingness and All There Is

  We peek into the dust of nihilism and find warmth there.

  SHE CAME INTO the room before the ceremony, as is the fashion these days, and he gasped and went to her, beaming, touching flowing fabric and lace, telling her how beautiful she was. And she was. Through the lens of my camera they shone, as brides and grooms do. They walked together down a grass aisle holding hands as a warm ocean breeze swept across them.

  Even when we’re young, before we can understand our own fragility and before statistics and cynicism rattle our certainty of the fairytale, we love a wedding. It is the brandishing of our collective best. It’s the most sparkling, most affirming taunt we’ve got to throw—a nonnie, nonnie, nah, nah to our lack of guarantees. The universe smiles at our sass, grants us this day. We love the silhouette of a bride and a groom, archetypal proof of our efforts to navigate the unnavigable human condition. We like this vantage point. Its composition pleases us. We glow in their glow.

  When I’m shooting a wedding, the first place I land is with the bride. She wears a robe or a plaid shirt. There are croissants and pink prosecco and the people around her fuss. Eat something. You’ll hardly get anything once this all starts.

  Someone new comes into the room and everyone squeals and hugs, and the cycle of fussing and adornment continues. The dress waits to costume her. Her friends lift it down like a slow-motion waltz. She disappears and comes out again in need of nimble hands for hooks and eyes, the last bit of her everyday self peeking out before the theater begins.

  I spend the next ten hours lugging my kit, kicking off my shoes, hunting patches of light, being invisible. But what knocks me flat, every time—what I could never take lightly, no matter how wracked I was by the end of my own marriage—is the visceral responsibility of recording something that will never happen again. Not between these two particular people on this day, with these witnesses. These lovers who somehow found one another in the midst of all this noise and worry and fear.

  The bride’s name was Jen. She had cancer. I didn’t know it the day I photographed their wedding. Not until after, when someone told me in a hushed voice. The same hushed voice told me the day she died, a few years later.

  If we knew our exact number of days or years—the precise granting of how many weekend cuddles we would be given, with flannel sheets and comic books—we would squeeze goodness and gratitude out of every second. Every time someone dies, we think on this. Then we promptly forget it.

  The glow, however fleeting, defines us just as much as all the rest.

  * * *

  I saw him at a Christmas party thrown by a friend. I gasped and stepped back before going to him and saying I was sorry, asking him how he was doing. To photograph a bride and groom is a deeply intimate thing. All day long, it’s the three of you. Them and you. You see his hand shaking. You see his mother’s hand shaking. You hear what her best friend whispers to her as they fasten an earring. I didn’t know them, but I had shadowed them in a way nobody else had. And here he was, the groom without his bride. We stood by a table of salt cod pâté with bottles of beer. I knew him, having seen him at his wedding, but I didn’t know him at all.

  Our first words were of his wife and of Liam. He said You’ve experienced loss, too, right? Like when Luna Lovegood explains thestrals, the skeletal winged horses that only the grieving can see, to Harry Potter. I don’t know how else to bridge the story from salt cod pâté to today other than to say we have been together ever since, which is how our being together began—as a bumble, as things are when you don’t expect them. Her jar of organic cinnamon, with her handwriting on the label, is in my kitchen. For a long time I felt like an intruder, though by the time he met me, he had long ago come to terms with her prognosis. By the time he met me, he was ready to live again. Cancer will do that. Witnessing it exhausts you into life.

  He tells me his dreams of her. Her parents and extended families, loving him as their adopted son and brother, are so kind to me it’s made me cry in the car on the way home more than once or twice. This reckoning softens with time, but it’s still there: if she hadn’t gotten sick, I would still be on my own, insistent on being on my own while being wracked about being on my own. My husband would still be her husband. For a long time, it didn’t feel right.

  Jen’s mother, Muriel, lost her little girl. I lost my little boy. We are both bereaved, though differently. Jen told her mother stories of her adventures in India. She graduated from art college while her mother beamed, her daughter’s work hanging all through the house. She is gone, now. I am married to Muriel’s son-in-law.

  I’m sorry.

  I can’t help thinking it, an instinct.

  I shouldn’t be here. She should be.

  * * *

  From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptin
ess?

  —GUY DE MAUPASSANT, The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant

  Me and you make a rude gesture at the emptiness. We are human! We are sentient. We know we will die. We rebel, refuse, and invent because we are frightened. Our defiance of the inevitable is the only thing that helps us sleep at night.

  Cormac McCarthy and Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and all the world’s romantics and vagrants alike wrestled and still wrestle, in scholarly auditoriums and dive bars alike, with why we exist. Are we born to watch clocks? Why bother hoping, performing? To what end? Why do we try, love, and die in this endlessly orgiastic, apparently purposeless combustion of body matter and dreams?

  Competing glee clubs, religions aside:

  The Nihilists (The world has no meaning, dumbass. None means none.)

  The Existentialists (The world has no meaning, sweetheart. Hey. Since you’re here, why not build something? Here’s a hammer….Neat! That thing you built has meaning.)

  The Absurdists (The world has no meaning, silly. You’re gonna turn yourself inside-out trying to fix that, though, aren’t you? Because you’re human. You can’t help it. But you can’t fix it. You’re a sucker! I’m a sucker. Ha ha! WAIT. STOP. I smell something. I smell sticky toffee pudding. Sticky toffee pudding! Yay!)