Notes for the Everlost

by Kate Inglis

  If not reaching for some form of Heaven, humans undergo various intellectual contortions to try and answer unanswerable questions. Early explorers of emptiness took a shot at what they saw as the sheep-ism of religion, and they shot far and wide. They had to. Religion owned nation-states and populations en masse, at the expense of all else. Wake up! Don’t live well because God is alive. Live well because God is dead. God is dead! That’s the recoil: what looks like a bit of a circle jerk, really, of futility. “The point is there ain’t no point,” wrote McCarthy, inspiring as much of a league as the fundamentalists though with a different gospel: for some of them, the only way to be truly masterful is to never tolerate earnestness. But that’s not all. Not at all.

  Everything that exists was born without reason and will die by chance. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

  If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.

  —Albert Camus, The Rebel

  It is true we don’t learn how little mastery we have over our destinies until something goes terribly wrong. The crisis is in how cold Sartre’s dark night feels and how unpromising and gray the morning dawn of Camus. But there’s a useful seed in nothingness. Here it is: ease up on trying to figure out your loss of innocence, appetite, dignity, fertility, faith, fetuses, people you love. You won’t. No matter what happens to us in our lives, it is unfigurable. Nothing and no one is deserving or undeserving. Everything is born. Everything dies. All is chaos. But then, consider the absurd: try again. Nothingness can live alongside tenacity and optimism. Turn over soil that lacks nutrients. It is a brittle crust. Nothing will grow in it. Be generative in a freshly tilled and damp plot. Pain is manure. Earnestness is sunshine. If nothing has any importance, than everything does. Even small things.

  Everything is possible. That is Camus’s dawn. We ascribe value and meaning to life when we produce it ourselves, free of doctrine. With his GOD IS DEAD, Nietzsche shook off the dogmatic yoke. Imagine determining what matters most with a clean slate and the common sense, do-unto-others morality of humanism. Rather than turning to a holy book for the answer of all answers, why not look to buttercream and vegetable gardens? This is why I’d share a bowl of sticky toffee pudding with Nietzsche. The nineteenth-century Prussian philosopher as seconded in Bob Marley’s heaven-on-earth anthem “Get Up, Stand Up.”

  Nietzsche called the great emptiness our deepest opportunity for self-reflection. The moment you are strong enough to meet that emptiness—the cancer, the addiction, the miscarriage, the lost baby—you are strong enough to jump off the hamster wheel of thinking it through. To move, stay put, say the Buddhists. To see, stop looking. Don’t imagine paradise in the sky. Make paradise in the kitchen.

  * * *

  HOW CAN THIS NOT JUST BE SAD thinks a writer, jotting down notes for a book about grief. Can I turn this around? Not just death death death. What’s the takeaway? What’s the point? To love, yeah. Of course. But more than that. How do we proceed?

  Justifiably alarmist environmentalism can have the unintended effect of making some people apathetic. We throw our hands up. An ice shelf the size of Maryland melting into the Bering Sea is too big a problem. We are too small. The resistance movement after Trump’s election, which unfolds like a slow-motion train wreck as I write this book, seems to be doing the same. Mired in shock, individuals take what action they can. They want to keep moving forward in the interest of inclusion, decency, a free press, clean air and water. Not backward. They talk about it at supper parties. They retweet and share and call Congress. But they are dispirited. The world is too strange, and the strange is too big. How to proceed?

  HOW CAN THIS NOT JUST BE OVERWHELMING

  MEANINGLESS

  SAD, etc.

  The answer: I have hindsight. I can see around the corners you can’t. Maybe not to specifics, but I can see your path turns, and you don’t know what’s beyond it. I can see enough to know you just have to keep trying. I saw Shawna as she stood alone at the Walk to Remember in Edmonton. I saw her unknown and unresolved. I feel like Nothing, since this happened, she wrote to me. But she was flushed with life no matter how she shrank from it in the absence of Ceili. I could see it in her, and I would see it in you. Everything is still there. I don’t know what else to say about nothingness other than that.

  * * *

  The rusted-out shell of an old factory lay sleeping across the road. The paper in my bag said TEXTURE IN LANDSCAPE, one of several assignments toward my photography diploma. I was shooting with black-and-white film and loved the lines of the corrugated steel, the chasm and the darkness beyond its door. I raised the forty-year-old Pentax to my face. A long-legged dog appeared just then, emerging from the darkness like a submarine from the deep to sit regally, perfectly framed, in a shaft of light. It was the first time I remember hitting the shutter and feeling like I hadn’t just taken a photograph, but captured a little wordless poem.

  Throughout my twenties, I wandered Vancouver with pockets stuffed with rolls of film, encamped in darkrooms to paint with light. It’s the only mathematics my brain has ever understood: the perfectly symbiotic interplay of aperture, shutter speed, ISO. It appeals to me as baking appeals to others in times of stress: no matter what is happening in the world, add powder or soda plus temperature and humidity and something sweet rises just so, indefatigably, no matter what. Like baking, photography is one of those lifelong pursuits. To capture moments and people and faces beautifully warms the room just the same as a hot oven.

  * * *

  My babies were a terrible sight. Liam in particular, in the first days after he was born. I was afraid of him, for him. His legs splayed open, his skin swollen and puffed, bright purple, every inch of him covered with intervention: blue tape, needles, IV, ventilator, bili lights. He was a cyborg, a specimen, a broken butterfly pinned to a board.

  Having seen him, I knew I would have to figure out how to see him. His context knocked me off my feet. My fear was in the way of my love. To see the boy who might be—who might have been—his soft flesh, the baby underneath—I would have to work my way through his shocking circumstance. First, I picked up my camera almost in defense of his space, circling the intensive care unit like a caged animal. I knew what would happen if I allowed any camera other than mine close to Liam and Ben.

  The incubator was a precisely controlled environment. The only way I could be inside with him, in his world, was with my lens. I shrank myself and curled up beside him, seeing him not through plastic but inside it. I saw toes and fingers, the clammy flush of heat, the softness at the nape of his neck. Every day, I pushed myself to go inside. Every day, a well-meaning nurse or relative might approach with a point-and-shoot and I would say No snapshots. Well-meaning and blurry, well-meaning and sad, a reduction of him to his trauma. Someone else’s pictures would compete with my narrative, in which he was more than that. His memory was mine to shape. This was how I loved him.

  * * *

  Ben looks over my shoulder. I had been cleaning out an old hard drive, and we are scrolling. He sees Liam sucking on his fingers. He and his twin nose to nose, drifting in and out of sleep.

  “I want to see that one! Is that him? Is that me? How did you know? How can you tell?”

  Oh, darling. I could tell. I could see Liam’s pain. Ben, love, you were already growing plump in small ways, your skin hanging off bird bones in folds like a Shar-Pei puppy but with a glow. Gram by gram you recovered in ordinary ways, extraordinarily. You fussed to get out of there and go home. I knew you from one another by every tiny wail of yours and by all of Liam’s silence. Liam, my love…Liam had a pallor, a misshapenness, his fists curled up in distress. This is how I knew, sweetheart.

  But I don’t say that. I say, “I just knew.” Ben smiles.

  “Show me that one,” he says, pointing at a thumbnail. I hesitate. It is from
their first day or two. It makes me cry. There was no best effort to be made. He was an emergency. He was death. “Show me,” says his identical brother, ten years later. “Whose foot is that?”

  I double-click. “It’s Liam, love.”

  “Oh…”

  “I know.”

  “Why is it like that?”

  “The first few days were very hard for Liam.”

  It is a photograph of the bottom of his heel. His ankle is wrapped in tape, holding lines in place. His skin shines taut over swollen blood, deep purple, and his foot is littered with pinpricks, only day two of his life but every second of it so far filled with distress.

  “Why did they do that?” He is looking at the pinpricks.

  “The doctors would take a little pinch of blood, and they would look at it under a microscope to see if it was okay.”

  “Was it okay?” He asked, hopefully.

  Only in that moment, ten years later, I figured out why I fended off every other lens. It was for Ben, for his ballast. If I could get past the machines, Ben might too. He might attach Liam’s humanity back to him, like Peter Pan’s shadow, despite all the rest.

  “He was brave, sunshine. He was your lovely brother. Look at his hair! It was just like yours.”

  “We would have played tricks on everybody,” he says, smiling and leaning his head on my shoulder as we gaze at the screen.

  * * *

  The practice of visual art is not only in what we show, but in what we take away. A photographer sees things in the frame that don’t add to the composition (or that detract from it), and she makes it disappear—diminishes it into shadow, changes her position, abstracts with shallow depth of field. An Alex Colville painting or a Mapplethorpe portrait have space inside them, brave empty space, and it sends our gaze to exactly where the artist points. They not only show less, but they bask in the less, throwing the point into sharp relief. This is white space.

  A snapshot of Liam’s wholeness—my broken butterfly, pinned to a board—was too much in the frame. The story of him was drowned in the clutter of his ordeal. Wires and electrical leads swirled around him, a mask, blocking me. The fuzz on his shoulder blade; the IV tube taped to his hand, long fingers in a fist; his pinpricked heel. Focus took the rest away, making white space in his story. In his toes, I could imagine who he might have been. This is how he became a boy to me. Piece by piece, wordless poem by wordless poem.

  * * *

  “I talk to my Jen’s spirit everywhere in nature,” said Muriel, her mother. “I stare at the sky and say I love you. I see her as a new form of energy. Know what I mean?”

  Yes.

  Not everyone is willing to talk about it, and so not everyone is kin. The death cooties. The thuggery of the forcible bootstrap pullers, the silent shoe starers, the my-dog-died-so-I-know-how-you-feel-ers. But there are all kinds of kin who have never held a dead baby. People who carry an array of losses openly, generously, with warmth.

  Bereaved parents of any measure become the same caricature of screwed-up cosmic mathematics. We are not supposed to outlive our children. Not if they’re thirty-seven years old or six weeks. That Debbie Reynolds would get the news of Carrie Fisher being gone? The universe breaks a sacred contract. We do not approve. This is why you and me and Muriel and Debbie Reynolds, bless her, share this kaleidoscope with more people than we might think. What of someone else’s pain would humble yours? What of their mixed blessings would you wish for? More time plus a more complicated burden of accumulated memory and separation? More to reconcile, more left unsaid, unresolved, unreckoned? More autonomy, more apparent control? More chances to have intervened, saved, affected outcomes? What makes you say Imagine the grief of that…as unimaginable next to yours? Others look at you and think the same.

  Irene and Jess and Bon and Josh and Chris and so many others who held dead babies. Stephen, three weeks ago, in Jersey City. We are the flotilla. But with a broader view, the companionship of the bereft is everywhere.

  “Most of the time, when I cry about Jen, I’m crying because she was in so much pain,” said Nick, early on. “I’m crying for her mom and dad that they had to see her suffer. It’s not so much that she’s gone, though it is that. It’s what she had to go through. Know what I mean?”

  Yes.

  It is wrong that Derek hit the moose, that my prom date died in the squad car of his dreams. It is wrong that a lovely couple in Edmonton spent eleven years giving everything they had to their son who would always die one day or perhaps the next—that he couldn’t laugh, run, tell them what he thought about things. All the miscarriages of friends and the years of infertility of others are wrong too. The interventions and stress and slippages of hope, all tangled up in the same endeavor as ours: to try and have children. All the bodies not cooperating feels wrong, with shocking consequences of various degrees. It is wrong that we might get sick or struggle or be expelled by war from a place we loved. Wafaa’s displacement is wrong. Her country’s destruction is wrong, and the violent loss of her son.

  We are the only animals who know death will take us from each other, yet we are the only ones who are shocked when it happens. Dismay is unique to us. The Buddhists devote every last wit to letting go of fair versus unfair. To make all this wrongness easier, they say, we’re going to have to quit being so surprised by it.

  After Jen died, Nick took a photo to the nurses. I wanted them to see her as she was, during her life, and not just with cancer, during her death. It was one of my portraits of her. She is standing on a wharf in white lace made by her sister. It is almost sunset, after the ceremony but before the dancing. She is rosy and beaming. I shot around his shoulder as she leaned in to him, her cheek touching his lapel, her eyes shining toward me. I remember hitting the shutter, and the little rush of knowing everything had conspired: my position, the breeze, the light, her transparent joy. That’ll be a great one.

  It is now on a bulletin board in a palliative care unit, most probably buried under the curled edges of other loved and lost ones in their prime along with cards of appreciation. Her face as all those kind people should have known it, not unconscious but full of promise, in still life.

  * * *

  The sum effect of finding kin: one plus one equals infinity. A grieving person finds another grieving person—someone they might not have otherwise considered, drowning as they were in their own private pitch black—and a little light takes root. In hushed voices by the salt cod two humans listen to one another, trading familiar unfairnesses and stirring the oxygen they share. It’s happened to me countless times: on sidewalks, at birthday parties, in a hayloft with a plate of barbecue. It is a shorthand, a safety, a space. A consciousness of breath and held breath. The pressure is eased and the light comes in.

  You may be a long way from caring about oxygen. You may be still bleeding and dazed in rubble. Or you may be a decade out, like me, thinking Yeah, I’ve felt that before. A deepening, softening, opening to people in pain, though I resent the means. Had my son lived, the world would have had more love in it. He would have received, offered, and generated love. He would have played, invented, and explored. He would have mastered a particular dish. He would have had his own favorite corny pranks, dance-in-the-kitchen songs, mountain peaks, dog-eared books, wallet photos of when he was young. He might have had his own children. He might have said to them, You’ll always feel better with a nap and a shower. Also, never nap with your pants on. That’s not a proper nap. It’s what my mom always told me, so now I’m telling you.

  With Liam’s death, the world lacks the love he would have made. Buckets and heaps and afternoons full of it. Whole lineages full of it. And that’s true. But the alternative? There would have been nothing of him. No implantation; no splitting of cells. No uterine kicks and thumb sucking and groping around to discover Hey. There’s another me in here. The erasure of Liam never having been Liam—even for a moment—would have
been more sad than his traumatic birth, his limited life, and our terrible loss of him.

  That he was here at all made more love in the world. With him, there would have been more. But without him, there would be less. I ache with this surplus. The ache is how I know it exists.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Womangood

  About the female state as we move forward. On beginning to build a life again rather than just surviving it.

  WHEN I was a kid, I had a Kate Greenaway peephole tunnel book that had been written and painted at the turn of the last century. I would gently pull the front edge and with a delightful crick-crick-crick the paper would unfold like accordion bellows. The first layer offered one small circle through which to look, and the rest of the layers staggered to form a 3-D diorama in miniature. I peeked through the hole at garden parties, kittens playing in hedgerows, and girls with baskets and bonnets with wide ribbons.

  Crick-crick-crick. The peephole was a golden ticket, a white rabbit, a cupcake that said EAT ME. Never mind the debtor’s prisons and rampant disease; I wanted to go to a tea party in 1898. The paper tunnel was transportation.

  Memories are like that. A collection of peephole tunnel books. They are never flat.

  Crick-crick-crick. I am asleep on a canvas deck chair in the sun, my hair in wet braids. I am sprawled flat on my belly, my arms tucked under me, a beach towel on top. There are marigolds in the yard. Cheerful voices and the pouring of lemonade and the spray of the sprinkler are a white noise. I am safe and loved, and the air is warm.