Notes for the Everlost

by Kate Inglis

Crick-crick-crick. I stand in a crowd at a high school dance. I like somebody. He doesn’t like me. It is 1988. The Pet Shop Boys are on a video screen. My boobs are little, and my hair is big. My sweater is tucked into my jeans. I am embarrassed. So embarrassed.

  Crick-crick-crick. I am wearing a wedding dress. We are walking down a village road, led by a piper. People come out to their front steps to clap. Pssst somebody says. I turn around. He snaps a picture.

  Crick-crick-crick. I am lying on the floor of our dining room. My first child is almost walking. It’s one of those scramble-around-in-nothing-but-a-diaper days. We are both sloppy and stinky. He flops onto me. ADLEE-GOO. His face is in my face. Then his elbow, then a chubby foot. He squirms and I catch him, roaring, squeezing his thighs. He squeals with a spitty, blueberry-smeared face.

  Crick-crick-crick. I am pregnant again with identical boys, hugely, taut under a blue shirt. Evan and I sit in the sand. He is two. He grabs fistfuls and the sun is warm, the sky and the sea twin sapphires. The water brushes up against the beach. I do not know yet that something is wrong.

  Crick-crick-crick.

  * * *

  I hate you, body. I want to be inside you like a room, and I want to smash everything in it. I want to see you in bits. I hate you. How could you do this to them? I hate you.

  I know, said my body, as I was wheeled to the incubators.

  * * *

  After the baby dies, checkout line magazines are newly incomprehensible.

  “30 Hot Sex Tricks!”

  “The Easy Flat Abs Workout You Can Do Anywhere!”

  “Get the Epic Love You Deserve!”

  Other women rejoice and fret over fifteen pounds gained or lost, split ends, affairs, scars, crooked noses, crooked lusts, streaks of gray, crushes, careers. But the baby died baby died baby died oh my god the baby died. The baby died. My baby died. The woman whose baby died was betrayed by her uterus. Her own body betrayed the life growing inside of it. The snakes on her head are screaming, in unison, all day and night, nonstop.

  * * *

  Womangood was a typo. The g was supposed to be an h, and this was supposed to be about the strangeness of feeding and washing and hydrating this body. Of decorating it, dressing it, walking around in it. Woman bad. Woman stuffed, fucked, kaput. Broken body, never mind the heart. Her only sex trick? Not crying during it, eventually, maybe.

  “You have to let go of the guilt. You have to stop punishing yourself. It’s not healthy. Why can’t you let it go?” he had said. The father of my children, bless him, wanted his wife back.

  “It’s not like I wake up every morning and choose it,” I replied. “Imagine you’re driving through a blizzard, and you cross the center line and crash and I am killed, or one of the kids. And imagine for the rest of your life, they make you walk around with the wreck of the car fused to you and for the rest of your life you ARE that wreck. You’ll be that wreck forever. You’ll eat and walk and sleep and do everything until the end of your days surrounded by all this twisted metal and blood stains. You know it was the black ice, not you, that did it. But you were still the driver. You were the one behind the wheel, and you’ll never forget it.”

  He nodded. What else could he do?

  Of course I know it wasn’t my fault. Stillbirth, miscarriage, prematurity, SIDS, accidents: nature’s chaos, a short straw, nothing more. I know. You know. Of course. But for a while, when everything is still smoking and spitting, I know, I know is instinctually followed by the knee’s twitch upon being hit with a rubber mallet:

  But I should have known

  I should have gone back to check

  I should have been more careful

  I should have called the doctor

  I should have gone to the hospital

  I didn’t

  It’s a reflex. It can’t be helped. It’s what makes the leap between tolerating womanhood and making womanhood truly good again seem like an impassable ocean.

  * * *

  Fathers: my gender is the obvious caveat. I can only speak to the car-wreck body and how it feels to be the vessel. This didn’t happen to the mother of your child. It happened inside her. Consider this a peephole tunnel book. Maybe it’ll be detached enough from your baby’s mother—from the trees of your forest—that you might see something you recognize.

  You two might be miles apart. Light-years. Or you might be standing together, holding on with a hooked finger or a knee against a thigh, bracing one another. You might be staring into space in the same general direction, not saying much. That might be okay. Or it might not be okay. Who knows. People go on about how the marital statistics after loss aren’t a happy sight. But they’re not in any case, are they? Every partnership comes with its own peculiar mix of inside jokes, recurrent annoyances, unspoken contracts, body languages, patterns of intimacy, gaps in intimacy, hot sex tricks, and suitcases of inherited anguish and anxiety. When loss happened, all the bonds or chasms that already existed between you were electrified. The outcome depends on what was there to begin with. Not on some arbitrary loss = divorce myth.

  Your baby died. For a time, there will be parts of her you can’t seem to reach. And you may have no idea what you need, let alone what she needs. You might wish she would stop talking. You might wish you could stop thinking. Or vice versa. You might think you have to keep it together so she shouldn’t have to. Or vice versa. You’ll get explosively upset on her behalf. She’ll make you explosively upset. You might swing far apart and then close together again, but fleetingly, until next time, like planets orbiting on a mobile of the Milky Way. You might wonder if it’s possible to ever find your jokes again, let alone your sex tricks.

  Never mind the typical stuff they say about how men handle it one way and women another. I’ve known women who never wanted to speak of it again. I’ve known men who wrote poetry and still do, a decade later. The only certainty is that at some point, you and your partner are likely to be out of sync, either a little or a lot. You’ll need something she won’t be able to give. She’ll expect too much of you. You’ll both raise flags that will be either broadly missed or misinterpreted by the other, and you may not have the energy to rephrase, clarify, be a grown-up, or remember all the rudimentals unique to the two of you. You’ll be tired, wrapped up in your own pain. Extreme loneliness, claustrophobia, guilt, or panic will inhabit both of you in turn, sometimes unheeded and neglected by the other, sometimes more malignant than benign, and this will land with a squelch on a growing, steaming heap of relationship shit that will grow six heads, and it’s going to live in your house. It’ll be your very own Greek hydra of relationship shit. Except it’s moving. And hungry. And has six heads. And it might eat you both alive.

  “MAWAGE,” says the Princess Bride’s bishop. “MAWAGE, that bwes-sed awangment! That dweam wiffin a dweam. And wuv, tru wuv, will fowwow you foweva…So TWASURE YOUR WUV.”

  You brush your teeth together. You dance rude in the kitchen and check each other’s moles. Dick jokes and neck rubs and sick days with chicken soup and piles of snotty Kleenex. And a six-headed Greek shit monster. Your particular monster might be wearing a sandwich board that says BABY DEATH. Another couple’s six-headed Greek shit-monster might be wearing a sandwich board that says ALCOHOLISM. Or GENERATIONAL PAIN RE: ABUSE. Or CANCER. Or BIPOLAR DIAGNOSIS. Can you turn your six-headed Greek shit monster into good, clean compost for a fresh batch of brand-new dick jokes and neck rubs? Sure. Absolutely. Ninety percent of the bereaved couples in my life are still fine and better than fine. It won’t be one shit monster that tips you one way versus the other. Just keep checking your moles, for heaven’s sake. And the dick jokes. Dick jokes are important.

  * * *

  Green and dewy and edible and nourishing things grow in shit, you know. That stinking heap is the very thumping heart of Mother Nature, the ambrosia of resilience. Money doesn’t make the world go round. Poop does.

 
We are a funny bunch. People who have never experienced loss or poverty or disease or anything in particular lie there, staring into space, feeling invisible. People who have suffered ten times as much as you and I—whose sons were left bleeding in an Aleppo street—write off a miserable day with a vow to get more sleep. A woman whose baby died a few years ago cries, mortified, at the bank. She forgot to set up automatic bill payments and she’s five times late on her credit card, penalized with the 25 percent interest rate reserved for delinquents. She is disorganized and hormonal. Her husband tells her she’ll feel better if she washes her face. She does.

  The third one was me. Yesterday.

  My baby died, for chrissakes. I would never cry over a damned interest rate, says the spectral imprint of circa-2008 Kate. Nothing else matters that much. I will never have that kind of emotional real estate again.

  But I do.

  Any one of us can play the who-has-it-worse game, either to shame others or to shame ourselves for being so damned delicate. If you do, no matter what your stance, you are correct. Yes. Some other people have it worse. Sometimes that person is you. And yes. Sometimes, you’re being silly. You’re catastrophizing. Turn that umbrella upside down. Pennies from heaven. No matter what you are—mourning or oblivious, close to your family or far away, broke or abundant, single or married, beset with X number of other traumas or not—you will invent a six-headed shit monster for yourself. We are imaginative, ambitious, and ponderous creatures. We are quick to both suffer and perpetrate a broken heart.

  Add to the chatter: Is what feels like a six-headed monster—stress / misfortune / loneliness / self-pity / hardship / woe—the truth? Or is it just a question of where you’re standing? If the answer is a grumbled Maybe, take a deep breath. Get some more sleep. Drink more water. Try again tomorrow. If the answer is Yes, this is all true, because my baby died, take a deep breath. Get some more sleep. Drink more water. Try again tomorrow. See the rest of us in parallel.

  * * *

  This kid smells good.

  In Calgary in a front yard swing with my friend’s baby on my lap. I would have evaded it, had I been able to. But it was nice.

  I might have liked to have had another…

  There was no man in my life, not for a long time, and I was carting around truckloads of guilt and shame, so much shame, over the end of marriage. Any reflexive womb flutter could only be entertained as a daydream for some alternate-world version of me. An alternate Kate who was still married and not forty. And who didn’t have an exploding belly—the placental abruption, the footnote on my chart that was overshadowed by the TTTS but a recurring danger if I’d ever tried again. Could I have had another without endangering myself or losing another one? If I were…also…several years younger? And with someone? I guess not. The moment I came to terms with babies, I came to terms with being finished with them for myself. Or who knows. Maybe, more honestly, I came to terms with babies because babies had become definitively impossible for me. Perhaps that’s when they became safe territory again.

  My social circle includes a cohort of bereaved parents near and far, a constant sounding board and soft place to land. As time passes, they are an array of life after recovery from every possible angle. After her first baby died suddenly at six weeks old, Jen said No way. Never again. I have dreams about trying to get pregnant and wake up drenched in sweat and shaking. I can’t do it. I will never do it. I can’t risk going through that again. Years later—it took years—I see a Facebook video of her rolling out a pirate ship she made for her two-year-old son’s first Halloween. They both laugh and squeal. Fist in the air.

  After a genetic condition caused her daughter to be born premature and die in the NICU, Saavi wrote to me: We tried for so many years. She was our miracle, and she is gone. They called her Ekaja, Hindu for “only child.” They went to Panama, to a little beach only the locals know about, with fresh fish and cottages on stilts. Initially, it was an escape. It was what they needed. But they never left. They found a community and a joy they can’t imagine leaving. It’s hot and lush and a long way from everything she once knew. Being a long way from everything she once knew suits her. It lights her up. Fist in the air.

  A subsequent baby is not a consolation prize. A big life change does not erase a missing baby. Subsequent marriages, businesses, dreams—nothing negates the loss. But the adventures, accomplishments, and developments that continue to unfold in life after loss will surprise you no matter what direction they take, what hopes they fulfill, or what unchartered paths they offer. They will add to you in a way that will make you so much more than everlost.

  * * *

  Jacqueline du Pré’s 1962 performance of Fauré’s Élégie in C Minor, op. 24 is the orchestral accompaniment to a silent film of human existence, a devotion of hope colliding with despair in loops and circles. A storm! Trees falling and guns blazing and all the failures and exclusions and corruptions and senselessness of us. One cello, one piano. Six minutes and forty-six seconds. The blind rage, the wailing. The certainty that you will always be bristling with sadness. The fear of the everlost. The drifting of the present becoming the past.

  We lament. This is our requiem, our composition for the repose of the souls of the dead. We wish for them to be tranquil, if we cannot be. Sorrow has as many synonyms as the Inuit do for snow, and it wraps around us as much as the white of the Arctic.

  What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music….And people flock around the poet and say: “Sing again soon”—that is, “May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”

  —Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

  Fauré’s Élégie in C Minor will make you cry, but exquisitely. It ends with a whisper. After, you’ll feel clean. Someone else has known this pain. They must have, to have orchestrated sounds like that. You are not alone. Neither am I. Neither was Fauré or du Pré. It’s not the music that is bliss. It’s the companionship within it. On the same album, after the Élégie, is “The Swan” by Saint-Saëns—peace creeping in again, like Carl Sandburg’s fog coming on little cat feet. We are sad, but calm. The Élégie would be less without the swan, and the swan less without the Élégie. They are as much a pair as a left hand and a right.

  How do I get up in the morning and make myself breakfast when my baby is gone? It’s obscene to butter a bagel when my baby is gone.

  In the beginning, it feels impossible to get through the day without thinking about it (you will). It feels impossible to ever revel sexually in the body that failed you (you will). It feels impossible to laugh at a joke, let alone make one (you will). It feels impossible to ever be generative again, the highest echelon of being okay. Productivity. Imagination. The creation and invention of new things, new chapters and movements in your life. To not just reach the baseline of a moderately even existence but feel terrific about something. Big generative and small generative. Satisfaction, pride, spark. It’s not impossible. It’s inevitable.

  You will never be yourself again. Not in the way you think of “yourself” as a concept. You will always be a bereaved parent. You will always long for what you have lost. But you will also be countless other things you don’t know about yet.

  It’s okay to feel like this is impossible for you. You might even hope it’s impossible. It may be too much to contemplate. That’s okay too.

  I feel sadness that Liam was my last. I feel gratitude, too. I am humbled by all those who tried again, who went through conception and pregnancy and labor after loss. I still look at them as some of the bravest people I know. I feel the same about parents who lost their only child and went on to invent unexpected lives down other, unexpected paths.

  Okay, baby.

  * * *

  A Fata Morgan
a is a mirage seen right above the horizon at sea. Ancient ships in the Strait of Messina attributed the optical phenomenon to Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay, seeing them as fairy castles or false lands to lure sailors to their deaths.

  It will be some time before you worry about credit card debt, over-browned tourtiere, your crap boss, or commute traffic. It will be longer before you sit mindlessly in front of Beverly Hills Cop III. Vanity and slovenly peace are distant shores, and you will inch toward them with ripped sails, an empty belly, and sunken cheeks. But not until after you have spent the requisite time being at sea.

  The first time you sense the ordinary woman of you on your horizon, she won’t be real. She will be an optical illusion, your Fata Morgana. You won’t be ready yet for everyday worries, despite wanting them (and not wanting them at all). The maybe-land woman you see, if you squint, is a trick of light and refraction. You will sail toward her anyway, just in case, and as you advance she will draw back to reveal more empty waves.

  Until, one day, you will feel the lurch of sand under your hull.

  * * *

  Are you still here, body?

  Years later. I have not been kind. I have turned myself inside out. I have deprived myself of sleep, water, intimacy. I am sorry. You tried.

  I did, says my body.

  * * *

  When a word feels like a hinge, I look it up. Dictionary poem:

  FALL

  Be born, little lamb.

  Come down freely under gravity

  To lower or less upright, suddenly

  Wounded or dead in battle.