by John Gould
Ronnie lost neither of her parents when she was young (in Cut Knife, by the North Saskatchewan River), nor did she lose siblings or close friends. To what, then, can we trace the intensity of her desire to join the “dead beat” fresh out of journalism school (Ryerson, 1988)? Raised on a fundamentalist image of hell, and bedeviled by it throughout her life, she certainly sought a more benign notion of eternity. Beyond that, she had a deep, appalled fascination with narrative, with the shapeliness of a “completed life” (a term she wryly lifted from the assisted dying debate). “Death satisfies every desire,” is how Ronnie opened her Ingmar Bergman obit. “It resolves every tension, delivers to every story its denouement.”
So, stories. There was the time she showed up at the office Halloween party as the blue Twitter bird, and spoke only in gnomic little non sequiturs all night long. (In her obit for Instagram influencer Sinead McNamara, Ronnie lauded social media as “an invaluable foretaste of death, constantly reminding us where we aren’t, and who we aren’t with.”) There was the time she spent her summer vacation getting herself teargassed and water cannoned alongside the Standing Rock Sioux. There was the time she brought her rescue pit bull, Baudelaire, to work in a beret and cravat, and snarled at anybody (including yours truly) who couldn’t summon the nerve to cuddle him.
Some of Ronnie’s tales, it must be revealed, were fiction. She was named after Veronica Lake, the femme fatale with the peek-a-boo blonde locks. (Her namesake was actually the New Testament Veronica who wiped the blood from Christ’s face at the 6th Station of the Cross.) Her first published piece, in the Paris Review, was a love story set in an afterlife in which the dead exist as sounds with no substance, no history, no gender. (“Litter Literally Kills” was the title of her first piece, appearing in the North Battleford News-Optimist.) What’s not fictional is Ronnie’s infatuation with irony, which she touted as the ultimate tool of the sceptic, the wonderer. In a sense her whole project was ironic, her words about the dead subjecting life to tireless inquisition. What she said was always so much less than what she meant.
Ronnie was astonishingly productive, her output suggestive of some subterranean source of heat, some hidden font or friction. It helped that she was awake so much of the time. As she summed it up in a (nicely flawed) syllogism scrawled on a sticky by her bed,
All ghosts are insomniacs.
I am an insomniac.
I am a ghost.
Ghostlike she could be, even ghoulish. She haunted funerals and wakes, as inconspicuous as a second cousin. (As the only other woman working the obits, I ventured to describe her once as “Audrey Hepburn cast in a plain part.”) The bereaved are only briefly truthful about the beloved, and soon fall back on bromides — Ronnie knew she had to be quick to learn anything of interest about the dead. (I flatter myself that she’d have appreciated this wordplay, though if she’d said so it would have been under her breath.) Survivors were often startled by her raw reporting. Where another obit might say “jolly raconteur” she’d go with “boozing blowhard.” With the living too she could be caustic — at least one ex-husband was characterized as a “dull obit just waiting to happen.”
It’s been made much of that Ronnie was fascinated with suicide. Her own death, however, was almost certainly accidental — or at least, like that of Ophelia (another fervent, fractured soul), it deserves to be left a mystery. Did her flight from the last of her three marriages loosen Ronnie’s grip on life? Did her dalliance with psychedelics (originally undertaken as research for her Steve Jobs piece) too dramatically decentre her already harrowed sense of self? We have no way of knowing. There’s every reason to believe she’d be pleased about this.
All of us here at the paper, including those of us who will try and fail to fill her shoes, are saddened by her passing.
Correction: When it originally ran in our print edition, this piece mistakenly referred to Veronica Swit’s dog, Baudelaire, as Rimbaud. In addition, the piece made reference to an “enduring if undeclared love,” for which there is no substantiation. Our apologies to her family.
Squeeze
What she needs is a baby. There’s an antidote to everything, someone once said, or should have, and the antidote to time with a person who’s about to die is time with a person who’s just been born. The catch is that Gretta’s own kids, all three of them grown and stably partnered, are childless. She’s been scrupulous about not nagging them, refraining from any little remark that might inspire in them guilt or remorse for their disinclination to procreate. She’s beginning to see how wrongheaded this approach has been. Time to crank up the pressure. Gretta arises and retires each day feeling inadequate. Why shouldn’t they?
For now, at any rate, there’s no grandchild to whom she can rush after another brutal night with her elderly and unwell and almost supernaturally ungrateful mother-in-law. Gretta’s best bet is her friend Lucy’s daughter’s new son. Gretta’s only seen pictures of him — a chinless, darkly-tufted little bloke — which gives her an excuse to intrude and meet him in person. It’s Monday, Lucy’s day to cover for her daughter. Worth dropping by this morning just on the off chance.
But there’s no answer at Lucy’s door. Gretta rings, then knocks, then makes her way through the gate at the side of the house and around back, not because she expects to discover Lucy and the little boy there but because she has no plan B, no alternate scheme for distracting or consoling herself. What she ought to do is head home and have yet another go at the paperwork for her mother-in-law’s home support application, or her mother-in-law’s medical benefits application, or her mother-in-law’s disability tax credit application, stopping en route to drop off her mother-in-law’s urine sample and pick up more pull-ups and more bleach and more Boost or Ensure, assuming she remembered to put the coupon for one or the other in her purse, but she believes the prospect of these tasks will cause her to drive into a tree, specifically the big leafless chestnut at Royal and 8th. She’s pictured it already, more than once. Midway through the left turn onto 8th she fakes an aneurysm. She slumps over, stomps on the accelerator, plows through the flower bed into the massive trunk. So sad, but we don’t believe she suffered.
“Lucy’s not home.”
“Pardon? Hello?” Gretta scans for the source of the voice.
“I saw her leave a while ago.”
“Ah.”
On the back porch next door there’s a young woman, about the age of Gretta’s eldest. She holds a wriggly infant in her arms. As Gretta draws closer, rearing up to see over the hedge, she notes that while the woman is red of hair and pale of skin, the infant is Asian. Chinese, probably. So many abandoned baby girls. Such a kindness to take them in.
“I’m Lucy’s friend,” says Gretta. “What a lovely child. I think it’s wonderful.”
“Wonderful?” says the woman.
“What you’ve done. What people like you do.”
“People like me?” These words could communicate offense, but they don’t. Curious, is what the young woman seems to be.
“I just mean reaching out like that,” says Gretta. “I have a friend who adopted a baby with fetal alcohol syndrome. Such a burden. Not a burden, but …” She rubs at her forehead. This headache is going nowhere. “How old is she?”
“He’s fifteen months.”
A young man steps out onto the back porch beside the woman. Asian. Korean? The father. Wrong story.
Gretta says, “Could I hold your son?”
The two young parents turn to look at one another. In concert, they look down at the child. What’s their most basic inclination as parents? To share or to shelter? It’s perhaps too early for them to be certain.
“Just for a minute?” says Gretta. “Just for a second?” She strives in vain to keep the desperation from her voice.
The man murmurs something to his wife in what Gretta assumes to be Korean. The woman nods. She appears to be pregnant again, her belly warping the blue stripes of her white sweater, or the white stripes of her blue sweater,
as gravity is said to warp the geometries of space-time. Gretta will be doing everything possible, everything short of assault, to get a hand on that bulge. The stir, the tremor of new life — she’s woozy with wanting it.
The man steps off the deck and comes towards her. When he reaches the hedge he grabs and pulls back an armful of it so Gretta can slip through. Gretta stoops and presses her way into the gap, but it’s tight. It’s too tight — Gretta has the panicky feeling she won’t make it through, that the pain behind her eyes will turn black and obliterate her. She squirms forward, but is she getting anywhere? She needs help, a shove from behind, and now she seems to be getting one. It’s almost as though she’s being born, or rather, it’s exactly as though she’s being born. She’s being born. There’s a brutal light, and she’s being pushed towards it, squeezed out of a dense darkness like a pit being squeezed from a plum.
Words fall short here. Early experience, the experience of a newborn, turns out to be almost entirely immune to the incursions of language. Gretta continues to know, in some sense, that she used to be Gretta, but this knowing gets fuzzy over time, the way a dream will do as the day goes by. Ji-hwan is her new name, or rather his. Ji-hwan’s older brother repeats this name to him tirelessly. By the time Ji-hwan can say it — he’ll be eighteen months old, and he’ll pronounce it “chew on” — he’ll no longer be anybody else. He’ll be himself, and he’ll continue to be only that until he too reaches the limit of his ability to bear it.
Open
Fear of death comes sixth on the list, but it’s really the only fear so it’s all of them. Fear of flying, for instance, which is number one. Why would anybody be afraid to fly if they didn’t think they might crash? Or number two, public speaking. Go back to when we were a tribe someplace and those staring eyes are the eyes of lions or wolves, a bunch of something hungry for you. And heights, and the dark, those are obvious. And intimacy, the fear of which is that you’ll disappear.
So I figured if I wasn’t afraid to die I wouldn’t be afraid of anything. To get free of Carl all I had to do was overcome that one fear. Which is where You came in.
What’s odd and kind of beautiful is that Carl introduced me to You in the first place. His dad believed, and even though Carl didn’t he kept the Book around, an awful gold thing from a motel. We are afflicted in every way, I read, sitting on the toilet with the shower steaming up my glasses, but not crushed. And then, This mortal nature must put on immortality. The way to do this is through faith, I found out, which is helplessness. I can do nothing so I’m saved. I’m mortal so I’m immortal. I carry Your death around in me so I’m resurrected with You every moment of every day forever. None of this is possible so it’s true.
It was Carl who taught me how to have faith, in a funny way. Carl is what’s called a spiritual entrepreneur, which means he makes money by believing he’s going to make money. The thing is, he’s not very good at it. He doesn’t make money, which is because he doesn’t believe in himself, which is because I don’t believe in him, which is why he sometimes hits me with his stapler or his three-hole punch. Or he did, until last night when You helped me leave.
Between Luke and John in Carl’s dad’s copy there’s a picture of You on the cross. The soldiers have come back to break Your legs to help You die, but You’re dead already. To make sure, they stick You with a lance and out pours blood and water, which is the human and divine of You. What gets me every time is that gash in Your side, like a mouth, which in a way it is since it talks to me. I peer into it, into Your body, the same way I peer into my own body when Carl opens it up, like that time he split my forehead to a white that was my skull. There’s only inside and outside, there’s nothing to fret about.
Carl caught up to me in the lobby when I stepped out of the elevator. In my bag I had the Book and only a few other things, including the red panties I wore our very first time.
“I’ll die,” he said.
I said, “Maybe.” Which now that I think about it, do we actually die even when we die?
“I’ll kill you,” he said.
I said, “Maybe. Here I go.”
And I went. I caught a bus to Cindy’s from work, who’s taken me in until I can find my own place. We sat up and drank tea last night as though we were just two girls, which is what we were. Her biggest fear is abandonment, number twenty, though shouldn’t it be higher? Poor Carl. I hope You can help him too. Please help him.
Number eleven is fear of flowers, which is strange, but I guess even flowers can kill people, or at least people can believe it. People can believe anything. Number nineteen is fear of You, which is foolish since You’re why we don’t have to fear anything at all. Though of course it’s also true that You can kill us whenever You want to, and You will. No matter what kills me, it will be You.
The Physical Part
There was a lot of weird shit about Shauna. Mostly good weird, though you couldn’t always tell at first. Right by her bed, where most people would keep a book or maybe a bottle of lube, she kept a picture of her Great-Great-Aunt Lucy. In the photo, which was actually a daguerreotype, an antique silvery sort of image, Lucy was an infant. She had a pudgy face and blank teddy-bear eyes glinting straight out at you. She was in a fabric-lined box you gradually recognized as a coffin.
“Holy bloody wow,” I said the first time I saw it. We’d just made love, sort of, and Shauna was in the bathroom loudly peeing.
“No, it’s okay,” she called out. “Don’t feel bad. The physical part —”
“I’m saying the picture. Is he …?”
Shauna wandered back in, tying up a pair of white karate pants. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen naked, which was odd because she looked like a boy. And okay, maybe that’s what threw me off for a bit. Is there such a thing as a beautiful person, as opposed to a beautiful woman or a beautiful man? That would be Shauna.
“Picture?” she said. “Oh, Lucy. My mother’s father’s mother’s sister.”
“Your mother’s …”
“Father’s mother’s sister.”
“And she’s dead there? She died little?”
“Yup.” Shauna started to pull on a T-shirt, but changed her mind. She knelt by the futon, her breasts softening ever-so-slightly the striated structure of her chest. “Wanna go again? We can do better.”
“But what’s … why?” I forced my gaze back to Lucy. The photo was small, and cut into an oval, as though somebody had once worn it in a locket. Shauna had taped it to the bedside lamp.
“They used to do that, take a picture once a person passed. See the hand behind her head?”
I squinted. “Like a halo, almost.”
“Mhm, yeah. So that would be her mother’s hand, my mother’s great-grandmother’s.” Shauna shook out her hair, deep purple at the tips but growing in blonde. “She turned religious after that, Lucy’s mum. Wandered around muttering Santa Maria madre de Dios all the time, we’re Spanish on my mum’s side. You couldn’t get her to say anything else. Will you have the pork or the beef, ma’am? Madre de Dios.”
“Creepy. The picture, I mean.”
“Not really.”
“You don’t —”
Shauna leaned forward and slipped a nipple between my lips.
Our second time was better.
Our third was better again.
“Right beside your bed, though?” I had my head on Shauna’s belly, my cheek against her sweat-slick skin. Her stomach gurgled sweetly in my ear. I had no plans to go anywhere, ever.
“People used to have pictures like that around,” she said. “They knew how to look at them.”
It wasn’t that day but maybe a week later that she told me about samvega, a Pali word that means the shock you feel when you realize life is pointless, but then try to come up with a point.
“It’s the consternation,” Shauna said, “but also the urgency. Death’s one of the only things that can hit you hard enough, supposably.” She’d do that with her words, say them like a li
ttle kid, especially when she caught herself in the middle of some big idea. Ambliance. Excape.
“I guess,” I said. We were in bed again. We were in bed most of the time in those early days, between shifts at YUMMY!, where we often manned opposite ends of the Hobart Sensotronic. She could load dirty dishes faster than I could unload clean ones, which drove me mad. Almost everything about her drove me mad.
“You suddenly realize this is all you have,” said Shauna. She patted the rumpled bedspread, which I took to be representative of the human condition in all its radical contingency. “You’d better get on with it.”
“It?”
Her stomach whistled like a whale.
“What if the it is us?” I said. “What if it’s us?”
“Huh,” she said.
It wasn’t for another month or so that she told me she was pregnant. “Six weeks,” she said, and let that sink in. We’d been together five.
“Ah,” I said. I was shocked, but not deeply enough. It wasn’t until the baby was born that I felt it all the way down. Little Lucy (it was to be that or Lionel, after my dad), covered in goo from the inside of Shauna’s body. Lucy had been nothing, and now she was something, and someday she’d be nothing again. Shock, and this sudden sense that maybe in some weird way stuff actually mattered.
The other thing with Shauna was that she lied a lot. She still does. There was no Aunt Lucy — Shauna had snipped the photo from a liberry book and made up a story to go with it. Also, she wasn’t pregnant when we met, that was to give me an excuse to bail if I wasn’t all in. We figure she got pregnant that very first day we made love.