TW: death, postpartum anxiety

I know a black one would have fit your aesthetic better, but the woman said they don’t use black for dairy.

Oh no we love this, I assure her. We had wanted a butter bell for a long time.

I linger on the custom though. She said that? That no one makes black things to hold dairy? 

Yeah, she said it’s just not really done. 

I guess it might look a bit like an urn in black, I wonder aloud, turning over its cool sides in my hands.

Did you know that breastmilk can be all different colours? I asked my husband, reading an article on La Leche League’s website. Obviously white and cream, but pink if there’s blood in it, green if you’re sick, orange if you’ve been eating a lot of carotene, blue if you eat foods with certain dyes. 

We had mentioned getting a ring made from my breastmilk. I liked the look of a milky white stone, and a tactile reminder of my physical connection to my son felt saccharine in a way that I craved. I had been hungry for months while trying to make enough milk, and I salivated at the prospect of extra calories, even if only in the form of sentimentality. But I never had enough to spare. 

I had recently stopped pumping, after ten long months. I’d felt a cold dread every time I shoved the pump parts together, flipped the stained pumping bra around my torso, figure-eighted the duckbills into the bra’s little horizontal slits, and pushed the buttons on the device that I hated, but so desperately needed. 

However I’d grown fond of the post-pumping ritual: pouring one bottle into the other, and watching the milk waterfall and bubble to a volume that I hoped would amount to more than the sum of the two bottles’ parts. But it never did. 30 ml plus 40 ml was always 70. 35 ml plus 30 ml was always 65. I knew this. 

Nevertheless, I pushed logic into abeyance each time, on the off chance that the universe wanted to use me for the smallest of tricks. But nothing ever materialized, and faced with not making enough, I felt each generation of evolution stack up behind me: seeing my volume fall short, the first one tipped forward, toppling each successive one on their way to ask me, Why?

I consoled myself with the fact that breastmilk’s fat content increases as infants get older. Over the last ten months, seeing the fat collect on the top layer of milk as I pulled it out of the fridge - miniature ice floes separating and knocking into one another in an opaque ocean - reminded me that my body’s reserves were being poured into my son's.

So imagine if you sent your pink breastmilk to be made into a ring, because it was tinged with blood. I recoiled, though I wasn’t sure why.

Yeah, that might be strange, he said, but maybe not. People get rings made out of their dead relatives’ ashes.

We were sure he was a girl. We had no reason to think so, but we did. The NIPT blood test would check for genetic conditions, and would also test for the baby’s sex. 

How does it check for the sex? I asked.

It’s by the presence of the Y chromosome in your blood, my husband read from the company’s website. 

In my blood? His Y chromosomes are floating around in my blood? 

I learned that his fetal DNA will migrate into my body, in a process called fetomaternal transfer. I learned that fetomaternal cell transfer is uneven, in that more fetal DNA will flow from the baby to the mother, than from the mother to the baby. And I learned that my baby’s DNA will stay in my body for decades. The persistence of fetal cells in maternal tissues is called fetal microchimerism, and fetal DNA has been found in mothers’ brains, hearts, skin, and other internal organs.

I pictured my DNA tumbling into the two Ziploc sandwich bags that the funeral home had used to hold my mother’s ashes before packing them inside the urn.

I couldn't save him from nuclear winter. The article I was reading made it clear. I had concocted scenarios from which I felt certain I could save him, or at least try:

What if someone tried to steal him in public? I could attack them. I’d never attacked anyone, but I was certain I could let loose every primal instinct to wrench him back. 

What if someone broke in? If I heard them in the house, I could shove the heavy wooden furniture in his room in front of the door and then jump out of the bedroom window with him. It was soft below. We might hit some tree roots or stumps, but I’d protect him with my body. I might break an ankle or wrist, but we could at least escape. 

I had done the first part during an overseas vacation. The obliging hotel staff in a small European hotel had lent us a crib for his room, but the only place to fit the crib was in front of the door’s angle of opening. The keys to the rooms hung behind the desk in plain view. I couldn’t shake the image of two hands reaching in and stealing my baby while I slept soundly beside him. So after he and my husband were asleep, I got out of bed and slid the heavy night table in front of the door. We made it all the way out of the room and down to breakfast before my husband asked if I’d seriously moved the furniture in the night. I couldn’t tell if his delay was concern or gratitude.

But as I read the article on nuclear warfare, my powerlessness in the face of the detonation of a large nuke - even far away - emerged. The article foretold of ash filling the Earth’s atmosphere, blocking the sun’s rays. I stared at the ceiling, imagining the cloud forming, obliterating the sun. How much of a worldwide supply of wheat was there? 

We could grow food indoors for a while, with artificial light and water. But at scale for the entire global population? I knew we couldn’t do that. Entire ecosystems would falter, and then fail. I had read The Road years back. Should I read it again? I had never thought of it as an instruction manual, so much as a meditation on the heartbreak of loving your child through your own futility.

If there is no sun and no food, then I couldn’t save him, I conceded. It’s only a matter of time if that happens. How would he die? I had asked a doctor how the brain tumours would stop my mom’s body from living. There are a few ways it could happen, she’d said. Once it came to pass, I’m not sure if her heart gave out, causing her brain to die from lack of oxygen, or if the tumours shut down her brain activity and, without the signal to continue, her heartbeat stopped. In any event, the two of them had run the whole race tandem, only to haggle at the finish line.  

How does hunger kill a body? And in what order? Which bodies go first? Would he, by reason of his littleness, wither away before me? Perhaps I could make enough milk for him to survive. Perhaps evolution had imprinted famine onto the human genome, emitting markers into a mother’s blood that would allow her to alchemize her body for her child. Perhaps, upon reading the markers, my breastmilk would summon the far reaches of my flesh, in order to sustain him. Perhaps my milk could suck my blood, muscles, and sinew into itself, siphoning decades of accumulated nutrition into his body. I had watched the cartilage of my mother’s nose sharpen to a blade in the minutes after she died. If she could transform in death, couldn’t I? But when the milky broth of me was used up and my bones had offered their last drop, who would hug him? 

His breathing whistled evenly beside me. He was on his back in a yellow onesie, zipped into his powder blue sleep sack. The growing light of dawn reflected on his turned cheek. 

One thousand percent! I whisper yell into his neck. He erupts into giggles. He knows the routine. I ask, How much do I love you? and then hold him up in the air and answer, One thousand percent! 900 more than is possible Titi! 

He kicks his feet and squeals with delight, and we swing around the front hall, his cool cheek pressed onto mine. 

I will love you long after I’m dead! I swing and sing. And long after you’re dead too! And even after the universe is done existing - whenever that is! I pull him away to look into his face. Even when we’re both just ashes Titi, you’ll be with me.

You heard what happened there? he asked, his eyes probing mine for a flicker of registration. 

I scanned his face. We told ourselves that it was our duty to know what happened in the world. 

No. And don’t tell me. I had always known that others saw my boundaries as window dressings to be gathered up and swept aside. As a child, teachers moved me around the class on the gamble that I would cool a particular quadrant of the seating chart. I always knew I had been given a job. I also knew that to fail to quell the chaos would be to betray my identity. The teachers assumed that my body would lull the other students into learning. They were mistaken. Thermodynamics did not bend for them, and I absorbed the frenzied heat around me. I hid all signs of my own increasing temperature, even as erasers flew and desks toppled.

One day my seatmate stabbed me in the thigh with his pencil. The attack felt routine. Devoid of emotion or malice. Devoid of intention, even. At home, I pointed out the pencil tip lodged in the top layers of my skin. Aren’t pencils made of lead? I asked, my tone rising. My mom grazed the pad of her index finger over my skin, frowning at the floor beyond my leg. I suspected she was thinking less about the lead and more about the reality of my classroom existence. Our teacher had threatened the administration with stress leave earlier in the year. Those kids are so rangy, my mom had said at the time. It’s all this sugar here in Austria.

It was spring and I had my orange denim shorts on. Every April I tried to coax summer out by dressing for it. The brittle single pane windows of our living room were propped open and the sound of streetcar bells drifted up on the cold air. Mine was the room at the far end of our apartment, the entirety of which was furnished with pre-war items. The cramped room contained a massive armoire, and on those brisk spring mornings I would creak open its doors and pull out the summer clothes that I wanted to wear. Kneeling beside me, my mom would consider them for longer than I felt necessary. I knew she was trying to reconcile my age and intelligence with this recurring misstep; but I wanted what I wanted. Eventually, she’d carefully offer the same weather lesson from prior springs: You know honey, just because it’s sunny out, doesn’t mean it’s actually that warm. I would hear her elongate the word ‘warm’ as I stared at the brilliant sky through the window, wondering whether to explain to her that if I made the decision to wear my hot weather dress, the day’s temperature would rise up to meet me.

Well, you’re not going to die of lead poisoning, I don’t think, she eventually said, pulling the sentence in slowly, from faraway. I continued to not die of lots of things over the years. Eventually a therapist said to me, You handle your side of the street, they handle theirs. 

But what if they come to my side? I asked. 

That’s when you put up a boundary.

I pictured the schoolyard game Red Rover. The only time I’d played I’d had the wind knocked out of me.

And if they get upset? 

You cannot control other people by taking all their bad feelings away for them. Even if those bad feelings are about you. She spoke in declarative statements, and I spoke in questions and complaints. While I believed her prescriptions, I simply couldn’t visualize shuttering myself the way she suggested.

*

The hospital where my son spent his first two weeks of life had terrazzo floors, cleaned daily by an older blonde woman who noted my insistence on moving the room’s garbage bin to the other side of the bed. Each morning she reminded me: It goes here. By the door. The neutrality in her tone never faltered, and it occurred to me that she had relationships with other mothers, in other rooms, reaching back months. She was pacing herself with me. 

I surprised myself by saying nothing in response. I stood motionless, staring at the bin as it slid, tiny bits of debris grating under it. I was accustomed to choosing which rules applied to me, but I wasn’t accustomed to making my defiance plain.

Her visits ended with a flick of the wrist to seal the yellow garbage bag. See you later, she smiled, backing out of the room and releasing the door’s puff of air. Thank you, I cooed from the other side of my son’s bed. We both knew I would move the bin as soon as she left.

But had I promised her any particular configuration? Of the room? Of myself? Besides, who was to say whether my previous body still existed. I could sense that I had grown into the room, limbs wrapping around the leather banquette that I slept on, fingers slipping into the stale beige drawers holding my son’s newborn onesies, sweat and breast milk drying into the heat of the room.

And what’s more, had I not sat holding my son, listening to a semi-circle of doctors relay a diagnosis? Had I not sat, teetering on fresh stitches, visualizing my son’s ureters being cut and re-sewn onto the inside of his body? Had I not sat, my stomach punching its own emptiness, asking “Will my son’s kidneys last his entire lifetime?” Had I not sat, blinking at the floor, reckoning with the answer?

Had the blonde woman sat? Had she sat in this room? Had she bled, sweat, and milked onto these terrazzo floors? I knew nothing of her life, but I knew enough about mine to know that I was not going to lob my son’s diapers over the web of wires dangling between the IV stand and his body. During the day, the wires felt clean - secular, even. The nurses gathered them up, their manicured nails clicking on the clear silicone as they arranged them on the metal guardrail with some slack, to not pull on his veins. Sometimes the wires refused to cooperate, and the nurses whisper-sang Come on, as we stood together, heads cocked, waiting for them to unfurl into their resting position. 

In the middle of the night, the wires taunted me. 

Imagine walking freely with your baby!

Imagine moving him from breast to breast, untethered!

Imagine lying down in a bed with him! 

Imagine tripping on the wires, yanking the needle, and tearing his vein.

Imagine tripping on the wires, dropping him onto the floor. The terrazzo floor.

Before he was born, the head of nephrology asked us on a Zoom call if we wanted to know. We said we did. He told us that some babies with this condition never leave the hospital - they stay, living on dialysis. He told us that some babies with this condition never leave the hospital - they stay, dying.

For the first 24 hours after his birth, my son's creatinine levels were mine - maternal creatinine. But once his kidneys were required to function on their own, they struggled. His creatinine climbed each successive day of his life. His kidneys needed to be flushed, meaning his body’s liquid input had to be greater than the output - a positive fluid balance. The doctors were banking on a turnaround, and the job of making the liquid to fuel the turnaround was mine. If I failed to feed him a larger volume of breast milk than the volume of urine emptied into his diapers, my job would be taken away.

I had to weigh him before and after nursing, to determine the exact intake of breast milk in each feeding. I also had to weigh his diapers to measure his output. I recorded these numbers on a whiteboard hanging over his bed. The nurses came to check my work. If the last entry was not sufficiently recent, they asked when I intended to feed him. 

He hasn’t woken up yet, I mumbled from my banquette, milk dripping out of my shirt and onto the floor. Somehow, I could instantly answer when questioned in the night. Wake him, the nurse instructed. That afternoon we had chatted about her commute, her olive coloured scrubs, and her vacation to Spain with her boyfriend. She was young and laughed easily. Now, at 3 am, her words meted out disappointment. Did I not know my assignment?

I had to bring my baby and his wires with me to the scale. The wires were attached to his IV stand, which was plugged into the wall. I peeled my skin off the leather cushions, convinced the noise would wake him. It never did, and my arms found more lift than intended when I picked him up off his bassinet. The idea of him was heavier than his actual body.

The lactation consultants had taught me the football hold, and I laid him in the crook of my left arm and unplugged the IV stand from the wall. Immediately, a low-battery alarm began to wail: a nurse came running, then darted away for an extension cord, then ran back to hook the IV stand back up. I put my baby down and rhythmically looped the long orange extension cord between my elbow and thumb, until I had a wreath to wear over my right shoulder. I scooped my baby back up into my left arm, and dragged the IV stand with me to his scale. Holding him secure onto the scale with my wreathed arm, I scribbled the number on the scale on a stray food court receipt. With him in my arms again, I hooked my free fingers around the IV stand, and shuffled us over to the banquette, to unswaddle him and start breastfeeding.

After the feed, I had to weigh him in the exact clothing and blankets that he had been weighed pre-feed. I reversed the process. Needing more milk, I had to pump after feeding. I estimated that if I pumped right away, I could sleep for 45 minutes. The breast pump sterilization center was on the hospital’s third floor. Only one parent at a time was permitted inside; there was always a line, even at 4 am. 

I shuffled to my son’s door, swung back to give it space to open up wide, and stepped out into the humming lights of the hall. When your mom is already dead, you can hear her say anything. As I walked to the elevator bay holding my bin of pump parts, she said, You know honey, just because it’s an option, doesn’t mean you have to do it. I wondered whether to explain to her that if I made the decision, my baby’s creatinine would stop, turn, and come back down to meet me.

I’m pregnant now. I told a lot of friends early on. I never considered keeping it a secret. I adopted the refrain “Well if I miscarry I’ll just end up writing about it anyway, knowing me”. As if the subject matter of my writing lay outside my control. As if I, a pyre upon which all of my life’s trauma was festooned, had but one choice: to emit smoky missives of pain.

So I surprised myself a few days later when a friend shared that they were curious to read what I had to write about the experience of being pregnant. Despite it being a generous expression of interest, I flinched. “Yeah, I wonder if I’ll write about it” I offered, lobbing my water bottle into the passenger seat and glancing into the middle distance with a disinterest that didn’t befit what was, truly, a happy pregnancy announcement.

I could hear my immediate thought ringing out: I don’t write a diary. I don’t just write about the next thing. But even as I thought it, I knew this reaction wasn’t accurate. I wasn’t bothered by the idea that I would write about the next station on life’s journey. After all, growing a new human is a notable station. I also knew well my craving to locate visceral, physical experiences within our wider emotional landscape. Even more specifically, I’ve always been captivated by pregnancy itself: since the advent of social media I’ve spent hundreds of hours scrolling the posts of midwives and doulas who document the process of birth and matrescence. My fascination with pregnancy threaded a vein through my relationships with other women, such that a friend - upon hearing my news - exclaimed “Oh you’ve been excited to be pregnant your whole life!” And she’s right.

In 2019, consumed by the fear of running out of time, I froze my eggs. I wrote about the experience, and had this to say:

The radical concept that a woman’s reason for making some noise about her inner state does not, in fact, require a referential reason at all, and that instead, her desire to do so, is the only reason she needs.

I still stand by the statement above. So why was writing about pregnancy off-limits to me?

For months I turned it over, searching for the answer - for one answer. But there isn’t one answer. After wrestling with it, I worked out that part of it stemmed from internalized misogyny:

I have more interesting things to write about than the basics of gestation.

Everyone came from a pregnancy, billions of pregnancies have happened to bring our current human population onto Earth.

These weren’t conscious thoughts that I defended. These were instinctual ego reactions.

Let’s start with the “basics of gestation”. There is no basics in gestation. We know this, logically. But physically, the sheer scope of symptoms in the first trimester was nothing short of breathtaking. I had heard about the urgent peeing, and the relentless insomnia made sense to me once I read about all the tricks that progesterone has up its sleeve. I was caught off guard by the earlier than expected side-to-side hip sway, the restless legs, and my inability to consider eating anything other than cheese and saltines. I did a double take at the constant sneezing and the stabbing nipple pain. I was awed, if unamused, by my body’s determination to produce a dusty, quenchless thirst, a shortness of breath even while sitting, and a panicked hunger that felt like a hemorrhaging of my own life force. But of all of it, the listlessness within the nausea - the breathless pacing, as if the end of the hall might offer an oasis - left me burrowing inside myself. When asked how I was, I would answer “Oh, just living inside my body”. Early pregnancy shuttered me to the world outside my own physicality in a way that I was fortunate never to have previously experienced.

Let’s skip to “billions of pregnancies have happened to bring our current human population onto Earth”. This alone makes it worth writing about, for a few reasons:

1. While I spent the first trimester preoccupied by my own physical turmoil, I did have one continuing thought about the world outside my body: that countless women endure these symptoms while doing gruelling work to support themselves and their families, in fields and in factories, with meagre nutrition, money, and prenatal care. Women’s resilience in carrying billions of pregnancies to term, whether chosen or forced, is the true miracle.

2. This post began with the mention of pain. It’s easy to write about pain, because pain feels unique. Did I think pregnancy wouldn’t involve pain? Or did I, despite my fascination with pregnancy and birth, still deem it to be an ordinary, quotidian pain? A pain that has been corralled, tempered, and abridged so often that many of its own references to itself had become a form of artifice? Was I thinking of film depictions of women screaming in labour, their feet and agency confined to stirrups? Of “morning sickness” stock photos featuring perfectly coiffed professional women in white v-neck tops, holding their bellies and looking confused? Of women who stiffen ever so slightly and deflect or self-deprecate when asked about their labour experience? Had I, too, adopted the idea that this was a pain so uninteresting that it should be summarily overcome? That this was a pain to be wholly subjugated to the joy of having a baby? That this was a pain to be endured, flatly, and then sealed away? Had I absorbed the notion that if I were to examine this pain, I would be seen as naive? Or indulgent? Or worse, weak?

3. There is comfort in the knowledge that billions of women have come before us. You, like many women who have been pregnant before you, have evolved to do this. And so it should only follow that we can relate to writing about pregnancy and motherhood. After all, the best writing pulls on a part of us that already exists. A part of us that will sit up and say “Wait - I’ve felt that way. That’s me they’re writing about!” And yet we consign writing that prioritizes women’s maternal experiences to the margins.

   Kate Baer, a poet who centres womanhood and motherhood in her work, discusses this in an interview with The Rumpus:

   How many coming-of-age stories have we read about baseball? Motherhood is a universal experience. We’ve all had a mother, in some way. We all come from a mother, for better or for worse. To say that is not a universal experience or to be put in some niche chick-lit column is ridiculous, and I am glad to not be playing into that anymore.

So what else played into my inability to write about pregnancy? I was wary of experiencing something for the first time and then writing about it as if I’ve discovered it.

While this wades into the question of why we write, it ultimately wrestles with how we write: writing carefully enough to add, yet not so carefully that our contribution never materializes, or worse, emerges as mere simulacrum, inaudible in effect. But in answer to the question of what, and how, to write, I keep returning to a poem that I’d wanted to read at my mom’s celebration of life. I ended up reading a different, shorter poem, but I had come across this particular poem in the first week that I was pregnant, and before I knew I was pregnant. The poem is intended to speak to the myriad anxieties that society foists upon pregnant women, and it consists of a repetition of the line “Expect ____”, with the words after “Expect” populated by entries from the index of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

When I first heard it, the poem struck me as a cross section not of pregnancy anxieties, but rather of life itself: ankles, bathing, fig bars; hot weather, meat, seat belts; vegetables and yoga. There isn’t an item in the poem with which we’re not all familiar, save perhaps for “dromedary droop”. 

I received it as an unadorned recitation of the fragments that we encounter while alive, and I was transfixed by this inventory of the mundane. I had tired of reading obituaries touting milestones and achievements. I wanted to read about what had made someone remember they were alive. And while I knew that my mom’s friends and family were showing up to her celebration of life to celebrate her life, I wanted to focus on what my mom had celebrated: life itself - not for the quality of it, but for the simple existence of it. I wanted us to feel struck by our availability to: age, cold weather, music, smells, and sugar. 

I keep returning to this poem for its droning insistence on the gamut. What do we all know? it asks. We all know all of it, it answers.

Still, we recite.

You can listen to a reading of the poem via the On Being podcast - the poem starts at minute 1:35. You can also read it below:

“What to Expect” by Katie Manning, a poem made of items “found in the index [of the book] What to Expect When You’re Expecting”:

Expect accidents. Expect acne, additives, age, and airbags. Expect alcohol, allergies, and altitude. Expect analgesics. Expect animals, ankles, and antidepressants. Expect autopsy findings. Expect bathing, bending, botanicals, and breaking news. Expect bruises. Expect cabbage leaves. Expect castor oil and cats. Expect cell phones, chemicals, Chlamydia, and clay. Expect cleaning products, cocaine, and cold weather. Expect computer monitors. Expect copper, costs, and coughing exercises. Expect dance workouts and death. Expect diving, Doppler, driving, and dromedary droop. Expect embarrassment. Expect electric blankets and equal employment. Expect eyes and facials. Expect failure, fantasies, fast food, and feet. Expect fig bars, fingernails, fish, flying, football, and freckles. Expect fruit juice. Expect gardening. Expect German measles, grains, grief, and guns. Expect hair. Expect heat lamps and hiccups. Expect hiking, horseback riding, hot tubs, and hot weather. Expect hypnosis. Expect ice skating, insect repellent, and itching. Expect jet lag and jogging. Expect kick-boxing. Expect K-Y jelly. Expect lacerations and laser eye surgery. Expect lead exposure and lovemaking. Expect manicures, marijuana, masks, and meat. Expect meditation, milk aversion, and moles. Expect mosquito bites and music. Expect nasal strips. Expect nicotine patches, noise, and NutraSweet. Expect on-line drug shopping. Expect optimism. Expect organ donation and organic produce. Expect outside influences. Expect paint fumes, pasteurization, peanuts, pesticides, and pets. Expect pins and needles. Expect raspberry leaf tea. Expect red palms, reduction, religious belief, and rest. Expect ribs, ripening, and risk. Expect rowing machines. Expect saddle block. Expect safety, saliva, and salt. Expect scalp stimulation and scuba diving. Expect seat belts, sex, and shoes. Expect skiing and skin sampling. Expect smells. Expect softball, stockings, and stomach bug. Expect sugar, sunblock and sushi. Expect tai chi, tears, teeth, and ticks. Expect toes, touching, train travel. Expect vaporizers, vegetables, and vision. Expect warts and water, workouts and witch hazel. Expect x-rays. Expect yoga and zinc.

I disappeared for a bit. A few things happened that left me shrinking. Shrinking from others is one thing, but shrinking from your own mind is a problem.

I got a concussion. I laid in bed for ten long days with an eye mask on, unable to process even the dim light of an overcast sky outside the window. I couldn’t talk much, because my own voice vibrated too heavily in my head. I managed to send some text messages by staring at my phone sideways with one eye half-open, my screen on dark mode and the brightness decreased to its bare minimum. But the strangest part was that I wasn’t supposed to think. How can you not think?

I did, in fact, not really think though. I had anticipated that I’d have lots of feelings and observations on being concussed, and maybe that sounds conceited, and it probably is, but I was humbled by the reality that my brain shut itself off. It simply didn’t work like it had for the three decades prior. So I had no thoughts. I didn’t have dreams either. When I slept it felt as though I was plugged into a battery that was recharging me, but in order to receive the charge, I had to be completely still. There was no movement in me. I kept telling my husband that my body was engaging in the “stunned bird who just hit a window” thing. He agreed that it probably was and let me know dinner was ready, but four broccolis later I’d start yawning and return to my job of being nothing.

It turns out that thoughts aren’t the same as emotions though. Maybe we know this. But maybe we don’t see evidence of it too often if we’re not trained therapists. Lying down on the leather bed and counting the quatrefoil cut-outs on the blue curtain at the emergency department, I had the distinct feeling that my mom was sitting beside me. She wasn’t, of course, unless we believe in that. But suddenly all these quatrefoils were dancing around in my tears, because I was crying about how I had injured the body that my mom created. When she left I had been in one condition (relatively good), and now I’d gone and messed it up by slipping on a boat ramp covered in algae and letting my brain crash around my skull in the process. How could I not have taken better care of what she’d made? How could I tell her that I’d hurt her child? What if I just deteriorated after she died, and never amounted to anything, and from that point forward my life was just one long, unending downward spiral? What if I never had a real, productive thought again?

Perhaps we can have some thoughts when concussed: catastrophizing.

And then my cousin died. My mom’s niece. She died of the same cancer as my mom, just seven months after my mom, at only 51. There is so much tragedy in this that if you try to listen to it, all you hear is a roaring. I can’t dissect a roar here, but more than that, my cousin’s death isn’t my story to tell. But I will say that she was such a vibrant life force that I often wonder where she is now. She must be somewhere, doing something. Is she running? Is she swimming at Kits Pool? Is she making quinoa salad? Is she laughing on the phone? Is she walking the dog? She can’t just be gone.

But the fact that she is - perceptibly - gone, unmoored me more than I already had been. After my mom’s death, I had already adopted an “Eh, you live and then you die” attitude. I had already become cynical about possessions clutched too closely and storylines that insisted they couldn’t be re-written. I had already started to scoff at people’s created identities. I refused to accept anything but the raw, the unfiltered. I spurned the fabricated, the illusory. What, you think you’re immortal? I’d sneer to myself. You think we don’t know you’re going to die one day?

It occurred to me that others were not obsessed with death the way I was, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t my problem if they didn’t know the facts of life. I’d had to watch the person who created me shrivel into a mere wisp, into a husk, into a chaff, and I was mad about it.

So I was already tired from carrying the ending around with me during the middle. And then, suddenly, my cousin’s death made it clear that this might not be the middle. That this could be the denouement. That this could be the conclusion. That this could be the autumn of our lives. That, at 36, I could be in my last 15 years. Or even less than that. And that there is no help. That there is no one who can stop it, if it’s coming for you. That we are all, truly, owed nothing.

It made the problem worse. I hated people who made things, people who said they did things, people on LinkedIn, people on Instagram, people who shared achievements, all the people who seemed to take credit for their fate. Who are you to claim this circumstance? I’d think. This health, this happiness? You’re lucky you even get to be here. Every opinion and every instance of striving became offensive. The slightest whiff of posturing became repulsive. How can you be so goddamn sure, if you don’t even know whether you’ll be here tomorrow?

I wanted to hear no one’s thoughts. If I couldn’t have assurance, no one could. And if I couldn’t stand my own thoughts, why should I grant you yours? In Aesop’s Fables, I was the dog in the manger.

I stayed like this for a while, and in part, I still am like this. But I did of course hear lots of people’s thoughts over the months that went by, and some were helpful. One was particularly helpful, in its factual simplicity: I was having dinner with a group of old friends, and one said to me, “And why did you have to get a concussion? That’s unfair. Like, I didn’t even have a bad year, and I didn’t have to get a concussion. But you did. That just seems like too much for one person”.

We don’t make people weak by telling them bad things happened to them. The same way a tree wouldn’t be missing more limbs if you went out into the yard and said to it “Someone cut your branches off. That’s really unfair”. We don’t make a person more sad by pointing out that they have a good reason to be sad. Depression isn’t fomented by the mere mention of the word.

And the thing is, we usually do know how to solve our own problems, so we don’t need much help. We just need someone to take stock for us, to acknowledge the state of things. For someone to say to us “You are here, and you have had to feel pain, and you are likely still feeling it, and I see that”.

Because being told you’re feeling pain is the same as being told you’re alive - you can’t feel pain when you’re dead. And that’s the crucial part in regaining some movement: believing that you’re still alive, and might even be for a little while yet.

There are times when terrible, cataclysmic things happen, and you grip the walls, demanding an answer on how the walls could look on and not intervene.

When you want to run into the garden and grab the weeping willows and yank them all the way to the ground, hissing at them that they were already most of the way there, when they dare ask what that was for.

When you can almost taste yourself hurling your water glass through the window just to see the shards break the splash into beads, the droplets a crystalline mess.

When you hold your bottom teeth in line with your top teeth the way your mom did when she was far away, and you do it now to keep the flat mouse of your heart in.

When you cry into the backs of your hands instead of the front, because you need to keep buttering your toast and you were in the middle of making it when you got the news, and you have a call starting in two minutes so if you cry into your palms they’ll be wet and you’ve calculated that you don’t have time to put down the butter knife, finish crying, dry your hands, butter the toast, put away the butter, and walk back downstairs in the next 120 seconds.

When you announce to your dad that on the basis of this new loss you’ve adjusted human life expectancy to 50 years, and you now consider anything after that to be a bonus. And you tell him that you’re going to call the actuaries to let them know and he says “Okay, they’ll be happy to hear from you”, and you say “I know they will be, because I’m not wrong”, and you talk like this because you can and because you’re worried that if you stop, you too (two) might die.

When they finally come and hand you a social crime ticket and you unfold it to read that you’ve been charged with “All you talk about is death!” Or maybe they don’t, but what if they do one day? Because earlier, when you were watching the Olympic wrestling, you opened your mouth and out came “Ok so he’s going to wrestle in his outfit and maybe win a medal but he’s going to die one day, so what’s the point?” But then you realize the men’s 200 metre swimming didn’t make you feel that way, so is swimming the meaning of life?

When someone who has never had to face the noninterventionist walls, the 3/4 length willows, the broken splash, the flat mouse, the toast, and the inaccurate actuaries, tells you the meaning of life.

This is it. It’s the beginning. This is how it starts.

And yet here you are in the middle of it, just stopped, holding your things: all the things you owned before, when you were a person who did things and bought things, and now all the additional things you own - your mom’s things - plus of course all the things your husband amassed at some point before you. You pick the things up, and as you feel them, you count that you have two citrus juicers, three sets of tongs, four colanders, five pepper grinders, six paring knives, seven spatulas, eight egg holders, and now you have wild turkeys outside too. The partridge for the rhyme.

And every time you turn the shower on you get the tap direction wrong, and you do think there should be a rule for this - some universal decree on whether a shower tap should be depressed or raised for the water to come out. Surely taps should not be allowed to make their users feel hapless.

You wonder, annoyed with yourself for wondering and for being so inept, if you will ever figure out the schedule of the face sunscreen. If you put it on to exercise outside in the morning, and then you shower and reapply, then you are applying it twice in one day just to sit at your computer for the remainder of the day. And then of course you also wash your face at night and anoint yourself with all the nighttime things. And you think that this is madness. That this is an exercise in aesthetic hysteria. Truly the height of some kind of dysmorphia. But the dermatologists have spoken, in their Tik Toks and in their Reels, and they have laid out a decree (unlike the taps) that SPF must be worn absolutely every second that one is outside, or near to outside, or even deep inside, during the hours of dawn to dusk - and probably during pre-dawn and post-dusk, to be sure - on any day in the calendar, in any country, in any time zone, anywhere under the umbrella of our dear, mottled atmosphere.

And you want to cry out “My god am I not a creature of this planet?! Can my skin not withstand the slightest dance with the sun? Not even for a bit? Was I not born to live in the elements, even just for five minutes?” And you know that your cry is childish, because even though all your peers tack on the line “plus it prevents skin cancer”, they’re really reading from the jacket of the book from which spills forth sheer, unbridled vanity, and in which there is no sentence reserved for child-like wonder or play. The goal is specific: to not age. The goal is precise: to not photo-age. It’s even what the epilogue will say, if you make it that far.

And so you consider shirking their dogma - throwing their caution to your wind - but then ah! You remember: Your Family History™. You mom died of skin cancer. And others in your family have / had it. And not in the small way, but in the big, big way. And so it’s not just a matter of rhetoric for you. You really do need to inculcate yourself with a fear of the sun, or at the very least, a practice that converts fear into a realistic ritual of protection. And isn’t that just all of it: converting our daily quotidian fears into a realistic ritual of protection. You can see yourself, just smearing the white paste into your limbs, and into the limbs of your children, and either going to bed sticky, or showering endlessly, until you all die anyway, of something. But whatever it is, it won’t matter, because there you will be: Gleaming. Photo-perfect. Cinderella’s slipper, in human form.

You listen to some Patsy Cline to feel like your mom is around, because she used to sway around the tiny kitchen to Patsy Cline, and would even sway into the living room, in her full apron, swinging her wooden stirring spoon, darting pasta water around the room, singing badly. Her voice was terrible. She would laugh about it. She still sang. And you remember that you owned two pairs of soft corduroy pants when she was in her Patsy Cline singing days. You were about 11 or 12, and your pants were relatively loose and soft, and you felt then that life would continue to be relatively loose and soft. But now here you are, staring at your 13 wooden stirring spoons, and there is nothing loose or soft. And you are wondering if maybe, you put on an apron, and sing badly, you could blur the edges of things, just a bit.

You go outside for walk. You have your sunscreen on, because you are in the cult of health and beauty. The former justifying the latter. A guy runs by you, uphill, moving you with his path to the side of the road, and you consequently find yourself walking straight into the path of a green caterpillar hanging on her string from the tree branches above. There’s no way to walk without your body interrupting her invisible string, so you anticipate that she’ll end up clinging onto your shirt, and you will let her tip toe onto your finger and you will put her down in the grass, like we do when we decide to trust that we are both creatures of this Earth who can engage, even just for a bit, with one another and with the elements. But you walk straight through what you believe to be the trajectory of her invisible lifeline, and she isn’t affected at all - not even moved or frightened. You stop and stare at her, watching as she twirls slowly, the rays of sun glinting on her sherbet green body. Why didn’t you break her lifeline string?

And then you realize: it’s the sunscreen. You’ve done it. You’ve smeared yourself into oblivion. You’ve become so insulated by your realistic ritual of protection that the Earth doesn’t even sense you anymore. And you, and your friends, and the gaggle of photo-perfect internet skinfluencers whose gospel you scroll in - you have all died already, your perfect faces radiating out from your Korean glass-skin coffins, the hinges smeared with Vaseline and the top of it covered in a thick layer of broad-spectrum SPF (remember, UVA rays pierce glass!).

The sun and the caterpillars and the wind don’t come to your funeral. They’ve long ago forsaken you for the pristine, hapless, swaying ghosts that you are.

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I hate that sound, I said. About the train horn in the distance, at night.

We used to hear that sound in Edmonton, my dad said. Lying in bed. At ten after ten. Same time, every night.

Was it mournful? Did you hate it?

We’d hear it three times. The first time, far away. And then you knew you’d hear it again when it passed by north of the city. And then eventually you’d hear it close, and the whole house would shake.

I walked by my elementary school track the other day, where we’d run the 400 metres in laps for gym class. Our grade 7 homeroom teacher was a runner and thought we could be too. She taught us how to breathe, her mouth making an exaggerated “o”, and we stood in a semi-circle contorting our mouths into the “o”, our lips blanching in the Pacific drizzle. When we’d mimicked the breathing and the mannequin arms enough times, we bobbed out onto the wet gravel.

I pushed myself hard those first few weeks. I’d lunge my body forward in space, through the burning in my chest, my oversized sweatshirt puffing out into a sail as I rounded the corners. The track was actually a rectangular pock-marked field, so there were corners. The teacher praised me as we walked back to the school: You really are good at this Dominique. I’ve never seen you participate in gym class like this before.

When I walked by recently, I thought of returning to the track. Maybe discipline would flirt with me there? But then I remembered that my efforts had flagged in the weeks after that praise, so much so that the teacher had taken me aside a while later, genuine concern on her face: Hey. What happened to you? You were doing so well. Are you getting enough sleep?

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was weary of the oncoming fate of it all. The circles. The pretending to dash toward it, when it was all just running up to meet me, regardless.

In the film The Dig, one of the characters talks about his desire to fix people in time by photographing them. I was struck by the use of the word “fix”: normal for the 1930s, but now mostly used to indicate making something better. And I wondered about the meaning of the word.

To fix: to make something better.

To fix: to make something forever.

To fix: to make something better, forever.

My mom had cancer three times. She wouldn’t have known after the first time - a lump taken out of her back - that it was coming back again. But she would have known after the second time - Stage 4 - that it would be returning for a third visit.

She ran in unending circles in an attempt to stave it off. She retired early. She meditated daily. She avoided the sun fastidiously. She exercised regularly. She took her vitamins and sprinkled her muesli with flax seeds. In photographs, high up on mountain tops or deep in forests, she radiates fitness and health.

When my dad was little, he’d go to his mother’s village for the summer, outside of Vienna. He was given the job of taking the cows out to pasture, which in fact meant accompanying the sheep dog Lumpi, as Lumpi took the cows out to pasture. Lumpi was black and white and would run unending circles around the cows to stave off their straying.

Lumpi is immortalized in a photograph, and I’ve seen the picture many times: he’s sitting proudly in the dirt road in front of my great-grandfather’s house. My great-grandfather is standing in a suit, hands on hips, a pipe in his mouth, glaring out from under his hat. My great-uncle is sitting on a chair in the road, cleaning a fish with a knife. My dad is standing beside Lumpi, feet splayed apart, knees poking out under his shorts, squinting into the sun.

I asked my dad what happened to Lumpi, and if he was sad when he died, since he spent all his summers with him.

Lumpi was killed by rats.

I was shocked. I’d never heard of a dog being killed by rats.

You know in the backyard of that house, where Preiner has his equipment now? There were rats living back there then, and they attacked him one day and killed him.

But how could those rats just live there all the time, and then only one day decide to attack the dog? I asked.

I don’t know why it happened all of a sudden.

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When the pandemic first started, and we were asked to stay home, some people ran into the ring of the suffering Olympics and held up their tiny internet signs scrawled with, It's not like you have to ___, you just have to sit on your couch!

They were really saying, you're not suffering a trauma, just an inconvenience. So we didn’t qualify it as a trauma at that point. But then summer came, and the body bags piled up in the parking lots of New York City hospitals, and young, healthy people were felled by this virus, and it started to sink in that this was a trauma.

Soon though, we grew accustomed to that reality. And once we all got used to the idea that we were running a marathon, we took out our stopwatches and sought to measure whose pace was most gruelling. Working parents homeschooling their kids? Those who live alone, yearning for the touch of another? Those working on the front lines? Those who are immunocompromised and scared? Those who lost their jobs? Those who lost someone and can’t grieve in community with others? And what if you tick several of those boxes?

We wrote articles acknowledging the collective grief we’re suffering. And we understood our sense of malaise. And recently, the New York Times figured it out for us: we are languishing. Not thriving, but not depressed. And we jabbed our hands in the air at each other, figuratively of course, because no one is ever really there to see you as you doomscroll, and we exclaimed Yes, thank you! This is what I’m feeling!

But this week, things got worse. At least for me and most of the people who communicate with me. For context, the third wave has been in full force in Canada for several weeks. We are locked in and isolated again.

I went from doing things, and mostly loathing the silly mundane things I do, to not really being able to do things. I could imagine an activity that I might do - go for a walk or change the water in the tulip vase or eat some soup - but it seemed far away, as if I was seeing it in the small hole created when you tape together a few empty paper towel rolls and pretend you’re yodelling. My thoughts pulled on each other, each of them wearing a sweater that the other wanted, and would take, with sheer force.

The air felt scarce, and I realized that I was no longer breathing as I had been for the last few decades. I kept catching myself holding my breath while working, and Google told me this is a common phenomenon amongst women, while emailing. Yes, while emailing.

One morning, I answered the phone with Hi, sorry, I was just lying here thinking about how I’m a waste of space, and thankfully, the person calling was self-aware enough to say, Oh that’s what I was just doing too!

I heard myself say to a friend I’m so glad you can’t pay attention either, and then made a half-hearted attempt to claim that I wasn’t actually happy for their inattention. But we both knew I was buoyed by having found companionship for my skittering brain.

During a video call, I explained to my husband that a shirt he has seen on me 87 times is a shirt that I have, as if maybe he didn’t know me and my things. As if maybe I had faded so far into myself that I needed to describe my outsides.

I attempted to grip myself by my shell, and just get a hold of all the slippery, useless parts of myself that don't seem to want to stand, but it was like trying to lift up an overflowing handful of dead jellyfish. I did this once as a kid - I spent a whole day collecting dismembered pieces of jellyfish on a beach in Greece. I’d run in from the water to show my mom, and she would look up from her Dickens book to marvel at the clear liquid slop I’d collected in my pail. I remember her tan legs in her Birkenstocks, and when I think of it now, I think of a doctor in Vienna telling her - without consulting any medical records - that she’d never had skin cancer, because of her olive complexion. And then it occurs to me that this is the most egregious form of mansplaining: to tell a woman, simply on the basis of a hunch, that she has not had the cancer that, by that point, she had already had, and that she would go on to have two more times, and that would eventually kill her. And when I consider his existence head-on, I want to dig my fingers into the jellyfish of my eye sockets.

When a friend texted this week asking if I could talk about trauma for a project, I didn’t know what I’d say about it, but I knew I’d experienced it watching my mom die. I couldn’t put my finger on how we define trauma though. There are so many events that are obvious traumas, but what counts as a loss versus a trauma?

I was joking to this friend that I’ve stopped breathing and wrote, I thought that was a non-negotiable?!

And there it was:

Trauma is the non-negotiable becoming negotiable, without our consent.

To be clear, my strange non-breathing isn’t a trauma, by any means. It’s likely just poor posture and stress.

And losing my mom isn’t a trauma, to me. It is a cavernous loss. But not a trauma, because it had been conceivable to me that my mom could die.

But watching her die was a trauma. I had not imagined that she could die in the way that she did. And I couldn’t imagine it because I didn’t know what happens when a person dies from brain tumours.

But the non-negotiable for me - that her body would cease to harbour any human quality and that she would breathe at a robotic, rapid rate for days on end, with her eyes and mouth open - had suddenly become negotiable. As it was happening, I tried to negotiate some control, to push her experience back into the realm of what I could handle. But already, the thing that I didn’t think could happen, had happened. And I had seen it.

And that’s the trauma. Just like the freezers and body bags in New York City hospital parking lots. Or the drone footage of parking lots in India, where bodies are being burned in crowded rows. Or hearing that this virus is getting more aggressive and causing teenagers to fall over dead, 24 hours after contracting it. We didn’t think these things could happen.

But once we know it’s possible, does is stop being a trauma? When does a trauma turn into an unwanted, but conceivable, loss?

I went for a run to sort my breathing, and wondered if hurling myself down the hill, in repeating somersaults, would fix me. As the cars drove by I scanned them by size, thinking, If that small one hit me, it might thwack me back into being myself.

I ran fast, and conjured my mom’s voice cheering me on, and the way I heard her voice reminded me of the time she intervened as I was painting a cup at a Christmas fair in Vienna. The person running the craft fair was bent over my table, telling me that I had to paint the cup properly, like the other kids. And to my small child shock I looked up to see my mom waving wildly over the partition between the kids’ craft section and the parents’ waiting section, whisper-yelling my name to get my attention. Using a combination of gestures and more whisper-yelling, she instructed me to ignore this craft person’s common sensibilities and continue painting the cup exactly as I had been. The Viennese mothers glared at her North American belief in something, even if they couldn’t understand what she was saying.

I didn’t want to go back inside when I rounded the corner from my run. Pre-pandemic, we lived inside and outside, and the front door was just a partition between many parts of ourselves. Now, very little of us lives outside, so we get to visit an oft-overlooked side of ourselves when we venture out.

A friend suggested I do some jumping jacks while I was out there, but I couldn’t do those. I pulled my pelvic floor lifting my mom every day for two months, from the bed to the toilet to the shower to the couch to the table. After she died, I saw a physiotherapist, who prescribed pelvic floor exercises: holding for 10 seconds, in reps of 10.

The exercises are incredibly difficult to do, and getting through them is like being asked to lift and hold the heaviest weight you could possibly ever imagine holding. Trying to maintain the hold quickly becomes impossible, and while you can certainly visualize what doing another repetition would feel like, your body simply refuses to perform the movement.

What always strikes me about them is the fact that no one can see that you’re doing any work, because it’s all happening on the inside.

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You are lost.

The days churn my ankles,

milking me out,

from underneath

my table of disbelief.

I press into its legs,

fracturing them at their joints,

my plump tendons

pulverizing

between the days’ thumbs

and

my bones.

*

You are lost.

Foam gushing

through the ceiling.

The bedside fan choking, on 

Snot and salt.

*

You are lost.

Hot rods flaring in my sternum,

charging up my clavicle.

But at the dentist they insist

I am only 36.3 degrees.

And they cleaned her teeth too, they say 

And Oh, her laugh! they say

And Yeah, she laughed a lot, I say

And Oh yes, I can imagine! they say.

And my embers surge,

And the hygienist whispers to reception

“The thermostat?”

*

You are lost.

All my hair, pulled up

Up and up and up and up 

Until my neck vertebrae click, and hatch

I am the turkey leg

that you steered away from you

Away from its crinkling, bubbly body

to show me it was done.

On Christmas Day.

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I share it now from the same room that my mother died in. From a place where grief has no discernible shape, because it lives in the spice drawer where she labeled each bottle, in the cat’s plaintive searching for her that can’t be soothed, and in the chic mustard sweatshirt of hers that I now wear.

I can’t smell grief on myself. Maybe others can, but to me it’s just the air now, and I’m not sure it’s even really there until I move a bit too quickly and feel it brush up against me.

A year after my Oma - my paternal grandmother Gisela, died - I forgot. I missed the date, even though I’d watched her light a candle on the anniversary of the death of her husband, mother, son, and siblings, year after year, without question or interruption. She’d place the flame, in its cheap red plastic casing, underneath the gallery wall holding stills of all her people, and explain to me in a ritualistic tone that lighting a candle is what you did. She often taught me the Austrian way of things, in that repetitive downtempo bred for the education of children.

But I missed the anniversary. I had been incubating in a self-centred shell of nothingness, making tiny wailing squeaks and listening to them echo back at me, ashamed of my own pitiful sounds. I was unemployed, having quit my job a few months prior when my mom was diagnosed with stage four cancer. 

After my Oma died, I had, what I saw, as the most elementary reaction to her death. It was as if I realized that things die for the first time. I found this embarrassing. Had I really been so naive before? 

But death festooned me with its tentacles in a way that I didn’t expect. I started to consider, with a vaulted fixation, the blatant reality that all lives end. I’d stare at a teenage daughter laughing while her father tried to take a picture with his new iPhone, and think “He’s going to die one day, and she’ll be lopped off at the ankles”. I chewed on my mom’s admission of missing her father more and more as time went by. I singed my psyche on visions of my future self, forced to live without my own dad, and saw myself relegated to wandering shapelessly. 

It seemed to me that my mom had raised me, and that without her one day, I would fend. But it didn’t feel as though my dad had raised me. He’d always just been a soul companion, reverberating beside me to the same inaudible beat. We winced at the same inflection in a word, pricked our ears at the same breath inhaled too sharply, and felt mini wisps of air shift identically around us in response to someone’s tilted head or inclined shoulder. We read the room’s weather together, raising our umbrellas to a protective click in the exact same moment. Ours was not an improv troupe, one reacting to the other. We were the corps de ballet, our every step, turn, and gaze executed in time with a metronome that we did not hear, but knew was our shared pulse. 

During the time when I failed to commemorate my Oma’s death, I found myself planning to bake a cake. I romanticized the idea of coming out of this dark, meandering period with an arsenal of recipes in my coffers. Joyful nourishment that I could serve to anyone who questioned what I’d done with my wasted free time. 

I pulled out “German Baking”, a creamy testament to the importance of baked goods in Austrian and German culture. It contained detailed descriptions of sheet cakes, which, it explained, were not considered a dessert, but rather a respectable form of sustenance. A position my dad and I had been taking for years. 

As a kid I was encouraged to put meat on my bones and stuffed my face with the low sheet cakes my Oma made. The fear that a skinny child struck in the hearts of those who had lived through the war on their own soil had not abated. My Oma’s refrain, offered from the side of her mouth without lifting her eyes from the stove, was “Geh, iss dass was wird aus dir!” Eat up so you grow into something! She repeated it well into my adulthood and would chuckle at her own joke: I had grown to be 5’ 11”. 

My brother and I grew up with sugar close at hand in Vienna, and nobody but my Canadian mom seemed to think this was a problem. She pulled the sound straight out of our throats whenever she informed us that she had shoved a bag of chocolate directly into the garbage. The garbage! We recoiled. Children and chocolate were a blessed pairing, we had been taught.

In the afternoons, or while playing cards after dinner, Oma would lay her palms flat on her lap, fingers slightly spread for balance, head darting between the two of us seated on either side of her, and ask “Wollts naschen?” Wanna feast? She said it with a glint in her eye and that tiny glob of pressure at the back of the throat that comes from knowing you’ve played to your audience. 

In response to our raucous “Ja! Ja!”, she would let out a steep arc of rounded giggles, slap her thighs once in triumph, and exclaim: “Tua ma naschen!” 

Making her way to her knees in front of the heaving credenza, and up again through loud winces, she would deliver an armful of sweets she’d arranged in a tower of packages pressed between her chin and forearms. A good portion had been gifted to her - sugar was passed around the way other cultures trade wine or flowers. Her green tablecloth wrinkled as piles of purple Milka bars, marzipan logs, and cherry liqueur filled chocolates fell from her arms. 

Having tried the latest chocolates was a valid conversation topic. If one wasn’t familiar with a new item, it followed that it must be tried. She always preferred the cherry liqueur ones, and thought it showed a strong lack of judgment on our part, for not savouring the bitter filling. “Oh don’t be so precious!”, she would guffaw at us. We’d squeal, sparking at the sight of our Oma acting like a child, her tone that of an equal.

She was telling us in one breath that we were idiots for not liking her cherry chocolates, but also, that we were spoiled for not liking all the treats, because she’d grown up hungry. We knew that behind her capricious dismissal of us was a real sense of disconnect from kids these days. We occupied a space of choice that she had only been able to look in on, until very recently. With us, she was both a child who had been waiting a lifetime to take her pick from a heap of chocolates, and a woman who had been waiting just as long to state a preference - any preference. And so, we three children were now trading candy as our identity currency. 

Oma had often regaled us with visions of how she would wave at us from a cloud once she was gone. And yet on her deathbed, she questioned whether she had been a good person. We scoffed, as much as one can scoff at a person breathing a death rattle. We wanted to make her know the absurdity of her question, but a recitation of her life’s kindnesses and sacrifices felt echoey. Her service to others hadn’t been a connect-the-dots of identifiable gestures. Hers had been a humming, plodding servitude to all those who hung on her gallery wall, and beyond. 

The week before she died, she had been knitting a pair of slippers for my husband, through aching fingers. Her neighbour had begged her to stop, reminding her that our generation doesn’t wear Schlapfen. She paid no mind. She wanted to finish them in time for our visit in a few weeks. I flew over early to see her, and from her hospital bed, she made me promise that I would finish them. I promised, and yet a year later, I still hadn’t done it.

And for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to light a red candle. Why? Was it because we had spent years arguing about the afterlife? When she lamented that they’d put my uncle “in a can” after he was cremated, I pushed back, demanding to know why it mattered, if he was in heaven. I didn’t believe in God. She did.

Eulogies aren’t read in Austria - it isn’t the socialist, collectivist way. The reading of the same Bible verses is considered sufficient for each individual, no matter their life. But my Oma had questioned her God, with a childlike disappointment. How could her aunts pray daily, and yet watch, unmoved, as she begged them for food? How could her mother pledge religious allegiance to her father, as he beat her? Why had her last name been reason enough for the village teacher to deny her library books? 

At her funeral, the Bible verses felt like an erasure of what life had inflicted on her. A figure unknown, I stood up beside the priest, as he shuffled aside to make room for me in front of the coffin. I recited her pain, plainly. She had never been pious about her own suffering, and if she could pick it up and examine it up close, so could we. Afterwards, her friends wondered aloud to each other as they passed me in the receiving line: “How could little Gisi have had such a tall granddaughter?”

Once I returned home, I wanted desperately to dream of her. I would think of her as I fell asleep, hoping to meet her in the night. I wanted to be in her presence again, the way we had been in her tiny apartment for so many hours.

I would wake sometimes in the night and wonder if I would see her standing in my room, looking at me. This fascinated me. How could I, the person who needed to wash her face with her eyes open after seeing a horror movie, hope to see her dead grandmother standing in her room?

Finally, she appeared in a dream: we were on a street corner on a hot, humid night, watching hordes of young people flock to an amusement park across the street. She looked about ten years younger than when she had died, at 97. She was wearing her brown cotton pants, but paired with a bright, sequin bomber jacket. She was holding onto my forearm, as she had often done, her mouth slightly ajar, eyes dancing underneath her wrinkled eyelids. Watching the crowd across the street, she murmured something about all the young men, and I experienced her as a woman who had been robbed of the freewheeling, breathless carousel of anticipation of a night out, where the possibility that anything could happen swirls around you in intoxicating gusts. 

I woke up wondering if she had come to me. Was she in heaven? Was my Oma’s heaven a place where she could laugh freely and wear sequins and flirt with boys? Free from the war, and paternal abuse, and hunger, and brothers killed on the Russian front, and fighting to hang on to even the bottom rung of the class ladder? Was she finally released from baking one-inch sheet cakes, and taking flowers to graves, and wearing black in mourning, and being dismissed for being common, short, and poor? 

I didn’t dream about her for a long time after that. And the longer she stayed away, the more I became convinced that she had sent me a message - that she was having the time of her death. That she was okay on her cloud. That the shame and fear and contempt that had coloured in the edges of her life, were over.

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Oh it’s HEAVEN out right now! Is it raining there? It’s nice here.

We are a seven minute drive apart, but the mountains make many mini-weathers in North Vancouver.

Yeah, maybe I just haven’t been outside in a while I say, to her and to myself. She knows that. She knows when I’m talking to myself and when I’m talking to her. She’s been listening to me talk to myself, through her, for 23 years.

She tells me to go outside, because of the 23 years, and the air.

From my chair at the dining room table with my two screens, I survey the sky and see two weathers - sunshine and clouds. I decide that it looks like there is sunshine on a road that leads to a place where I could go.

I’m gonna walk to Superstore! I announce from my belly. But it’s not a big belly announcement. It’s a shallow-breathed expulsion, because I’m sitting slouched, my shoulders having lost their agency a few hours prior.

Ok! my dad hollers back, through a cough. I can tell from the holler that he’s coming with me. I come with you!

Yeah! I need a picture frame!

We get outside and I resent the immediate onset of my shiver reflex. I shiver like a rabbit in a field 40 minutes north of Paris on a November evening. I shiver as if I can’t not. But I’m not convinced that I can’t not. I try to unfurl my shoulders, and breathe out slowly. You’re fine, I tell my body. You are not freezing to death. You don’t need to do this.

My dad walks behind me, and we pass a little girl staring deeply into the eyes of a succulent plant. She’s sitting on a stoop, clasping the little planter with both hands, gazing into as if it’s the face of a beloved sentient creature. I do a closed mouth smile, with a heavy focus on making sure my eyes are smiling, but I don’t manage it in time, and she looks scared of my quivering Ichabod Crane skulk.

I can see from her face that my dad, walking behind me, doesn’t smile at her. North American adults smile at children, to allay any fears the children might have. About what, I’m not sure. But we do it. We smile.

No strangers smiled at me when I was a kid in Vienna. I can recall an older woman who smiled at me once, while I was examining the tri-colour spheres in the glue-on poster on the back of the bus stop, wondering how they got the entire image out of the same three colours. I saw her smile at me as if I was a sweet young girl, and so, I assumed she was German. Germans were friendlier. Our neighbour was German, and she smiled at me every day. The phenomenon bore out too, when tested outside Vienna. When I lived in Hamburg as an adult, I was shocked to find that people said hello in stores. People didn’t say hello in stores in Vienna. If they did, you either felt embarrassed by their naïveté, or waited to hear the German accent, and then felt a smugness for what the Viennese would do to their sunny, simple disposition.

Do we need anything?

Just the picture frame.

They have that here?

Well they have everything else. I’m sure they have picture frames.

We split in the store, fanning out into the home section without a plan or acknowledgement of our divided fronts. I lose him. Sometimes he doubles into my lane, and we pass each other, like strangers. He’s scanning, diligently. I idle, eyeing soap dispensers and picking up cheap candles.

You know these masks really work. I can’t even smell this candle, I announce to him, as his route brings him into my aisle.

He lights up. Oh yeah, mine is a new one, it’s really tight on my face. No spaces!

I look at his cheeks to see if I can pick out the absence of spaces, as we fuse our scanning routes.

How can they have shower curtain rods and no picture frames? Should we get a shower curtain rod?

How do we know if it fits?

I try to explain that it’s a one-size fits all situation, but I don’t find the words fast enough and he loses interest.

Here they are! I pick up a plain black frame. He sits down on the pallet the stockers left behind and watches me turn the frame in my hand.

No, he says. Get gold. The thin gold one. That’s nicer. The black looks like Oma’s funeral.

We walk out through the stationery and books section. The cards wall has their Easter display out. My dad carries on up the aisle, to the magazines. I pick up a card. A rabbit with its ears in the air, that can be taken apart like a puzzle. There’s a flower pot with a bunny tail in it, the tail and flowers made of pastel fabric baubles. There’s a beautifully painted hare with a flower crown thing for a collar. The Renaissance painting of the Papyrus exhibit. I keep pulling it back up, marvelling at its beauty. This is Papyrus?

There’s a whole selection of cards with chicks and eggs. I want to buy them for someone. I want to spend $8 on each card and send them to everyone I know. I want everyone to see these cards.

Easter is a florid celebration in Vienna. The city’s winding streets and squares becomes aisles for outdoor Easter markets, where merchants set up hay beds cradling hundreds of hand-painted Easter eggs. My Oma (grandmother) always made an Easter tree - an Osternbaum - and would call across the Atlantic to describe its glory to me. My mom loved the baby chicks part of Easter, and would always send me a card with a fluffy yellow chick on it. As a kid she once dragged me out of a brunch in Italy because the servers brought cages of chicks to the table, to be chosen for slaughter by a dining guest. I wished that she’d been able to find a reason for us to leave, without telling me that it was because they were displaying live animals to eat.

But she even told me a story of when, as a teacher’s aide at a school that had a pet snake, she’d been horrified to see live chicks brought in for the snake to eat, and even more horrified at the thought of the little kindergarteners trundling to their desks, past these cages of shrieking chicks.

I go back to the rabbits, pulling each one of them up again: Humour. Silliness. Spring Fever! Joy! Fluffiness! Renewal. Elegance. Grace.

I pull some out of their shelves completely, so I can examine their rabbit faces up close. I check each of them. I don’t find any that look like they are shivering.

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That’s gonna be boring, my dad says. Can we add this to it?

I look at the salami stick my dad is holding. I had been downstairs, rummaging around in the canned goods, the maple syrup, the paper towel, the extra bars of soap, the bulk shower gel. All purchased by my mom, during her lifetime.

You know Peter, we really should go to Costco one of these evenings. Let’s go at night, so we don’t miss the sunshine during the day.

Behind rows of beans and tomato paste, I found four boxes of Annie’s Mac & Cheese. I had heard about Annie’s! Less toxic and less embarassing than the orange stuff.

So I could make this, and not have to cook, I thought. I stacked my prize in my arms and climbed back upstairs, to fill the pot, heave it over the burner, ignite the light, invert the salt shaker over the water, and cover it. The kitchen is next to the family room, and my dad was watching a dramatic re-enactment of a real-life crash landing.

My dad was an excellent pilot earlier in his life. The youngest class 1 flight instructor in Canadian history, at the time. Chief flight instructor of the largest flying school in Canada, at the time. He flew up North, where pilots fly for hours, and die. He made it out. He flew water bombers over forest fires, where pilots fly for money and die. He made it out. We don’t know why he was so good or why he got so lucky. It’s just what happened.

I look at the salami he’s holding up. That’s all nitrates, I think.

Sure. We might as well add it. Why not.

He cuts up the salami with precision, into wispy pieces, each cut as proximate to the end of the stick as the last.

I add it now?

To this boiling water!? No! Just leave it there, I’ll deal with it.

He goes back to his dramatic re-enactment of the real-life crash landing, teetering on the edge of the couch in sitting’s athletic stance: torso leaning forward, elbows on knees, one hand holding the other for moral support.

So what’s happening? I ask, in an easy valley girl, my wooden pasta spoon loose in my wrist, water dripping onto the tile floor.

They lost an engine. Four engine plane. Commercial turbo prop. The props came off and cut into the fuselage and locked the throttle cables into cruise speed. 100 people on board, they gotta get this thing down, without crashing it.

[NARRATOR]: They cannot control their speed. They must land this aircraft, but without being able to reduce their speed on approach, this will be very difficult. Normal speed on approach for this aircraft is 120 miles per hour. Knotley has just reported their speed to air traffic control at 300 miles per hour. The pilots need to decide how they will secure this approach.

She was able to swallow some Ensure, until last night, but then last night we tried to get her to swallow some water, and she just held the water in her mouth. We couldn’t get her to swallow it or spit it out, and she refused to open her mouth. We were worried she was going to choke on it.

The palliative care nurse holds her shoulder, studying her as I speak. Has she been asking for water?

No, but she hasn’t asked for water in a long time. But until last night she was able to drink some, if we gave it to her.

He looks at me. So, when the body starts to die, it loses its need for food or water. So if she’s not asking for any food or water, then her body doesn’t need any.

They’re going to try to land? I’m watching it unfold from my stove station, one arm twisted behind me stirring the shells, the other on my hip, craning toward the screen.

Well yeah, they have to. But how, is the question. How do you get this thing down, and not crash it. I mean if you make contact and you’re going too fast, the nose will dive and you’ll go right over. This is crazy.

[NARRATOR]: Knotley tells the crew to move to the back of the plane, as he starts the descent for the approach.

God that would be scary, I mutter, a tightness collecting in my chest.

It’s Saturday night, in a rainstorm. We are camped out.

Ok love, so how much Nozinan has yer’mum had? For some reason all the palliative care nurses are English or Scottish. My dad even asked them why once, during a lull. He said he liked it. Liked that their Europeanness felt familiar to him. They didn’t respond. Just took it in, without judgment, as they did everything.

We’ve been giving her 0.2 ml of Nozinan, and her breathing is still up at 42 breaths per minute. She’s also on 1 mg of hydromorphone. And she’s still on her 6 mg of dexa, in the mornings.

As I talk, the nurse is checking the paperwork that they gave us to record our work. I laid out all the forms on the dining room table and made sure to organize them at right angles, and in chronological order. I wanted her to see that we had done as we were told. That we had done everything that we could have, with what we had been given.

I had also laid out all the syringes, in rows, so that she could get right to work when she arrived. I stacked the already filled syringes into differently coloured mugs, so that no one would grab the wrong thing. Even though the nurses already put flag-style stickers on them, showing how much of what is in each vial.

But still - we were told each butterfly needle could only be used for one type of medication. I assumed it would cause her pain, to mix them up. What else could it be . . . ? Because when the far-fetched worst-case scenario of your life has just sprinted up to you and is presenting itself, hands on knees and panting for air, as your new middle distance certainty, you’re left with only the most proximate and inconsequential repercussions to choose from.

The nurse doesn’t look up after I recount my mom’s latest medication round. It’s not doing anything, I state. I try to sound like I know what I want. I try to tone it out the way you would an edict. I’m standing feet hip-width apart over my mom’s body, in the space between the living room wall and the edge of the hospital bed, now set up where our couch used to be, trying to Matilda the nurse to come over to us.

Come here. Come look at this. Come see what these tumours have wrought.

My dad inches closer to the screen, one hand tucked behind his bad ear. They’re gonna try to land. Wow. How’s this gonna go.

Ambulances, fire engines, and police cars line the runway. It’s a hazy, mid-summer day, based on the grass, and the sky, and the T-shirts on the airplane passengers. The actors playing the real-life passengers fidget and look around at each other.

The screen cuts to one of the real-life passengers: The airplane was shaking. It felt like it was going to split apart at any minute. It felt like we were just hostages on this thing, you know? Like, not really hostages, but just, you know - who could help us?

I pour the shells into a colander, heaving one long exhale through a wave of tears that could come, if I let it.

My mom’s breath sounds mechanical. Possessed, even. Only a machine could breathe at this speed for any sustained period of time. And it’s been hours. Days, even?

The nurse walks over to touch my mom’s chest. I ask if this breathing is normal. She tells me that it can be, yes. I want to say that my mom told me herself, with her own voice, that my mom’s friend died of cancer by just going to sleep peacefully. And that my mom would have told me, if it had been worse than that. And that my mom was, more than anything, a person of truth.

I want to tell this nurse that this can’t be how people die. That people should die as humans, not machines. That we can’t watch her short-circuit, like a collapsed robot. That it would be okay if she sounded like any living or dying creature, in any forest or jungle, or even any sea. But that we just please need to get the intonation of sentience back into her.

Do you think we can get her back down to the 20 breaths per minute range? I venture. I try to sound inquisitive. Curious, even.

The aircraft roars as it approaches the runway.

The show cuts to one of the real life flight attendants recounting her terror: We had no idea what would happen on impact, or if we’d even be able to get the plane down. The screen flips to a depiction of that flight attendant inching her way to the back of the plane as it barrels toward the Earth.

[NARRATOR]: The aircraft has gained speed on approach. Knotley reports to air traffic control a speed of 310 miles per hour.

Her breathing is going up, not down, my dad turns to me, shock in his mouth as it hangs ajar with the realization. It’s at 58 now. He has been perched a foot from her face, counting her breaths while staring at the second hand on his watch, and then calculating the per minute rate in whispered German.

Ok this is her bad side, I proclaim. Let’s turn her. She always breathes better on her right side.

I start to pull the sheet off her, and lift her right leg up from the pillow between her knees.

We have to move her this way first, and then turn her over, I instruct.

The nurse comes over to help.

Ok, on three.

We grab the pee pad on three, lifting and pulling her over the rubber air pockets of her Roho mattress. I always think how they transfer ocean animals from one zoo to another through the air in those massive sheets. When she was conscious, I teased her, You’re like a cute baby beluga whale at the aquarium! as we slid her through space.

No I’m not, she tried to chuckle, her eyes fluttering. She had usually tried to deny us our silly animal analogies, for reasons not obvious, because they always amused her.

Ok let’s turn her to the other side. I push on her right shoulder, rotating her entire torso. I lift her head, to make sure it comes with her shoulders. The skin on her face doesn’t move. She had been on her side, where her lips had been hanging away from her teeth, pulled down by gravity.

We all stop, and as I hold the back of her head, I realize that her lips and cheeks have already started to die.

Her eyes have been open for six days straight, and we haven’t known if she can see. We assume that even if she can see, she can’t process whatever her eyes take in. As I hold her head now, her eyes are locked on mine. Can the eyes still see, when the cheeks are already dead?

We search her face for movement - not just for independent movement, but for the ability to still be moved - but her breath has stopped. She stares, lifeless.

[NARRATOR]: Air traffic control clears the aircraft for landing. The pilots are going to attempt this landing.

Aren’t they going too fast? I ask. A dam of tears is pushing behind my eyes.

Yeah, way too fast, my dad agrees.

I turn to stir in the cheese powder into the shells, and a little tear escapes one eye.

[NARRATOR]: A mere 15 feet from touching down on the runway, Knotley decides to overshoot this landing. The aircraft is traveling at far too high of a speed to land safely. He will go around and attempt it again.

The nurse sees my mom’s face and grabs my arm, and my dad’s. The fingers of her latex gloves stick to my skin.

Oh this could be it love, this could be it. Ok? This could be it . . .

My mom just stares. For 15 seconds, she shows no signs of life. And then she gasps, reaching up with her mouth, like a fish hooked on a dock.

Let’s give her a little bit more then - let’s try another 0.2 ml of Nozinan and 0.2 ml of hydromorphone, the nurse says.

It’s not working though, I insist. We already gave her those dosages, and her breathing is still going up. I think we need something else, or way more medication. Can we call a doctor?

Oh they’re going around again. They’re gonna try it again, my dad calls, over the hood fan.

So what are they going to do differently this time? I ask, around the choke in my throat. I’m stirring the salami into the pasta.

They had the real-life pilot on now: We knew we had to get our speed down, we just didn’t know how. You gain speed when you descend on an approach, and that’s unavoidable, and we weren’t able to stop that process the way we normally would.

It’s not going down. It’s actually gone up since we gave her the last dose - it’s at 68 breaths per minute now, I relay matter of factly to the palliative care doctor, who is calling me from somewhere in a neighbourhood nearby, in her own house, from her on-call shift. I hear kids in the background.

Ok, your mom needs a lot more medication, she says. This is centrally motivated - this is coming from the brain, not her lungs or heart. The tumours are making her cerebellum send the signal to breathe at this elevated rate. That’s why the medication at these doses isn’t working. We’re going to need to give her much, much more, which will mean that she’s completely unconscious, if she’s not already. Do you have a pen?

[NARRATOR]: On the second approach, Knotley decides to cut the other three engines. This will mean a total loss of control over the aircraft. But this is the only way the pilots can slow the aircraft down enough to manage the landing.

I scrawl down all the medications and dosages she gives me. It’s 8:30 pm. If my mom is going to live until the morning, she will run out of medication by 1 am.

We call every pharmacy on the North Shore, in search of Midazolam, Nozinan, and hydromorphone. It’s Saturday night. Every pharmacy is out.

We find some at a hospital pharmacy across town. A friend gets in the car, to go get it for us.

The nurse talks to the doctor, and then starts to draw up more syringes, to put in the differently coloured mugs. I set alarms on my phone for every half hour, from now until 7 am the next morning. For each alarm, I type the medication and dosage as the name of the alarm. My mom’s breathing marches on, a plundering metronome that taunts our silence, as we work.

It’s still raining.

They’re cutting the engines. Good. That’s what I’d do too. Sideslip it, it’s the only way to get it down.

I want to cry out in shaking wails and sob.

Oh ok, is that a good idea? I ask, my eyes on the shells and the salami.

We give her the Midazolam, which will make her unaware of her surroundings. The doctor increased her medication dosages tenfold, and she now has four butterfly needles, up from three. Two in one leg, and one in each arm.

We take the syringes previously filled to 0.2, and give her five of them. There is no needle to insert. It’s a lock and key port system. So useful, I think, each time I use it. You just take the syringe, push the flat end of it into the recessed portion of the butterfly port, turn to release the medication, and slowly depress the plunger.

[NARRATOR]: All four engines are now off. Cutting the engines worked - Knotley has just reported the speed on approach at 150 miles per hour, down from 310 miles per hour on the first attempted approach. While this is still too fast, it may be slow enough to land the aircraft. However, the pilots have no control over the aircraft, and without any steering control, the landing will be very, very risky.

It sounds slower. Is it slower?

I’m shoving spoonfuls of a three day old salmon cream cheese casserole into my mouth. It’s the first solid thing I’ve eaten all day. I’m dehydrated too, and the pinkish sauce is sticking around my mouth, uncomfortably.

Yeah. It’s down to 45, my dad reports, into the space between his watch and my mom’s face.

The nurse has left to go get more syringes.

I sit down with the casserole, chewing into the beats between my mom’s slowing metronomic pace.

They’re landing. They’re actually gonna put it down. How’s this gonna go. Wow this is fast.

I turn to see the plane descending toward the runway, the pilot rearing back on the control column with all his bodyweight.

[NARRATOR]: The aircraft touches down, but immediately loses control, swinging wildly from side to side on the runway. The pilots are unable to exert any steering force on this machine.

My friend gets back with the medication. The rain is still driving down onto the skylight above us.

It’s down to 24 breaths per minute. Wow. That’s good. It really came down, my dad reports. To us, this time.

Oh that’s so good, my friend reassures us. Yeah, it was pretty obvious that she needed much more, she adds. She knows about these medications.

We need more syringes filled, so my friend and I start to break open the ampoules. I learn on YouTube that something about physics makes the liquid not tip out of an ampoule, even if you hold it upside down. I learn something, while my mom is dying.

The plane continues to flail as momentum kicks it down the runway. I stand at the edge of the counter now, one hand clasped tightly around the other, as we watch the nose swing into the ditch, dragging the rest of the plane with it.

[NARRATOR]: The question looms as air traffic control, emergency services, and bystanders look on in terror: when, and how, will this vessel come to a stop?

You guys, she’s not breathing, my dad says, his voice rising from his bedside post. She took a breath a few seconds ago, and . . .

We jump up from the table, scattering our ampoules.

What was her breathing rate at?

Same thing, 24.

One of the wings digs into the ground, breaking. The plane lurches, and comes to stop.

I put my hand on her head. Nothing.

We stand, waiting for another breath. I smell like smoked salmon casserole and ampoule juice. I managed to mess with physics, apparently.

My mom, did not.

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I’ve recently gotten myself into the voluntary loop of listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, recomposed by Max Richter. I do this thing with a good friend of mine: we find songs that we love and can listen to upwards of 100 times in a row, until there’s nothing more to hear in the song. And then, without realizing we’ve moved on, we simply never listen to it again.

We started it in the library in law school, when we needed music that could act both as background noise and as a stimulant when cresting hour eleven of staring at the same caselaw. Thirteen years later, we continue to share songs across the country. The outbound text will consist of a song share from Spotify, with the promise that this one, in particular, could be the next contender. I never know what she’s listening to, and she never knows what I’m listening to. I have to assume that our loops sometimes sync up, and that for a few hours, we internally rotate to the same rhythm, on the same day.

I don’t usually fixate on entire classical-esque albums, and the point of this post isn’t this album. I am linking for you here though, because if you’re anything like me, you loved Succession and its score, and this version of Vivaldi’s music lets you feel like you’re alternating between a sweeping autumn day and the creeping rot of a wretched family empire, all within a few moments.

Aren’t we already feeling that way these days? Well yes, collectively we are. But my emotions got stuck last month. In early October, I found out my mom is palliative. Her brain tumours have advanced to a point described by her doctors as “extremely severe”. At first, I cried. For a week, I cried while working, while brushing my teeth, while putting on face cream, while cooking, and while eating.

I flew home to Vancouver, and when I arrived, I walked into a house where my mom, who used to attempt to outpace her previous time on the Grouse Grind, couldn’t walk, couldn’t use her left hand, and couldn’t hold the memory of who I was through a conversation with me. The tumours were pushing on too many parts of her brain. What had been an experience of shock and grief, became a demand for action.

In the course of one week, she had gone from an independent person with no obvious signs of cognitive or physical impairment, to someone who needed to be fed, bathed, and dressed, and coaxed, cajoled, and directed. There were oncologists on the phone, palliative care nurses at the door, occupational therapists at the bedside, and shower bar installation personnel in the bathroom. There were hospice pamphlets, and phone numbers scrawled on ripped sheets of paper, and business cards left behind by social workers on the kitchen counter, and forms - forms about how to die, and where.

I consulted a grief counselor through the program at my mom’s palliative care dept. I relayed to her my fear that I was not engaging enough with my own sadness. That I was perhaps ignoring the reality of the situation - looking at what needed to be done, rather than all that would be done to me, by her passing. I explained this to the grief counselor, in her sunny Zoom room, while squeezing a sizeable lump in my throat. I had the idea that I should not cry to this grief counselor. That of all people, a grief counselor was the person I shouldn’t cry to, from my parents’ spare bedroom, while sitting on the chair that I have since realized is decorative, as it had me hovering a few inches off the ground and rendered my face a bodiless, vibrating orb.

But the snowballing pace of change in 2020 has granted us a previously inaccessible trick of time: the ability to examine last week from the emotional distance of next year. For every day that we’re awake, it feels like we experience a month’s worth of 2008, or 2012, or 2015, emotions. I can now look back at the person who spoke to the grief counselor and realize how surreal it was, for me to hold in the lump until I felt like a snake that had swallowed a raccoon, mistaking it for a shrew.

That raccoon is now a moose, because I haven’t cried since. I don’t know what for. I don’t know to what end. I don’t know how long we will live in this state, and the sadness has calcified into a constant irritation, that shape-shifts at will into guilt, rumination, and a dogged sense of clench.

You know, I had an experience like that in Vienna. I was trying to get to Oma, before she died. I arrived to the hospital, and that hospital was big! It had so many floors, and these different wings. And I had come from overseas, so I had my coat with me, and my luggage. And it was winter, so my coat was heavy.

I stopped chewing.

Anyway, I tried going to the floor I thought she was on, but she wasn’t there, and I tried asking someone, but they sent me in the wrong direction, so then I was even more mixed up. And I ended up taking all these elevators, and rushing up and down flights of stairs, and I had to carry all my things, and I was stressed, you know, because I knew I didn’t have much time.

I set my cutlery down, raised my hand to my chin, and listened.

I mean Oma was dying, and I knew it was dire, and I wanted to get to her! So I started running, and I was sweating, and people were looking at me as if I was crazy. And you know the Viennese, they’re not exactly helpful. But eventually a nice woman did point me in the right direction.

My mom was telling my story.

Two years ago, I flew across the ocean to see my Oma on her deathbed, and got lost in the hospital, frantically running from floor to floor, exhausted after a red-eye, carrying my Toronto parka and my luggage, the work emails pinging as my phone automatically joined the hospital wifi. As I shuffled down the pea and peach corridors, the exhaustion and physical frustration rose in me until they burst forth in hiccups of tears when I eventually did find my Oma, and she squeezed my wrist in her warm, puffy hands, saying, Nicht weinen, mein Mädchen.

My mom had gotten it all right. She had heard my little story from that day - just some corridor confusion that ended up being of no consequence - and wound so tightly into it along with me, that it had coiled onto her own loop of consciousness.

Well that must have been very stressful for you, I said. Trying to get to her, when you knew she was dying, and feeling so utterly unable to reach her.

It was, she said to her plate.

I looked at my plate, and for a few seconds, we internally rotated to the same rhythm.

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It was about the diameter of a dinner plate, and we set it at the end of the dining room table and circled around it, propped up on our elbows. The directions came in German, so my dad read them, and then set about pouring the water into it and adjusting the nozzles, narrating the instructions as he went.

True to its name, the Dampfmaschine did create steam, but it also started to sputter and burp, and with each noise came an attendant hop, until the thing was making its way across the table, seemingly with its own plan.

As my family took in the spectacle of its huffing and puffing, I felt a cold sop of anxiety cover my small body. In my mind, I could see us from the other side of the room, and I was sure we were doing something wrong. Did we know enough about engines? About steam? Would this thing explode on us? I had heard about the grandmothers who had lost their faces to faulty pressure cookers. There were lots of them in post-war Vienna.

I knew this was just a small thing, on a dining room table, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. Mostly, I was convinced that we were out of our depth. Why was everyone laughing?

My boyfriend walks up beside the bed, clutching the cat in his arms, whose REM sleep is consistently interrupted by being asked to perform ministrations for his greedy humans. Despite my unconditional devotion to him, the cat hates me, and usually starts to struggle at the sight of me. This time, like all times, he starts kicking his hind legs and slithers out of my boyfriend’s arms, recoiling as he lands on my hip bone covered by the duvet and leaping off the bed in frenetic zig zags.

I’m napping, I report, at the wall. I have all my clothes on.

You don’t look like you’re sleeping, my boyfriend gently notices.

Well I can’t nap, because I’m too worried. What’s going to happen on November 3rd? Everything is bad and nothing is good.

He reminds me that there are good things, even though there are many, many bad things.

You can’t just nap until November 3rd.

I know, “there’s no free lunch!”, I sing, without mirth.

Our dog is old. She’s on diuretics for her heart, which means she now pees near-constantly, and for the first few weeks, did so on everything in the house. To avoid churning through multiple loads of laundry a day, we learned to take her out at the speed of a reflex, if we so much as consider that it might be time. We live in the country now, in the silence, amongst the trees.

I take her out every morning, immediately after opening my eyes. It’s already cold up here, so I zip my jacket on, on top of a sweatshirt, over my pyjama top. There’s never anyone out there anyway.

We usually stand in the road, staring at the mist hanging in the trees. She likes the sides of the road, where the smells live in the leaves and the grasses. I don’t mind, either way.

I’ve started to notice a phenomenon though: it sounds like rain is pouring down on the leaves of the trees on both sides of the road, while the pavement in the middle stays dry. Also, the leaves stay dry, despite the apparent rain.

Sometimes I drag her into the road, so that I can put my hand out and look up at the sky, in search of the water. We stand there, peering back and forth at the leaves on either side of the road, as if we’re at a tennis match of molasses. We listen to the steady pitter patter descending, but we can’t figure it out. Eventually we stand ourselves out, so we go back inside.

On other days, the air is so still it holds us upright, slowing the sway from our leftover slumber. Great Danes don’t bark, unless there is sensed danger. Sometimes, she plants her feet, and staring at the end of the road, where it curves, barks, short and hard, into the fading darkness. The barks fall back on her in the hollow air, and I plant my feet too, and point my face in the same direction as her face, searching for the thing.

She keeps barking, and the fur along her spine stiffens, and the more she barks, the quieter it gets, and I start to wonder if she’s warning me that the huffing and puffing thing is sputtering its way toward us, around the bend, and soon, will be coming down our road, on our street, in our town, in our country.

And then the pitter patter starts again, in the trees.

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Over the past year, since my mom got diagnosed with serious cancer, I’ve had yearnings wash over me for my body to be something else.

Sitting at the terminal in the Toronto airport, on the way to Vancouver, I’d be struck by the desire for my body to be spun from either end, like silk, until I became a wispy strand of nothingness. Standing on the streetcar, I’d feel the visuals of a rapid succession of tsunami-like sound waves aimed at my chest, pulverizing me. Sitting at my desk, I’d sense a hand pulling my throat up and out of me. Standing in the shower, I’d feel a flutter of being compressed into a non-space, like a beer can, under a busy man’s sandal, at an outdoor music festival.

And shocking as it may sound, these weren’t concerning to me. I knew what they weren’t. I knew they weren’t harbingers of something gone wrong with my mind. They were simply a picture book of dread, and the desire to shrink into its pages.

They eventually faded, as my sense of catastrophe ebbed. But I think of them, because there were so many of them, and - did they leave?

Dr. Gabor Maté explains that, “Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system.”

I first thought about the need to move emotions when I walked the Camino in 2015. When I got home, friends were curious to know my takeaway. What had I learned? I hadn’t gone to learn anything. I had gone because I’d come to know not enough about myself, other than that I needed to move. I had gone because I felt the compelling urge to move through space, but it was more than a compulsion: I knew that I was at stake. And I did learn that our worst emotions need to be moved out of us. They won’t leave on their own. And certainly, movement alone is not sufficient for everyone, but I found it was necessary for me. If emotions are a movement in us, we either move back at them, or they contort us.

I’ve been struggling with how still I’ve been this year, as this pandemic has plodded onward. I’ve alternated between my parents’ home, and my own home, each of which houses its own immunocompromised person. My movement has been extremely limited. To put it in millennial terms, since March 9th, I’ve only had one coffee not made by my own hands.

My dad and I have often talked about our shared nightmare of being forced to live out our lives in a small town. Oh, I go crazy, he shudders. He’s speaking in English, but in his native language of German, there’s a version of the future tense that doesn’t involve the verb “will”. Meaning that you can speak in the present tense, but it’s understood by fellow German speakers that you are referring to the future. He uses this verb tense when speaking about the future in English.

I go crazy.

You’re going crazy, repeatedly?

You are in the very act, right now, of going crazy?

You’re going to go crazy, in the future?

Oh yeah, me too, I say. What do you do in a small town? Just go to work and then watch TV at night? Day in and day out?

We like to make it worse than it is.

Except we are now, each of us, living in our own small ho[town]mes.

At night, crumpled in bed staring at our phones, our heads sunken between our jutting shoulders and our elbows stabbing into overworked pillows, I rotate my phone screen at my boyfriend’s face.

Don’t you just want to be able to move like her? To move through space like that?

It’s a video of ABT principal dancer Isabella Boylston, finally getting to dance in a studio again after all these months, set to funny music.

He inches his head back in its shoulder crevice, blinking at the screen now shining at his face.

Uh . . . no? But it’s cool. It’s very cool!

He wants to appease me, but he also moves his eyes back to his Reddit feed. I don’t figure out whether he really never has felt a yearning to move like that, but I play it on repeat a few more times in our shared face, with the sound on for good measure. He might change his mind, if he hears how free she is.

When I was little, I’d often come stomping out of my room, hiccuping with small person rage, demanding to know why I had to be in bed if my older brother and parents were going to stay up and laugh without me. I was less mad that they were permitted to stay up, and more disappointed that they would choose to carry on without me. How dare they exist, without me?

My mom soothed me and assured me that they were going to bed soon, too. In fact, they’re going right now, aren’t they! In contrast, my dad laughed at the tiny tornado I’d created inside myself. He hugged me and picked me up and swung me around in circles, the dusty right angles on our Persian rug becoming cul-de-sacs under us. And then, for just a moment, he grabbed me by my ankles and held me upside down, while I squealed with delight. My mom told him to put me down, chuckling and rolling her eyes, and my brother jumped up and down on the couch, giggling and asking for the same. After a second or two I was back on my feet, my fleece onesie softly petting its way back down my body, with gravity.

Looking at me in utter amusement, my dad always asked: And? How do you feel now?

He knew: I felt better.

I sit still.

You’re sitting still, repeatedly?

You are in the very act, right now, of sitting still?

You’re going to sit still, in the future?

ALLE DREI: all three.

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Hi!

Welcome to pergola.

I mentioned in my intro that I feel like I've lost the plot on what we're all doing. And leaving the apocalyptic elements of this year aside, most of us have complained of feeling like we're living groundhog day. So sure, the plot has been erased, in many ways.

But I think what I really mean is that I've been left alone with my body. I've had this itching sensation of being stuck in my body - confined in it, tethered to it, just dealing with it, ceaselessly. 

And it makes sense. There's been a fundamental shift in how we're able to use our bodies. They were once vehicles for us, transporting us into experiences that let us seep out of ourselves. That convinced us we had eight legs on the ground around us, so wide and certain were we. That turned our chests into a mesh for the breeze to blow through, rinsing our marrow as it went. That let us charge through the fronts of ourselves, or graze our own sides. That made us look at our hands and think, how far they are, from me. Our proprioception stretched to meet us where we had already gone, well beyond the lines of ourselves. We asked forgiveness, not permission, from our bodies.

And instead we've been relegated to just sitting, cautiously and determinedly, in our bodies. To feeding them, cleaning them, stretching them, exercising them, putting them to sleep, and, when we do get to take them places, sanitizing their public tips.

In a way, it feels as if staying home and sitting in our bodies has calcified the mind-body divide. I would not have predicted this. We learn so much about grounding into our bodies, coming back to our bodies, staying in our bodies during conflict or hardship. We are taught that, if we just remain steadfast with our bodies - stay listening to their heartbeats, their breaths, their pricks and pringles - then we’ll be okay.

I haven’t stayed with my body. At this point, my body is the just a parka that I’m holding in a busy store in January, and it certainly is warm isn’t it, because it’s making my forearm sweat - god even my sleeve is kinda damp - is there nowhere I can drop it off? Shouldn’t stores like this have some kind of repository for coats? A garderobe?

Oh no? This isn’t a museum in Europe? Oh sorry, I just got confused for a second by the plastic hangers and the $9.99 + up rack. Obviousssly this isn’t a museum in Europe, but are we also precluded from having some air in here? Is North America now too stingy for air??

I’m not being dramatic! I’m never dramatic. I’m just speaking out loud.

I’m also not hissing at you. You’re hissing.

Anyway.

Ok well sorry, I can’t really put it down just anywhere - someone might take it, and it wasn’t exactly cheap you know. Which is why it’s so warm.

Okay! Okay! You’re right. You’re right, I’ll need it the second I get outside, that’s true, so, no, I’ll just hold it. It’s fine. I’ll just switch arms. No, thanks, you can’t hold it for me.

No, remember? You physically can’t hold it for me. We talked about this?

I’ve got it, it’s fine. It’s fine.

Sometimes I catch sight of my body in a mirror as I’m passing by and think, Huh - you're still here? How have you been? But I don't wait for the answer. It’ll be here later.

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Welcome to pergola.

A pergola is that criss-cross roof thing filled with vines, that you sit under. I called this newsletter pergola, for the dappled, varied light that it creates.

The time we’re living through feels like a simultaneous over- and under-exposure. Our actions are subject to a level of scrutiny that, prior to the pandemic, we had yet to experience on such a pervasive scale.

And yet, this over-exposure is isolating - each of us individuated and shuttered in with our own personal anxiety narratives. The contrast feels like being locked in a box and then suddenly having the lid torn off, without warning.

And that’s why the light of a pergola seems so inviting right now. It creates no sharp contrasts. The light gets in, but you’re mostly protected.

What can you expect to read here? I’ll be writing about our emotional landscape. And our bodies. And time. And how it feels to be alive right now.

Despite doing lots of things every day, my body feels like it's been holding its poor little breath for way too long this year. So maybe this newsletter is a bit of an exhale.

I can’t promise to describe anything perfectly, but I will be honest, because - life is finite. We’re all dying!

Sign up if you want to think about feelings together.

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