The thing about grief is time doesn’t really dilute it. Caffeine, work, exercise— temporarily mute it. But it pops right back up. I keep thinking I’ll write about something else, and often start to— and my psyche is like “No, sorry. I’m in charge!” So I promise if you make it to the end of the essay, a baby gets born. Meanwhile it’s in 11 parts, so you can choose your own adventure. If that’s the part you’re into, go forth. Also, see my mom in that messy, very unedited photo, hovering above us, after I gave birth a few feet from my couch? She always wore that bag around her neck, like a person in a fable holding a talisman.
1.
It is impossible you are not here, so we’ve decided you must be here.
“A klutz” in life, we wish you were a clumsier ghost, the kind who shattered coffee mugs, broke the bedside lamps at 3AM and let rip unselfconscious expletives, when all the lights are out except for the blue hum of my stepkids listening to horror movie lectures on Youtube, and me texting them from bed, “Mightn’t it be time for beddy-boo, ye 20-ish year-olds?” Upstage that lecture with your fabulous evanescence. Be a giggling, fuck-bumbling spectre.
Be the kind of ghost that does things for which there is no other explanation than “It’s her. She’s in the kitchen dust-busting the tortilla chips crumbs!” Dust-busting was one of your love languages.
Fuck up our favorite books, tear out all the middle pages and tape them to the walls, so there is no other explanation than, “Mom’s going crazy on the climatic scene again!” Eat the ripe August tomatoes and leave the juice everywhere. Write I LOVE YOU in goat cheese on the counter.
2.
When we asked her what it felt like to die, she answered, “Blah.” Like Frog and Toad on a kiteless day, or Eeyore even on a Sunny one. C’mon, mom. Not one adjective? Not one participle? What is language even for? You are our primary source.
Maybe dying, not just death, is a state beyond language. A sentence’s shadow. Not yet silence, but too slippery for words, water escaping through cupped palms.
Or maybe this is what ghosts are, the place where language and form drop off, and energy begins. The space between dust and bust.
“I just feel like I’m going down,” she said, holding onto my arm as we toddled along 7th avenue at the end of winter, the baby tied to my chest. One block from the house was now an arduous walk. Reluctant buds were pushing up near the London Plane tree roots, in their little plots.
My parents had lived in Brooklyn for 45 years; she’d traversed this stretch so briskly so many times. She’d only just had her third and harshest chemo session for metastatic pancreatic cancer, after which she’d have “a break.” That break would never end.
“Going down” was accurate: our bodies fall to the earth, not towards the cloudbeds, and at some point can’t change course. We’ve spent our lives holding ourselves up, counterposing gravity’s constant yank. Eventually, The Force wins.
Yet most of us look up intuitively to speak to our dead in the sky. Including me, when I beseech you to be a blunter trouble-maker. And ghosts for sure are not earthy– they are universally depicted as floaty, the opposite of gravity, thinner than Kleenex, thinner even than atoms, whatever those are (I low-key failed chemistry class).
“I love you,” we said over and over, around the clock, when there was really nothing else to say. Until the “you” flew out of you, hovering by your home hospital bed. I love you, the connective tissue of our childhood, and our children’s childhood. I am still saying it.
3.
What is love, anyway? I wonder about this as I swim in the bay, where the kids cannot ask me for things, the season after your death. I am grief’s playdough: every time I get myself together, grief makes another stabby thumb print.
Maybe because I am in the water, pretending I am not afraid of the large mystery seaweed blobs that sweep my leg (would a ghost parent really choose to scare the shit out of their child?) all my definitions are poetic, loose. My tenderness is coextensive with the horizon line.
Love is a fig soaked in wine. That feeling in your body of total saturation, fundamental inseparability.
So how could you be anywhere else than where (our) love is?
Ok, case closed.
But the case cranks itself back open, like a clamshell abandoned ajar on the beach, missing its life-giving innards.
4.
My dad is looking for scientific proof that the spirit stays on after death. I understand the urge. I’m his research assistant. While the baby contact-naps against me, I do my deepest work on Chat-GPT: “Give me evidence, a double-blind randomly controlled study, that proves the spirit remains after death….” You know, that one obscure study by so-and-so-et al, out of South India.
The results prove nothing, exactly nothing: “There is currently no conclusive, widely accepted scientific evidence that this happens.” Well screw you too, science. Artificial Intelligence, minus the intelligence.
As the baby shudders, clutching the broken cordless phone from the 1990’s we’ve given her as a soothie (who says babies need any toys other than defunct electronics?), I open a new search window and try again, aiming for a better answer that strokes my confirmation bias. What else is the world wide web for?
Like my children, I could tap the internet’s reserve with kaddish-like nagging. How many times does Chat GPT let you ask the same question before it gently offers the definition of insanity?
I mean, an unrandom uncontrolled contrived study, will do– so long as it has you, mom, as its conclusion. I don’t want philosophical, spiritual, or psychological explanations. I want warped science on my side, by my side, breathing in my ear. I will twist her elbow until knowledge is power.
5.
I am 45, yet still working hard at conjuring, demanding, my mom’s face. I’ve studied my children for 12 years and I know how it’s done, to refuse not to keep asking, truly believing a cupcake will manifest as the end of all your tonally variant pleading.
Be an accident-prone ghost— accident from the Latin, “to happen.” Appear at the front door, tripping on the rug. Be a predictable ghost with domestic commandments, reminding us to take off our shoes (we already did), asking us if we have homework (DOES ONE NOT ALWAYS, what is parenting but 24/7 homework?). Pour our Cinnamon Teddy Grams into a bowl, until they overflow onto the floor.
You are my assignment now, mom.
Most people who have been through the death of a loved one, which is to say most people, are also looking for ways to claim– and believe– they have gained them in another form–something beautiful, delicious or familiar– recurrent and trite, like a flower, butterfly or bee.
I wonder what the seagulls do, when a wiry fox has scattered the carcass of their brethren across the beach. Its mealy eyes eaten first. One broad wing splayed across a mound of shells, as if half considering half-flight. Crab molting upturned like a bowl under its intact beak. For sure, a hungry ghost.
I’m not alone in this, in engaging in some mental fuckery as a grieving person. In our sorrow, we become sleuths, trying to find the route to God’s daycare where souls become babies again, to Nature’s storage closet, where energy is stashed and labeled in non BPA containers for later use, the past made present, and the future made whole.
6.
On Long Island for the summer, Dad and I talk about you while we push the baby on walks. Grief needs to be shared. I should leave to do my editing work, but instead we cry, which feels bad in a good way. The older kids and my husband are all at camp, no one to look askance at our midday tears.
A turtle is crushed in the road, and flies have set in to feed their young. “Today I’m feeling really confused about mom. I’m just having trouble believing it,” he admits. ME TOO. The egrets stand a little taller, nodding subtly in the green, green marsh grass, as if they meant not to be noticed. Mom, don’t be that kind of elegant apparition.
The stroller is the same secondhand one, a tasteless burnt orange, that you and dad excitedly retrieved for us from someone’s Brooklyn trash pile 9 years ago. The wheels resist rounding any corners, but it does the job. That’s our parenting style too. It may not work perfectly, but it works.
Prove your whereabouts, mom, with some weird craft project none of us, hyper averse to deer ticks, would dare try: adorn the stroller’s creaky canopy with roadside flora, Queen Anne’s lace, purpling beach plums, oval cactus flats.
When we pass neighbors, and they ask where you are, we have to acknowledge: “What a good question!” like they say on podcasts to buy time. Because we’re trying to figure it out too. Anyway, they already guessed, hearing the lump in our throats, but who wants that guess to be right?
Sometimes we pretend we are deep in a cell phone call, to not have to stop walking to explain, again, depressingly, you’re dead.
Dad confesses, through breaths more like gasps, that he wishes he had bought you flowers more often while you were alive. A clumsy ghost could abate this regret with reassurance– I didn’t need flowers to know how much you loved me.
This is your chance, mom: Make yourself known incontrovertibly, so any other explanation fails. Make a beeline for us, like the first day I rode a bike without training wheels, pointing the handlebars directly at a ditch and then screaming in surprise as I hurdled there.
Lift my baby up in your inarguable ghost arms, when she wakes from her “cheap nap,” while she points vaguely at things (babies see Beyond) honking with excitement.
We are supposed to find you in nature’s largess, we know, we’re trying, and wow, the landscape must be packed with everyone’s dead: the three-quarters moon entering stage right, the undulating V of birds in flight, the pink creeping along the bluffs at nightfall and sunrise. But let’s not bullshit ourselves about nature’s capacity, she’s busy as a Mother. Let’s be blunter than that. What is the opposite of a pathetic fallacy?
If you prefer more classic haunting, say BOO from the pines. Leap out from the bushes to dust-bust our pain.
7.
A devoted citizen, you always joined the resistance– don’t change that now. This administration requires devoted fuckery, the playful spirit of the body politic that believes in the rights of all bodies.
Get RBG’s blessing to cast absentee ballots. Get all your dead friends and loved ones to join. Who will argue when the address is “heaven”? I dare the first god-fearing Republican to step up and invalidate your registration. Any other Home is temporary.
I’ve lost people before, and my outrage and sorrow bubbles up on behalf of all previous and future losses, mine and others, like a fishing line seeking an eel but dragging in a colossal kelp mass. RETURN TO US AS A STAMPEDE. BLOW US THE FUCK AWAY with your live action haunting. Be an arbiter of more implacable love, of more more more.
I think about the global genocides, babies and parents who die in tandem, and for no good reason. Sudden losses, without so much as a battery light warning. There are so many truly wrong deaths. And yet, despite dying in peace at home, there is no way for yours to feel right.
8.
Let’s start with a fantastical paradigm change: I want a ghost as cumbersome as unspooled saran wrap. One more elephant than the elephant in the room. I want the elephant in the room in Stilettos, jangling its castanets.
So mom, no sneaking around. Be unhinged, blazingly obvious, ridiculous, a soda shaken vehemently, then opened.
Make your non-skid socks waltz around the house, dizzy with enjoyment.
Make your newspaper - the last paper copy left from the now-canceled subscription— dance in the air, sheet by sheet.
Fold it into paper boats, carry us to where the Wild Things Are, swinging in the sketchy trees, in an unfathomable wilderness beyond cause and effect.
Pronounce this part loudly: I’ll eat you up, I love you so!
Perhaps that’s all love is– that which absorbs us into something larger to which we are perfectly attuned.
As a ghost, fan out! Be greedy for presence; take up so much space people check the weather forecast on their phones.
Grandparent with abandon. Usher the children off to bed. Read them Last Stop on Market Street –from your own “last stop,”-- in your unmistakable ESL-teacher voice, with the careful pronunciation you used to respect all stories and all readers.
Relieved of a parenting task that is, let’s face it, often as tedious as it is tender, my husband and I will suddenly turn to each other, startled and ask, “WHO’S PUT the children to bed??” And the only answer is– obviously– you, mom: free childcare courtesy of a thoughtful ghost, with longstanding interest in family-friendly policies and economic justice.
Tolerate their late night requests for yogurt and mulberries, or to play another game of cards. Humor their somatic queries: why their ankle hurts or butt itches (WHY WOULD I KNOW). Give them a lollipop just because. Get them whatever they ask for. Life is such a shortie.
At 5AM, be ahead of the light. Suspend your running shirt in the space next to dad’s bed, ready to envelope him.
Then wake up our kids by rubbing ice cream on their faces. Don’t forget their ears.
Come to Johanna and I, in separate states, at the same moment, proving that everything we thought about time and place is a fiction. Science already said so.
Repurpose your hospice mouth swabs as fantasia wands: turn the world into spirals and squeegees, into a glittering reason to be here at all, ah, so so so much to behold.
In your transposition, be amazing, in its original sense. Be obnoxious.
We are counting on love to go the extra mile, if distance can be measured that way. We are counting on love once again to close the gaps between our bodies.
Give us a better story to tell our children than that death is the end of a person, that science has gag orders, that spirit is a nice idea.
9.
The children interrupt my sollicitation. Ro, 10 going on 10,000 years-old, crawls in bed with me and the baby, tucks around my body, at night when his heart opens. He whispers: “I’m thinking about how little we know, compared to what we don’t know. We’re just specks. I miss Ema.”
The first death throws open a door, and then breaks its hinges off. You can’t go back to a childhood where death was only an idea. Now it’s something you’ve been through.
He and I hold each other, and spend the next 10 minutes being specks. Aria whisper- shouts from her bed on the floor, looking to join the pile, “I AM SAD FOR NO REASON!” which is her brand, and we nod like specks do when the wind blows.
It’s entirely possible we have no idea what’s next, after death, if an adverb like “next” even applies. But that doesn’t mean anything is possible. “To be” is an irregular verb! “Not to be” is Hamlet’s morose terrain.
The unknown is unlikely to have our beloved in their same old same old form, so we must let that form go. But my favorite way of letting go is to not let go at all.
That a person could be no longer here, and no longer anywhere, remains patently ridiculous. I don’t care about the law of conservation of matter, the quanta of personality reabsorbed like blister fluid in the quantum universe. That’s theoretical consolation at best. I would like the law of hugs.
You are immeasurable, something science struggles to work with. And missing you is also immeasurable, something we struggle to work with.
Where is the container for this grief?
“What we don’t know is infinite,” Ro says. “Also: Did you know that before babies are born, they share a metabolism with their mother?”And before that they share a metabolism with the universe.
10.
All summer, I watch my kids struggle with executive function, how to go to bed before 4AM (aforementioned horror lectures), how to not lose their bathing suits as soon as they take them off (Anyone seen a wet wad in the middle of the hallway?), where to put down a book you’re midway through (between couch cushions, obviously?), that a plug goes in the socket, and not your mouth.
I want to abandon that lonely bossy model, that solely we are in charge of ourselves. There is already too much we must bear alone. If our brains change with love, and love is oxytocin’s superglue, then we all have company in our synapses.
How about consecutive function? How about how much we need each other to manage the work of being here?
How about how much you are still part of the movements of my mind, a disruption in my sentences, scrambling the syntax?
Are you bored with total plenitude? Me too! Mold a herd of clouds into a perfect O, like a cervix dilated to 10cm, and dive through.
Be born– it’s not that hard! Look at all the billions of people who get born each year. Be like them. Come back.
11.
Last summer, around this time, I gave birth again. Talk about consecutive function! It felt impossible that I would push the baby out, even as the reflex ripped through my body.
My midwife said, “Get out of your own way.” So I did. But like you felt about dying, I still don’t know how to describe it. I could not tell you how to push a baby out, nor could I name the sensations with a writer’s precision. LARGE, I might say. The greatest agency (no one else can push your baby out) meets the greatest surrender (to not clamp down against the hugeness). I held on tight to my husband, in order not to be obliterated.
I guess that’s dying too. To not stop what is sweeping through. To actually be unable to. To sally forth into the shedding of personhood, while terrified. The sleep coma seems to coax the terror out of a person, replaces it with something softer, puts the net out for the leap, invites you to rest in the lap of that Other Mother.
Still, I have been a portal for three babies, and I know we carry our ancestors in every cell. If you need to visit through a body to appear as a Clumsy Ghost, I offer mine. I will let you rip through me. I know it makes no sense, but I don’t care. We’ve done sense and it is overrated.
You are the past but you are also the future. Be a ghost as noisy as time is quiet. Do spectres struggle with go-getter energy, with summoning the motivation to amaze, to appear as apparition when you’ve already been through so much? We’ll make you a coffee, we’re great at that.
Come on out. I will count to 5.
I am waiting. This emptiness is all yours.
For you!
Paid subscribers get to join our “writing grief” workshop, coming in October- date announced in early September. This will be THE PLACE to uncork and explore what’s dying to get out in communal container. Upgrade now if you’ve been considering it. Led by me and my impeccable grief therapist bestie, Jane Hansen. All flavours of grief will be welcome, at any stage.
Wow, a book I didn’t know existed until this moment! Joy Harjo- Washing my Mother’s Body. Listen to her talk about it on NPR OH AND FUND NPR.
Excerpt;
FADEL: Can you describe the importance of that ritual, to wash your mother's body before she was laid to rest?HARJO: Yeah. It's about acknowledging the story that her spirit inhabited in her body. And it's a way of helping us, as well as her, to let go - to say, we're here. We walked part of this story with you, and we love you, and we wish you the best on the next part of your journey.
FADEL: We have something very similar in our tradition. I'm Muslim, and we have something called ghusl mayyit, the washing of the dead, where you - for purification and respect and dignity and to help with the passing, you wash the body. Going back in time to do the thing that you wanted to do in that moment for your mom, what was that like?
HARJO: It's interesting how that poem just took over. It was like I was there almost as a witness. I was observing the ritual as it was happening.
as deep as dive as I expected, dear coso. elegiac, but no full stops; full of longing but also unattached to any particular form of connection; a call-out for communications from the other side while knowing that you might entirely miss the forms they may take which means rather obsessively looking for them everwhere. grief is the ultimate sedimentary, layer upon layer.
two things: Johanna & “me,” right? (from someone who always gets it wrong‽)
Martín Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief & Praise
brilliant & beautiful, dear SNO
I relate to this so much - thank you for sharing this Sara. It’s as though you are putting words to my thoughts. Sending love to you.