There’s a surprise twist in this story, but I don’t want you to feel waylaid when it comes, so I’ll spoil it now: Heather dies in her sleep, at the age of twenty-five, of an undiagnosed heart condition.

It’s difficult to articulate the process by which two twelve-year-old girls with a lot of things in common—archetypally awkward, voracious readers, intellectually far ahead of their burgeoning social skills—become inseparable. It feels predestined, unfolding with the simplicity of a teen-movie montage: sleepovers, slasher movies, painting each other’s fingernails, singing into hairbrushes. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time I didn’t know her; that there are aspects of my personality that predate Heather. It feels like we created each other from scratch, scribbling in the details and watching ourselves take shape. We like scary movies. We say “fuck” a lot. We write poetry. I learn to think of myself as strong, confident, unaffected by adversity, because that’s how I see Heather. Without her I would be too self-conscious to be the first person on the dance floor. But she is always there beside me, throwing her long hair into my face, and I’m not embarrassed if the two of us are together.

I suspect that the curious personality merging you see in really close young-girl friendships can only be achieved under very particular circumstances. You must be at that point of adolescence where you’re only half-formed, as a person, but you feel fully formed. At twelve, you are so far from who you’re going to be, but in your mind you’re all the way there. Your opinions are intractably strong and you would die for them, but they’ll all be completely different in a month. The entire course of your life can be altered by a movie or a song or a long conversation in the dead of night after you’re supposed to have gone to sleep. Everything you have in common feels magical, as though knowing all the words to “Born to Run” is a sign that your souls are intertwined, instead of a sign that both of your parents came of age in the 1970s. As you begin to sculpt yourself into the person you want to be—the person you believe deep down you have always been, were always destined to be, and have only just now discovered—someone is there to hold your hand. When that happens, there is a part of you that never lets go.

Heather and I have our own language, a creole of euphemisms and inside jokes and shared memories incomprehensible to anyone other than us. When we’re together we never seem to need sleep. We stay up for hours after midnight, watching endless parades of horror movies, or we slip out the back door of her house and make our way to the playground, eerie in the moonlight. We are ageless together, unembarrassed to splash through puddles and jump off swingsets. We drive a lot but we never go much of anywhere. The point is the movement and the radio and the windows rolled down and the night air in our faces. We cut class together, walking with our backs straight and not looking around, as though we have every right to go wherever we want, which we do. When the sun is shining and you’re skipping geography with the one person in the universe who already knows what song is stuck in your head and will start humming it before you do, every door is open and you are a citizen of every street.

As we grow up, as we emerge from the glittering cocoon of our youth, we begin to grow apart. I go to college out-of-state, get really into slam poetry, start sleeping with girls. Heather stays home, drops out of college, gets married at 20, goes to a lot of punk shows. We still talk on the phone for hours at a time—we never run out of things to talk about—but our all-night phone marathons grow farther apart. I still come home every year at Christmastime, though, and I spend every New Year’s Eve with Heather, drinking too much tequila and dancing to Spice Girls-heavy mix tapes we made in eighth grade.

Our friendship begins to seem to me like a place: I don’t visit as often as I used to, but every time I walk through the door it’s like I never left. Our friendship is wallpapered the way we used to decorate our bedrooms, so thick with Scotch-taped detritus you can’t even see the color of the paint: posters, CD liner notes, handwritten poems, set lists from concerts. Photographs of us, camping in jeans and ponytails or dressed up for The Rocky Horror Picture Show in miniskirts and fishnets. The bookshelves are full of diaries and photo albums, and Heather pulls one down, turns to a certain page, and says “Remember the time that homeless guy said I looked like Farrah Fawcett?” And even though I didn’t remember it five minutes ago, it comes rushing back: the melting snow on the sidewalk, the Starbucks hot chocolate I was drinking. Heather holds the keys to my memory, the keys to my childhood.

Our lives are different, our living situations are different, our interests are different, but she is still the person I turn to when I need to turn to someone. When her husband has surgery, I am in the waiting room holding her hand. She is the maid of honor at my wedding. Her toast is goofy and rambling and unlikely to make sense to anyone but the two of us. We dance to Queen and Beyonce and, as always, the Spice Girls. She leaves early because her husband feels sick. This is the last time I ever see her.

After finishing grad school, I am unemployed and depressed. Heather is overwhelmed by her work schedule and her husband’s chronic illness. Her social withdrawal mirrors my own. We talk on the phone every few weeks, agreeing that sometime soon things will get easier, and we’ll have the time and energy to get together again. When she calls, I sit on my front porch in the sunlight, roll my head back on my shoulders and close my eyes. The words still come easily whenever I hear her voice, like slipping back into your mother tongue after months of living in a second language.

Heather’s death is astonishing, unanticipated, unimaginable. It happens before dawn on a Friday in December. Her husband finds her lying on the couch. When he calls me several hours later, the sky is gray-white, and I watch a ragged line of geese flying aimlessly, not migrating, just wandering. I think clearly, before the crying starts: There is nowhere to go.

As I write this, Heather has been gone for one hundred and four days. Some of those days I’ve woken up cheerful and clear-eyed, remembering the best times: road tripping to Glenwood Springs, cutting class to sit in line for a concert all day. Other days, it guts me. I sit on the floor and cry until my nose bleeds. I look through my photo album—the real one she made me for my eighteenth birthday, covered in stickers and scrawled with her absurdly girly handwriting, the i’s dotted with stars—and feel terribly, terribly old. I regret the cute haircut I got last week, because Heather never saw me with my hair like this, so now I am a person she has never seen, and the distance between us gets a little bigger.

My youth feels like a ghost town, an abandoned and dilapidated house I don’t have the keys to anymore. I stand at the window looking in, and I can make out some of the pictures on the walls, and I can see the photo albums on the shelves, but I can’t see what’s inside them. I can’t see the details. Our special language of coded facial expressions and inside jokes is useless. Our favorite movies to stay up all night watching are just embarrassing, low-budget, and trashy, now that I have no one to watch them with. No one else will ever do the dances we made up to “I’m a Believer” and “Look Sharp.” Heather—the part of me that is Heather—curls inside me like an unused and atrophying organ.

I wish I could tell you how to live through a loss like this. I wish I could tell you how to pull yourself up off the floor and wipe your nose and brush your hair and keep going. I wish I could tell you how to not cry when “Living on a Prayer” comes on the radio, because that was one of her favorite songs, and they played it at her funeral, and “we’ve got each other and that’s a lot” is suddenly incredibly fucking poignant songwriting. I wish I could tell you, but honest to God, I have no idea. All I can tell you is that it really, really hurts.

I am still trying to put myself back together, like a puzzle with some of the pieces missing. I won’t be the same as I was before. I will be much older than these few months can account for. I’ll be less carefree, less reckless, less willing to be the only person on the dance floor. I’ll move a little slower and talk a little quieter, and sometimes I’ll look like I want to say something, but I won’t, because the person I would say it to is gone. I’ll tear up when I hear Bon Jovi, and belligerently refuse to explain myself. Some of my puzzle pieces will fit together weird, because they were never supposed to overlap, so I’ll have strange jagged edges and be fragile in places you wouldn’t expect. I suppose I’ll be wiser, if that’s the kind of silver lining you’re interested in. Mostly, I think, I’ll be lonelier.

But I’ll still watch trashy horror movies and listen to the Knack, even if I have to do it on my own. I’ll still swear too much and read Stephen King and dance foolishly and drive fast and get lots of tattoos and wear sexy clothes even though I’m fat and not apologize for falling in love young. Those are some of the things that I learned from Heather or she learned from me or we both learned in unison. They aren’t things that make me feel young, not really, not anymore—they’re just part of who I am. Heather is part of me. It’s not enough. It doesn’t make me miss her less. But it’s something.

***

Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

Related Posts:

• Improvising a Bone Graft
• The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Getting Made (in honor of Ronan Louis and Emily Rapp)
• Dirty or Clean?
• “Infinite Ache”
• On Loitering

“Form—it’s because there are consequences.”

—Lisa Robertson, Nilling.

I turned to the internet after my brother died.

The call came while I was putting on my makeup at the kitchen table. I watched my husband’s face drain of blood. I heard him say “Are you serious?” in a tone I’d never heard before, can’t articulate, and hope never to hear again. He hung up the phone. He told me to sit down.

That day passed in a haze of shock, vomiting and Ativan. Thank god for the Ativan.

Some time later that night, numb, medicated, breathing shallowly, unable to eat or keep down food,  I sat down and created a WordPress site. The first post that I wrote included the following text:

My name is Nikki Reimer. I was an only child for six years.

—

My beautiful, talented, sweet, smart, amazing, lovely, handsome, wonderful brother died in his sleep at the age of 26.

This is for him.

I used a quotation from the book The Outsiders as the site tag line: Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold. I chose the quotation not remembering that the band that had hired Chris as their touring guitarist throughout 2011, The Dodos, had taken to calling him “Pony.” I then uploaded six photos of Chris taken in 2010, drank enough vodka to become completely anesthetized, and went to bed.

I’m not sure what drew me to the Internet. Shock is a protective mechanism; it keeps the mind from having to process too much all at once. I stayed in shock for a long time, and while I was there I spewed my emotions all over Facebook and Twitter, neither thinking nor caring about the effects my emotional vomit might have on readers, friends, and strangers.

Most responses to my online grieving were supportive and compassionate. A community of friends and artists held me up through their words, their books, songs, poems, cookies, candles and collages mailed from all across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. I met and grew close to people who had also lost people suddenly and tragically, or who had also lost siblings early in their lives.

One poet wrote her condolences to me on Facebook, and added, “If it was one of my siblings, I don’t think I would ever stop screaming.”

I thought of her comment many times over the first twelve months, because I never did stop screaming.

Every day over that first year, I screamed. I wailed, sobbed, and tore out my hair. Chris’ girlfriend and I both started Tumblr grief blogs into which we still pour our pain every hour, every day, every week. I picked Twitter fights with strangers. Considered suicide. Committed Facebook suicide.

After one such public flame-out—I’d renamed myself “Bag of Dicks Reimer” on Facebook and changed my profile picture to an unknown woman ugly-crying—my husband, compassionate but firm, suggested that I was spending all my time inside the internet because I was trying to find my brother. That it was time to put down the iPhone.

He had a point.

However, I kept searching, I kept screaming, and I kept writing. Very gradually, this frantic activity ceased to be simply an expression of emotional distress—what the grief experts call “searching behaviour”—and started evolving into a digital, extended elegiac project. I wrote prose poems for Chris, then collaged images, then sound pieces. And then I created an interactive website hosting a series of multimedia pieces that combine my work and his: Let’s Improvise a Bone Graft.

But before that: I was posting on Tumblr. I posted the 19 minute ambient track released by his label, Flemish Eye. I posted a green St. Patrick’s Day milkshake: “Wish you were here.” I posted a photo of the obituary I wrote for a local music monthly: “I did this for you because I love you. But I never fucking wanted to have to do this for you.” I posted songs he liked, reblogged fan and friend reactions to his death. I posted a screenshot of a Skype call with our parents: Mom’s forehead in shadow, Dad’s blue eyes deep navy with sorrow. I posted quotes I found on grief and the grieving process, and an acoustic cover an indie musician had done of Women’s “Black Rice.”

I posted from Vancouver, where I pined for my brother and the life we shared in Calgary. I posted while my husband and I packed up our apartment and loaded the U-Haul. I posted when we stopped in Kelowna, where I let some of my brother’s ashes go into the warm waters of Lake Okanagan, on the beach where we had played as children. I posted when we arrived in Calgary, while I sorted through boxes of childhood mementos. My first haircut. His first dance recital. A paper Valentine he made me when he was four.

Rifling through Chris’ bookshelf one day, I pick up a tattered copy of Ulysses I’d lent him. Out falls a postcard I’d sent him several years back: Robert Johnson with a hand on his guitar and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Moments like these feel like intratextual, metaphysical messages from beyond. I photograph my hand holding the book with the postcard inside, and it becomes part of Bone Graft. It also inspires another part of the project: a listing of some of the many musicians who died before the age of thirty. Their names and ages scroll up the screen over writing from Chris’ notebooks and a sound piece by me. It’s layer upon layer of memory and loss and object and rage and grief and love.

Now Chris can no longer be found physically anywhere, it is true.

His remains are shards of bone and ash in small memorial urns taken by his closest friends, and a larger urn that is heartbreakingly equal to the size and weight of a newborn baby, the size and weight he was when we brought him home from the hospital in 1986.

But another part of Chris, a part that is closer to his soul, continues to live, online, in the music that he wrote and played, in pictures and videos and interviews, in cached pages of the initial shocked responses to his death.

This online afterlife is somewhat ironic. Chris was deeply ambivalent about the internets, and self-promotion in general. He’d talked his best friend Marc into quitting Facebook several years ago. In the last months before he died, he’d mentioned to me that he was considering joining Zuckerberg’s empire in order to keep in touch with people he’d met on tour, but he never did.

This gives me pause, when I think of how public I have made my grief.

After he died, a small part of the internet briefly lit up with the news of his death. I would type his name into Google (piningly, searchingly), and the suggested search terms, in order, would be: “christopher reimer cause of death,” “christopher reimer women,” “christopher reimer death,” “christopher reimer pitchfork.” I screen-capped this search because it was so heart-stabbingly horrible; because it magnified the horror of the situation to me; because Chris had a minor indie-music level of notoriety, so of course when he died people would be curious, but also fuck you it’s none of your business; because I could hear Chris’ voice in my head, and the particular inflection his voice would take when he would say of something horrible,  “That’s horrible.” And that’s what I heard, when I looked at these algorithmic search term suggestions: “That’s horrible.” The image is now a part of the Bone Graft project, assembled together with lines from Roman poet Catallus’ elegiac dead brother poems.

I loved my brother with a fierceness that is not ashamed to stand howling and naked in the middle of the road, and what I miss is the material essence of him. The only thing in the world that I want, and can’t have, is my brother’s arms around my shoulders, his infectious laugh, his shit-eating grin, his middle finger pointed at me in response to sisterly teasing. His “jerkface!” in response to my “jackass!”

Instead, I am left with the objects and the digital artifacts that Chris left behind: half-soldered effects pedals and lead dust all over his bedroom. Unreleased ambient tracks on his computer. Pictures from tours. Funny drawings. Scraps of writing.

Chris and I always communicated through gifts and offerings of art passed back and forth. When we were children, he would co-star in all my overbearing older sister plays, his timing and ability to memorize his lines always perfect. When we were teens, we played a sort of word association game, building these post-modern tone poems: “Perspicacity.” “Perestroika.” “Muffin top.” “Piston engine.” We would never talk about things like this, we would just start them up spontaneously, riffing off each other’s energy.

After I moved away to Vancouver, I would send him books I thought he should read. He would gift back such creations as a mix CD with a hand-sewn brown kraft cover screen-printed with a collage of a map and our great-grandfather’s face, or a set of stickers made from his abstract sea creature drawings. When I moved out, I’d abandoned our Baba’s high school t-shirt, a white 1940s cotton short-sleeved tee with red ribbing at the sleeves and collar, and an insignia that said “Saskatoon Tech” over the breast. Chris took to wearing the shirt, which made me remember that it was awesome, so I wanted it back, and he’d always say, “nope.” So smug, eyes twinkling. “Nope.” Years after I stopped asking about that shirt, it turned up in my Christmas present.

The kid always had perfect timing.

After he died I leafed through the notebooks in his room and found a series of poems. My musician brother was writing. I was heartbroken all over again to find this because I’d never known that he was writing. Maybe he didn’t think he’d written anything good enough to show me, or good enough to show me yet, but these and other snippets of prose and poetry that he wrote have a spark of unpolished brilliance to them. And since it’s too late to tell him this, I’ve folded his prose fragments into the Bone Graft project, collaged against my textual or audio responses.

My project is extended, circular and labyrinthine. It is an electronic elegy that I do not believe could be a book, because a book is too linear. I need it to resist closure. Death is final, sure, fine, but in grief there is no such thing as closure. There is ebb and flow of emotion, and there is learning to live with the gaping wound, but there is no close. The acute distress does ease with time, and you might emerge stronger from having lived through the loss, but that doesn’t mean you are ever ok with it. A cousin asked me if I had closure the day we had my brother cremated, and I almost punched him in the face. I might still punch him in the face, if the mood strikes.

I live within a morphing, evolving digital grief, and so I am writing a morphing, evolving digital lament. I am seeking out possibilities for circuitous routing. I am searching for electrical feedback. I continue creating in order to continue living with the absence.

Though my brother is dead, I continue to follow the pictures he posts. I continue to respond to his text messages. And I hope against reason that wherever he is now, something I’ve created might slip like a postcard out of the pages, into his lap.

Related Posts:

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• The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Getting Made (in honor of Ronan Louis and Emily Rapp)
• Dirty or Clean?
• “Infinite Ache”
• Literary Salon: Genuine Storytelling

I was on a boat. I was on a boat leaving Mexico and if I knew that it was the last time I would be seeing my friend Steve Bridges I would’ve asked the boat to turn around and I would have gone back and back and back farther. All the way if I could where nothing was blinding and everything was dark and still in the way things are right before they go bad.

A year ago I sat on a plane, like I am as I write this, and I ordered a glass of wine as I looked through my photos of the retreat and I laughed at the videos of Steve and thought How I love this man. How I love this man.

A year ago I came back from Mexico and laid on my sofa feeling pancake flat and Steve texted me I am laying on my friend’s couch and I can’t stop thinking about our trip. I wish we were back there. Wow. I wrote back me too and in my pancake way I stood up and put on shoes to go teach my yoga class but I knew something had shifted, something was gone, and maybe that was why I felt flat or maybe it was natural after a trip like that to feel so much I want to be back. To feel it so much in your bones that they won’t even carry you. They turn you into a pancake. Pancake yoga teacher. Nothing. Flat. Pancake person.

When he died, I texted him I want to be back. I want to be back even though I knew he was dead.

We made videos the night before we left Mexico. Like little time bombs with messages on them that we planned to watch in a year’s time. When it was Steve’s turn he looked into the camera and said, That was fun. Let’s do it again next year. Hell, let’s do it again next month.

He died within the month.

This morning I got the text that I had been waiting for, the one I knew would come today or tomorrow or yesterday. Ronan died. One of my best friends, the beloved writer Emily Rapp, lost her two year old son this morning as I zipped up my suitcase to head for the airport for my Hawaii yoga retreat. His suffering is over she wrote. His short and remarkable life she wrote. I am numb she texted me privately.

I am numb too. I am on a flight to Maui and I feel nothing. I am hungry. I am not hungry. I am sad. Am I sad? I feel nothing. Where does the pain go? It’s floating up here on the airplane and I am sure will make its way up to my seat if we don’t crash. What happened? How does a mind process this? (I will have the cheese omelette and not the cereal, please.) Ronan died and it’s for the best say the very best intentioned platitudes. My friend Robert held him for an hour yesterday. I asked him what it was like. Everything, he said. It was everything.

What’s it like to hold a dying baby for one hour? One hour in a short life is like ten years in a normal life span. (What is a normal life span?) What’s it like to hold a dying baby for ten years? He got to feel his last little oomphs right there in his arms (imagine that!) and hold his small fingers (maybe he intertwined them in his own?). He got to brush a few hairs from his eyes and pass him back to his grandparents or his mom and he got to feel a life right there in his arms which would disappear in less than 24 hours into That’s it and It’s over but he got to hold that and stop time for ten years because in a dying baby’s life one hour is equal to ten years. He got to do that and I am glad for that. I love him for that. For being there for Emily and Ronan when I couldn’t.

It makes you want to stop lying.

Why lie when this can happen? When a person can be born and then just like that It’s Over, It’s done. He’s gone.

Why tell untruths as if people care?

I keep having this recurring dream where I am driving and the brakes don’t work. The other night I had it again. I was driving in Philadelphia, over the Benjamin Franklin bridge. The brakes wouldn’t work. I tried pressing my foot into the brake and it only accelerated the car which wasn’t even my car. I swerved in and out of lanes so I wouldn’t hit anyone. It was all my untruths rushing at me. In the dream I somehow made it to safety and pulled out a paper where I had put a big X through a box that said “Brakes.”

I had shut them off myself.

The greatest lie that was ever told was that you are safe. It’s the lie I still want someone to tell me though. (Say it to me?)

Say it to me.

Other lies have been both monumental and petty but with the news of a baby’s death comes a yearning for honesty. There is nothing else. I love you to all the people I love. I don’t care to all the things I don’t care about, and there are as many as the things I do care about. I am happy. I am not happy. All of it. Truths and lies and some half and half.

Once, on a road trip, there was this deer along Route 70, just outside Cody, Wyoming. His eyes the color of headlights. He recognized me immediately. (He was no stranger to regret and he spotted mine immediately ). And with his four-chambered stomach and eyes on the sides of his head, I knew his type too. The cautious, the time-takers, the digesters.

Unlike him: I am impulsive as a flood.

But we knew each other, me and that deer. For the ten years or two seconds he stood there in the road in front of our car.

A basic law of the universe: the implications of what’s been said always mean more than what actually has been said. My deer understood this algebra, this economy of language and therefore didn’t say much. Me: I spit it out as I feel it when and if I feel it. Unlike my deer, I do not contemplate my cud.

I love you!

I love you!

The lies I have told have mainly been to myself but others have been to save face.

There is no more of that. Do you get what I am saying? It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks because once you have held Ronan in your arms for ten years or one hour you see that what is important is the life we make, right here and now. You may not have been the one holding him in your arms for ten years but you get the metaphor, you get the as if. You can almost smell Ronan in his baby and old man smell. The life you make here and now. Not the lies or the I dropped out of college because I was half dead and freezing but I will lie about it so you don’t judge me because no one cares. It does not matter. It’s the life you make here and now because after you get the text that he dies you realize that all you ever had were the moments of holding him, the minutes with Steve in Mexico, the half-seconds with people you love. I don’t know how fast it feels at the end, but my guess is that it feels like ten years. Or maybe 6 months. Maybe less or more. But it won’t feel like much. It will feel like all you had were breaths and moments and a few snapshots with the sun in your eyes like that. You will squint to remember the way the light felt in your eyes, to recreate that and everything else that was blinding and bright and yours.

I love you. The words alive like velvet antlers. Words made of bone. They need a way out! I must speak them. I must tell no more lies. The life that you make here and now. Here and now.

Words: make, here, now, love. Remember them.

The old deer had made it through once more, one more near miss across an ocean of cars, a scuffle of rain, and a sky full of mistakes. He’d found a pair of eyes (mine!) to lock into before going back into the world, alone and foraging.

It makes you want to stop lying, to climb onto the wing of the plane and hang there if you knew you could and sob and swing and fall into clouds like you would if you were a cartoon and could always be safe in a cartoon world. You could sleep on a nimbus cloud and wake up and ten years will be ten years rather than an hour. It makes you want to stop lying and run into the arms of all your beloveds (you’re lucky if you have even a handful) and tell them to keep you there. Hang on to me, tight like this. Tight like this. Keep me here. It makes you want to admit that lying is worthless and dirty and that nothing matters, not really anyway, so might as well buck up and say I love you or I don’t love you or I am so broken or I wish you didn’t die or Yeah, I get that your spirit is with me forever but God damn it I want your body. Forget the spirit! I will trade it for your body and smell and fingers. It makes you want to forget everything and remember everything with equal measure. It makes you want to cry for days and beg the gods or the scientists or luck to leave you alone and leave everyone alone that you love. It makes you want to live like you were meant to all along even in the moments of self-hatred. It makes you all these things.

It makes you.

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(For Juliana Jones-Munson)

On my dishwasher is a magnet; one side reads DIRTY and the other reads CLEAN. I flip it around each time I load or unload the dishes, and it creates a weird sense of satisfaction in me; this notion that something can be so easily turned around, every day, that in such a simple, steady habit there exists an important reminder of the little mundane demands of life: you eat, you load the washer, you empty it, you flip the magnet. Life goes on, no matter how difficult it might be.

And each day when I flip this magnet around, I think of boundaries and how they’re marked, how they shift and morph; how they’ve changed so deeply for me during the process of grief; I think especially of how my attitudes about intimacy and sex are so different than they were even a year ago. In other words, I’ve become a bit of a pervert, meaning that I have turned away, in some sense, from what I was taught, in my Protestant upbringing, was the “right” approach to sex; namely, we don’t discuss it, you shouldn’t do it until you’re married, and you definitely shouldn’t enjoy it too much. Oh, and never ever talk about it.

Early this year I had a conversation with two good friends who are also writers. We were talking about how a person “presents” him or herself and about general perversion and who gets to draw the line and why, and we were categorizing one another. “Are you dirty, clean, clean/dirty, or dirty/clean?” The categories had less to do with actual practice than with vibe (and nothing to do with hygiene, except that if you are actually dirty, you are not really capable of being classified as clean).  But someone who presents as outwardly edgy and pervy might be secretly shy in the bedroom; someone who presents as generally a bit uptight or conservative might love trash talk in bed.  Clean/dirty and dirty/clean, then, referred particularly to a secret self underneath the surface energy or social presentation.

In other words, I’ve learned to be a switch hitter.

*

Years ago in my early 20s, when I was engaged to my first husband, I was having coffee at a Montana diner when I picked up a copy of the local personal ads. Next to the announcements for furniture and car sales were earnest requests: Old carpenter who likes to fish and camp seeks woman who can sing for companionship, long walks, more? Or Divorced white female, 42, seeks a good man who likes kids and can balance his own checkbook. I sipped my coffee and giggled meanly. How pathetic! I remember thinking, because I was about to be married to a man I thought was a super hot stud, I was young and hopeful and smart, and I would never have to look for love again. Check. Off the list. I thought about that diner – the bad coffee, the sassy waitress, the view of the mountains through the window – when my first marriage ended a year after it had begun, and I was moving my furniture and books into a sweltering hot storage unit in Austin, Texas with my sweating and worried parents helping me move boxes from the back of a rental truck.

I thought of those ads again this past year after my son Ronan was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I thought of them when I drove home from a nightclub, my hair full of sweat and smoke, my shirt askew, wondering “what just happened?” I thought of them when I looked at a bar menu on a date, ordered another gin and tonic and wondered if Ronan was having a seizure, and how the babysitter or his father would be managing it. I thought of them when I tried to pick out an outfit that was sassy without being trashy, and talked with my friends about how far it was appropriate to go on a first date. Most couples do not survive the loss of a child. My second husband and I fulfilled this statistic probability, although in the midst of our great sadness we made valiant efforts to reach each other. We failed. Grief morphs people; it dissolves direction, focus, desire, supposedly unbreakable bonds. We decided to separate and then we decided to divorce. The gap between us had become unbridgeable; the lives we imagined going on with after our son’s death incompatible.

Living on my own again, I realized that I had returned to a place I had happily abandoned for five years: the weird world of dating. At first this was exciting. I was gripped, compelled, shoved around by this desire to live, which manifested in some bad decision making and situations (late night booty calls and the kind of drunken hook-ups I hadn’t had since my 20s, only I’d end up weeping when it was all over). Some of these experiences felt exhilarating at the time – it was so good to feel something other than sadness – but they left me feeling emotionally strained, confused, and more shattered than I already was. I was “connecting” with people, sure, but it was not intimate and it did not fuel or nurture me at a time when I was already running on emotional reserves I didn’t even know I had until they were tapped out. I felt like an arrow of sheer desire, flying through the air in a small town and emblazoned with this unfortunate tag line: “Newly single mother of a dying baby.” Not exactly the description of somebody’s dream girl. And I didn’t care. I wanted to fuck and be fucked. I felt like I had a t-shirt that read TRAGEDY stenciled across it in rhinestones; I was bedazzled by bad luck. And I also had the sense that I was always about to fail a pop quiz. It’s like the dream when you imagine you missed math class and didn’t get your degree and then all of your teeth fell out. You wake up worried that all of your accomplishments are lies, your fingers groping frantically inside your mouth. In other words: dating created anxiety as much as it provided much-needed distraction. Would I ever have sober, enjoyable, connected sex again?

Of course it’s not all a bad dream reenactment. I enjoy the conversational aspect of dating, the literally “going out” to have new experiences with someone who sees the world differently from you. It feels like receiving a new pair of lungs to spend time with someone who doesn’t know that they’re facing the death of their most loved one in the very imminent future. I love getting to know new people (which isn’t unlike building a life in a brand new city or country, which is also a great love – and a unique talent – of mine). But I don’t like what seems to be the necessity of subterfuge, which constitutes the bulk of recommended behavioral currency in the (truly, not-so-modern) dating world. A sampling of advice: by their nature men like to chase and are hunters; women should play hard to get, make sure they see (and present) themselves as “prizes.” I am a sad mother watching her baby die who spends a lot of time alone in bed, picking the chocolate pieces out of trail mix, snuggling my son, weeping and watching action films and yes, writing. I also like to have dinner with my friends, hike, hear music, dance, drink martinis, and I have two full-time teaching jobs. Do I want to be saved from this existence? Not really. I just want someone to be able to hear about it without getting up from the table (literally or metaphorically) and running away.

Some other dating world beefs: I don’t like that being honest and trusting has become a totally unsexy liability. I grew up as the child of a pastor, in a world where you could sit on any man’s lap with zero fear of being molested, where people were true to their word, and where most of us were poor or on the edge of being poor and the winters were long and windy, and where my parents loved me even when I was acting like a maniac, which in my teenage years was most of the time. I hate that trying not to be self-conscious about an old-fashioned Midwestern-type farm upbringing (which involved working on an actual farm) makes me feel more self-conscious and uncool in a world where we’re supposed to be slick and street smart. I don’t like being told to quiet down or that I’m “too much” when I’ve spent most of my life working my butt off to be a writer, a teacher, and a decent person with a life full of purpose and meaning. I spend plenty of my life in utter quiet, happily whirling away in my inner life, which is a secret and complicated place, a world that is wholly my own and that I will never again give up in service to a relationship. But I do not want to be a nerdy hermit all of the time. When I’m with another person I want to know them, which requires talking and listening, not just observing and trying hard not to reveal anything that suggests vulnerability. Otherwise I’d rather be reading or writing or watching one of my favorite police procedurals on Netflix. I like to write stories, but I don’t want to be one. I like to have sex, but it’s not super fun to have a lover who bursts into tears when you’ve untangled yourself from her.

“What would you want in a relationship?” my girlfriends have asked me, while gently advising me that now may not be the best time to begin one. I thought long and hard about this. Did I want to keeping having ill-timed liaisons with people who cared little for me, or who, like me, were subconsciously seeking the distraction of drama and connection without true intimacy? Should I start dating women? (Tried that. Nope). Was “sex without attachment,” as I had rationalized it, a way of proving that I could live when I’m often so sad I think it would be better to die? No. That didn’t reduce attachment; it just made me feel empty and inauthentic. And who wants to feel more shattered than we already do in this sad and wacky world? I was giving myself a nasty head trip. I was flipping from dirty to clean and back again so much I was making myself sick.

I wanted dating to feel like connecting, not strategizing, and I didn’t want to feel like I was required to buy someone else’s farm on the first date or worry that they might want to buy mine, or whether we’d soon be negotiating which parts we want back. You can have the pigs, but I want half of that cornfield back, dammit. And get those chickens out of my back yard while you’re at it. I wanted a situation that feeds my soul, not just my ego. I didn’t want to rent any UHauls or think about renting future UHauls to live in homes where I might live with future children, although I would like to be a mother again, whatever that might look like. I didn’t want to make any promises but I wanted to have integrity in thought, word, and deed. (A VERY clean and Protestant wish). I wanted to live like it might be my last day without tapping into utter wildness and irresponsible behavior. I didn’t want to decide what I wanted to do with the second half of my life after Ronan dies, because I have no idea how I’m going to feel or in what direction my desire will run. I was dancing around in my living room to candy pop music one moment and the next I’d be catatonic on a friend’s couch weeping about how the future is a black hole of hopelessness. My emotions are not predictable; and frankly, I don’t think anyone can calibrate how they’ll feel from moment to moment unless they’re heavily medicated or trying not to feel anything at all, or anesthetized by a drug or an activity of choice. The only way, I think, to live on after an almost unfathomably shitty situation is to actually experience it, and that’s what I’m trying to do, and it’s messy. But I’m human. I want connection, true connection, for however long it lasts, and I want space for my complicated and deeply sad but also full and happy life. I’ve realized that people have trouble holding contradictions when they think of “dating.” They have a checklist of criteria to match up against a list of their own fears and phobias and issues, only this latter list is often invisible to them, even though it dictates their actions. Oh, it’s confusing. I’m vulnerable. In this social arrangement, who isn’t? To not be seems a much more frightening concept. Why can’t we just be as clear as possible?

I don’t expect anyone to love my child the way that I do, because nobody can or will. I don’t need anybody to fix my big fat broken heart, because nobody can or will, although that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be happy. I do. I want to live. I want to be, quite simply, accepted and desired for the sum total of who I am, and who I might become, and for the experiences that have contributed to both. I don’t want anybody to feel as though they have to prop me up, but I also want – and need – support. And yes, I want romance. Long walks, maybe more?

I would never judge those Montana ads now. I would hope the best for those people. I would hope that they got what they wanted without giving up an essential part of themselves, as so many people do, as I have done. I would understand that none of us knows when we might be abandoned. I wish I could meet them and say, “Hey, Other Human Person, you’re so great! Hold out for what feels good! And just remember that nothing lasts forever!”

This newly found compassion doesn’t mean that being the mother of a dying child has made me a better person in the superficial way we have come to understand that phrase, which is usually meant to describe someone who does the “right” thing, whatever that means. As Nietzsche would argue, our notion of ethics and morality stem from a source that itself might be completely bunk and doesn’t provide an appropriate baseline for assessing our activities as right or wrong, because these words don’t mean anything on their own or when randomly applied to real-life scenarios that are not just abstractions. Mothering a child who will only live for three years while being robbed of all his faculties has made me edgier, but also softer; it has made me more authentic and less judgmental, but also less tolerant of superficial concerns. It’s made me totally fearless and absolutely shit scared. It has dissolved the person I thought I was and helped me find the girl who used to write in the closet with a flashlight without thinking about if what I wrote was any good, just loving the feeling of creation, the sound of the words in my fingers. I’m 38. My life is over. My life is just beginning. I feel like a two thousand year old teenager.

I find that my previously quite detailed dating criterion has disappeared. I don’t really care about finances, or occupation, or education, or age, or a particular “type” of look or even a series of common interests or “shared goals” or “deal breakers,” these last two being overused and pointless phrases that people throw around in therapy and in casual conversation. I care about how I feel; it’s taken me almost four decades to understand that I don’t need a checklist, I need a heart match, and this latter requirement is not quantifiable and its physical manifestation cannot be anticipated. But if I say that on a date, I feel like I’m quoting dialogue from a Lifetime movie, or sound like a new age hippie, or maybe have a secret drinking problem that I’m afraid to admit. As if having a dying baby wasn’t enough of a melodramatic plot that makes people want to run from the room.

In my previous dating life, long before I went through anything from which I might have needed saving, I wanted to be saved: from uncertainty, from the possibility of loneliness, from the inevitability of loss. In short, I didn’t want to die, and I thought yoking myself to someone else’s life would stave this off. Unpacked in this way, such thinking is completely idiotic but all of us do it unconsciously all of the time. Of course I only made this connection fifteen years later. I look at my son and know that I am more yoked to him than I have ever been to anyone, that I would kill anyone if I thought it would save him, that I would die with him if I thought it meant I could go where he’s going and help him out in that place that nobody has visited but hope exists. I don’t believe that you don’t know love until you have a child. Love is not quantifiable; to say so is to demean both its power and its mystery. I do know that I’m capable of loving more deeply now than I was before my son was sick and dying. Why? Because I am bereft of certainty, cleaned of at least this one misguided desire to be saved by anyone or anything. I’ll never be okay again, mothers of children with terminal illnesses often write to me. But are we ever?

So, if not salvation, which most people are subconsciously looking for, what is there to want in a romantic relationship?

I want a witness. I want to be held while I weep like an animal and not be told that I’m strong or that things will get better. I also want to cry on my own and sulk with a good book and bad television. I don’t want to be lied to. I want big-hearted accompaniment in this wild and frightening place of grief that is unexpectedly beautiful, shimmery, weird, and unpredictable; which is to say, it’s just like life, only magnified, deepened. I want someone who can see me in the ultimate moment of weakness and view it as an expression of human strength, because that’s what it is.

Every year, the citizens of Santa Fe build a giant puppet – Zozobra – and watch him burn in a public park in the middle of town. Everyone is invited to place their gloom, whatever it might be, in a box, and that, too, is set on fire. My good friend is the mistress of gloom, and being late to the gloom table, I almost didn’t get mine into the puppet. Break the rules! I begged her, but I wasn’t the only one. She slipped some gloom in the pot for me, texting me from the stage I wish I could see you. This is what grieving people truly want – to be seen. In all their mess and humanity and roaring, groaning, rock-back-and-forth sadness.

Most people think they don’t want complication. But it comes anyway.

*

To let go of the thing you most want to hang onto is to experience desire with all its unmatchable threads, its sharp and feathery edges, its weird geometry and turbulent mathematics, its dark corners and wacky, spontaneous bursts of light. To say that someone is the love of your life is to admit that if they are taken from you, your life will be unfathomably altered and there will be a hole that’s impossible to fill. What I’d like to say on a date: “To love is to burn. You dig?” And then wait for the answer before asking (or not) for the check. I do not want solutions, platitudes, or promises. I want to cry in the dark. I want to cry in the car. I want to pound my fists against a surface and scream. I want to listen to the rain on the roof, that slow and steady rhythm that is so like the beating of a heart, so unmistakable, so easily changeable so ready to stop. Everything still stop. The heart will stop: Ronan’s, mine, everyone’s. So here’s my ad:

SWDF, both dirty and clean, depending on the day, seeks someone to put their arms around her and say, “I’ve got you.”

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“Now, though I sometimes cry, I more often feel a sense of awe at the depth of my connection to my mother. Perhaps this wonder is how I know that ten months and more have passed and that my mother, in some form, is back in the world. Awe at the undeniable fact that I will forever be the son of a fiercely beautiful woman. Awe at knowing just how exquisitely she prepared me to live and write my way into this world.”

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In February of this year, I took a trip with some friends to Colorado. There, I had the good fortune to meet a woman named Holly who snowboards, deals wine, and makes a pungent but delectable fish soup. One evening, Holly prepared dinner the seven of us, and I hung around asking heady questions while everyone else tried to relax. We talked about hot sauce, healthcare, spirituality—and then Holly told me about a meditation group she’d joined. “You know,” she said, turning to me while stirring fish sauce into the curry, “everyone around you was your mother in another lifetime.”

While I like ideas, I also like it when one plus one equals two. I like organized bookshelfs. I count calories. I don’t eat things with four legs. The idea of ubiquitous mothers does not fit well into my rule-based system. Plus, I’ve lived most of my life with an absent mother. So in response to Holly’s statement, I shut my mouth and chopped vegetables, making sure all the chives were the same length.

But like most unsettling things, Holly’s idea took an empty parking spot in my brain, until earlier this year when I picked up Jennifer Richter’s debut poetry collection, Threshold. In poems about birth, death, illness, recovery, and loss, Richter explores themes of a life I have never lived. I have never had children. I’ve never breast-fed a child or nursed a child through an illness. I have never suffered a major illness myself. And yet despite this experience gap, I connected with Richter’s poems more strongly than I’ve connected with any poems I’ve read in the last two years.

From the title poem, “Threshold:”

“You brace yourself. He draws you like this, arms straight out, too stick-thin but the hands are perfect, splayed like suns, long fingers, the hands he draws for you are huge.”

Richter invites us, through the language of the speaker’s world, to understand that each and every one of us is a threshold—something pain passes through. We are resiliant from the moment we are born, mothering ourselves and others always by the very act of allowing life to pass through us. As I read the opening poems of the book, I began to understand, perhaps, what my friend Holly had meant.

Jennifer Richter

Threshold: a point through which things pass.

Perhaps this is also the definition of a poem: something through which time passes. Something which holds a moment, a truth, a reality that time denies as it speeds past, as pages burn and ink smears, as books are digitized and shipped around the world. Perhaps the poem transcends the page, the way Holly’s words transcended my efforts to excise them from my brain. The poem is within us—the poem is us, is what we pass through and is what passes through us. For rather than simply documenting moments in a narrative, Richter captures patterns of grief and their familiar journeys through the body, through society, through time.

From “Recover 5: Now What Do You Do?”:

“The pain is like a child. You marked it first in days, then months. Now years. Your son is five. Today he drops your hand a block before his school. He sprints up the stairs and disappears. Certain doors, you crave to be behind again.”

Richter draws a remarkable connection between pain and children, illness and pregnancy. As the speaker draws lines connecting the grief of loss—loss of a child, loss of the ability to hide, loss of identity—the reader discovers that the only way to operate amid such pain is to view the self as the embodiment of something larger, something out of our petty control, something which flows through us.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, pinpoints this very idea in a speech about “creative genius.” What is left for the artist, after the birth, growth, and release of one’s masterpiece? To view the self as a vessel, the genius as a visitor, masterpiece as a gift.

Threshold: a point through which things pass.

What does it mean to “go through” something? To endure? To birth, endure, abandon? Are we all mothers to our pain, our thoughts, our ideas, our children, our belongings? The common denominator Richter pinpoints in Threshold is our inability to control those things which we first capture, but then grow to need. All things contain their own perceptions, their own patterns, their own lives; our grief is in the fact that we live, that we, too, are worlds through which things pass. Things—people, children, mothers—have choices, sometimes grow indifferent, sometimes no longer need us. Acknowledging ourselves as thresholds, we mother. At the first loss, we mother.

As Richter puts it: “Thresh, hold: separate the seeds, gather them back.”

How do we endure illness, pain, emotion, one another? Though Richter explores concentrated themes, her poems speak widely. We can all find ourselves—as mother and child, illness and host, clock and time—in this extroardinary collection of poems and moments, this orchestra of throughness, of threshhold. This mother.

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And I think we can see that entire populations are regarded as negligible life by warring powers, and so when they are destroyed, there is no great sense that a heinous act and egregious loss have taken place. My question is: how do we understand this nefarious distinction that gets set up between grievable and ungrievable lives?”

At Guernica, a lively and passionate interview with philosopher Judith Butler about her forthcoming book, Frames Of War: When Is Life Grievable?

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“Over the years I’ve had five letters from people saying that what I wrote stopped them killing themselves.”

“A lot of people … sidestep the pain, by taking pills or moving on or whatever. But I didn’t think any of that would work. The pain would come back again and again if I didn’t live in the grief. And the thought of it coming back was awful, unbearable. I’d rather have died.”

— A few selections from a pretty brilliant interview with Jeanette Winterson at The Guardian

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A review of The Professor and Other Writings, a book of essays by Terry Castle.

Our very own Elissa Bassist has a fake interview with Elaine Showalter, and it is brilliant.

The last book Kathleen Alcott loved was Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.

Terry Castle

In times of grief, says Michael Berger, we turn to art and literature “to become more madly ourselves.”

And most importantly, though this is not technically under the purview of Rumpus books, here’s a list of ways to help in Haiti, as well as updates by Brian Spears numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

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I foresaw that it would be — I have been unhappy, unsettled, unbalanced before (who has not?). I did not foresee that, this time, for much of the time that I was most antic and most lost, most peculiarly undone, I would have taken from me (I would, I suppose, take away from myself) that which had always been of such solace to me.

Quite simply, I could not read.”

At ReadySteadyBook, founding editor Mark Thwaite shares today his experience with grief and how, in the process of grieving he discovered Hamlet.

In times of grief, what do we do if can’t do what we have always done? Perhaps I’m thinking about this because of the inability to think about what happened yesterday in Haiti to thousands upon thousands of people.

Because, more generally, of the inability to think logically or cohesively about what happens when lives and communities are swept away at a moment’s notice.

For some of us, this is where art steps in to offer not distractions, but enrichments; not clarifications but further mystifications.  I don’t expect answers, just inklings, bafflement that doesn’t paralyze me.

Reading refracts my own panic and dread in colors I might not recognize. This alone is consolation: not recognizing, at first, what belongs to me. And when I write, I try to cull forth things I might prefer to disown. But I can’t, because they belong to all of us.

Call it religion, but one stripped to its base elements: the human, his or her boundless ignorance and the terrible and beautiful cosmos unraveling in all directions.

I remember being enthralled by Hamlet as a high school student. Here was the ultimate mad hero, I thought, a man adrift in a meaningless world asking the essential questions not so much to hear them answered but just to hear the music they make in the air.  I remember going to London as a young man to see Hamlet performed and hearing the bells of Westminster Abbey on Easter Sunday and thinking that so many people, right at that steel-gray, pigeon-strewn crossroads exist for no other reason than they simply do.

Mark Thwaite describes Hamlet, “the poem unlimited” according to Harold Bloom, the very masterpiece that may well have invented the “human” (“a sense of the secular, self-questioning subject”) as “a study in the negotiation we each make with the (in)authenticity of our self, and our grief, and with what that self loses even as it becomes more madly itself via the very losses it witnesses and articulates.”

To become more madly ourselves, then, is one reason why we turn to art and literature when grief paralyzes us.

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