THE FEELING: Afterthuds

The shocks of death, grief, and love

Saw these flags, made of mesh or something woven, floating very lightly; it was nice

Pals,

An important and ritualized part of my week, which can otherwise feel, from a space-and-time perspective, like crashing into the earth at random intervals, is walking Jem in the woods(iest downtown park I have access to within a thirty-minute drive from my home) on Saturday mornings. I like to be there first, which means early, before the runners and cyclists get going on the path that loops the perimeter, and I like to leave loose and dirty, with my clothes covered in wet grass, and my head fucking empty.

(An important and ritualized part of my life, which can otherwise feel, from a space-and-time perspective, like crashing into the earth at random intervals, is being alone in the morning with whatever grass and dirt and trees and sky and dog will have me, baptism-by-dewdrop, before reorienting myself to the human world.)

The last time I did that, the full Saturday thing, was the first time I’d done much of anything alone, since my mom died. I’ve been doing other things. Packing and unpacking, a lot. I bought a dress at the mall, after displacing myself in its octagon-shaped retail organs, and then couldn’t remember my phone number and couldn’t stop crying, and was doing the makeup-salvaging Upward Tilt when the Banana Republic sales associate came around the desk and pulled me into a hug. I have been project-managing the Google Document in which my sisters and I track to-dos. Ruining the day of the nice pharmacist who knew my nice mom. Spending nine or ten hours at a time with a child and her many backpacks, and two to four hours at a time with the level of friend who I can cry any kind of cry with, including the most unsettling cry: the “Stop ’n’ Start.” Actually, the “Already Crying As You Sit Down” is also gnarls.

I’ve been trying and failing not to cry in front of Strawberry. (Generally I think this is a bad idea, and that being most of your genuine self in front of kids is a good idea, but we’re driving slowly through flooded lowlands in the dark, here, with the hazards on and the radio off.) She has been using the language of my parenting style — “gentle,” which is so named because “respectful” is both too obvious and too triggering, and because “authoritative” is too easily confused with “authoritarian”; Montessori-informed; big on the “frame” and oui oui ou non clarity of the French — against me, like this: “You’re sad because your mommy died. Do you remember your mommy? She loved you and loved you. Her body stopped working. She can’t play with you anymore. She can’t eat dinner with youuu. She can’t go to a restaurant with youuu.” (But also… Here is a text I sent my friend: “‘Mommy, when will you be happy?’ Disney-ass direct quote.”)

So, god, anyway: Being alone-alone for the first time, having a nice little walk in the sun, and stilled by the muscle-memorized flow of dog-leash handling (and some evasive maneuvers around dime bags and forgotten underwear — city woods in the early weekend hours are yet another kind of lowlands), an existential and probably ancient sense of loss had a chance to really kick through my consciousness and into the black hole.

Out of “nowhere” I was crying so hard that I fled my usual route, and ran as-the-crow-flies-style through the trees and down the hill and back into the park-proper, emerging suddenly onto the sidewalk facing the oncoming cyclists, a feral-bourgeois grown woman in an Adam Sandler outfit and Jackie Onassis sunglasses and a single Airpod, with a dog tumbling out of the bushes behind her. (Jem knew what was going on, because she lost my mom, too.) Standing up to wipe tears with my wrists and the heels of my hands, loudly sobbing, only to fall over forward again, like I was broken. The exquisite morning quiet was broken only by the affluent zoom of road bikes, and now me, wailing.

Shock is really something. It’s protective. All of that “fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop” stuff is our bodies and minds getting together to keep us safe, in the moment. (But, as with a Z-pack or a sexy idiot, a stress response is not a cure we want to rely on.) I assumed, as I woke up to my phone vibrating across the floor, that the call from my sister was about a late-night, goss-y celebrity encounter. (Celebrities love my sister.) When she told me that our mom died, I experienced immediate disassociation: Is this real? This isn’t real, is it? I made a note to myself, that same night, that said “Figure out how to tell [Strawberry] but make sure it really happened first.” As Simon would say, and did say: “Oh, sweetie.” Inside of shock, I assumed a new reality would slowly formulate around me, like coming out of a dream, which I was at the time.

But! No! In the weeks after, and down into the park, it was just unpredictable psychic violence — “aftershocks,” I guess, but without the protective, brain-bubble-wrapping distance, more just thuds — that made the finality and permanence ever-realer, ever-worse. It was in reading something about her in the past tense, and “tripping over it” (this is writer-editor-speak for “the fuck?”). It was the usual things, the ones you hear about: “Oh, I should call Mom and tell her…” and then… yeah. Those things.

What did it this time, in the woods, is that I had been sort of accidentally/incidentally listening to “Strange Powers” by the Magnetic Fields on repeat, on my one Airpod, which is one of those uncanny songs that chases you around your life, that crosses phases and relationships and moods. It came out during my Aladdin soundtrack era, and I never had a 69 Love Songs thing (was too deep into Black Flag and Beastie Boys and Bjork for anything I might incorrectly perceive as cute) so I don’t know when we first tangled. It’s short and peppy and trippy and dank. (Pairs well with “Dancing On My Own” if you want to feel too much and bop around with a little more purpose.) It feels like early Douglas Coupland, like reading Shampoo Planet on a broken chaise in the middle of the day. It has a lot of typical Magnetic Fieldsism, a lot of real lines. (My mom wouldn’t like this song.)

One of them: “Our hair in the air / our lips blue from cotton candy.” Something about that, extracted from a wacky love song, decontextualized by repetition and imbued with cosmic meaning by the desperation of grief, felt directly and entirely about my mom, and about me. She was fun; we had fun. Working on the obituary and eulogy it came up over and over again, how fun and warm and brave she was. Rollercoasters; volcanoes; Fiji; saying “Sure” when my dad left a steady, stable job to risk going out on his own. She was up for it; she was down for whatever.

I visited my parents a lot; my brother-in-law called my southern-Ontario hometown my “favorite vacation destination.” (More than once, I received a text from my friend Amy while she was at Paris Fashion Week, while I was in the backseat of my mom’s car.) My mom and I were so often involved in, and always mutually delighted by, a low-stakes caper. We both wanted to bike all the way back to town for a second ice-cream cone, every time.

(But also! Blue was her colour. She never liked when I was beachy, bleachy blonde, because dark brown hair and light blue eyes was one of our things.)

So. We also both liked the writer Anne Lamott, and I read this bit of hers at the funeral: “You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through.”

The last time I saw her, we zipped down Rosedale Valley Road after dinner, windows open, the dark-green bowers of valley branches grazing the car — this road is famous for being dangerous and beautiful — talking about my friends, and then I hugged her goodbye outside her hotel. My parents and sisters and extended family had come to town for Strawberry’s third-birthday weekend, which was a friend-and-family jamily of dinners and toddler soccer and parachute games and happy garbage, and early on Saturday night, four dispatched cabs driving by and not picking us up (was it the two enormous bags full of cupcake boxes?!), c/o the Beck Taxi Company, who I will never forgive, making us an hour late for the last dinner. That cab ride home, though, just my mom and my dad and me, was one of those fast, thrilling, silver-blue twilight, dark-green valley whip-arounds. Our hair in the air. Sometime, sooner or later, a memory of that particular blue air and those particular green leaves will shock me, too. I miss her so much.

I love you.

xx

Kate

“The sun falls down like honey / the moon pours down like mercury.”