Mother?
When I was a little girl, I believed that you had to hold your breath when going past a graveyard. If you didn’t, a spirit or a wandering soul of someone recently deceased would enter your body and take your place. I told this to my sisters, being the oldest and therefore the wisest, and they believed me. And so, in succession, in the backseat of my parent’s black Volvo, we would tap each other’s shoulders in warning at the sight of cluttered headstones and one by one: breathe in and not out. At least until the cemetery was out of sight. I kept them safe, giving them the nod to exhale. And when the time came: to inhale again.
In China, ancient residents of the Hemp Pond Valley would suspend their dead in coffins above the ground—like an infant’s mobile of dangling graves, haunting the space that birds know best. The tradition, which was lost long ago along with the Bo people, left beyond some 160 or so caskets which the locals refer to as “Subjugators of the Sky.” I imagine the wood, the flesh inside long gone having already done its part, passing on the rotting so that it can be seen by the world outside. The coffin acts as a suspension of death—bones engulfed in a decaying grave— surrounded by the life in the forest and the trees themselves. What spirits are suspended there, too?
I used to ask my parents a lot about death: Where do all the graves go? and How does the world not run out of room? and best of all: Don’t the dead get bored?
Thomas Lynch, undertaker turned essayist, writes, “The dead I bury and burn are like the dead before them, for whom time and space have become mortally unimportant.” As humans, we have a preoccupation with death. It is one of the few things we have left undiscovered, a headstone unturned (if you will). We are fascinated by it because of its inevitability, the kitchen timer of our existence easily fading into the background only coming to the front with small encounters: funerals, fender-benders, slowing down to get a glimpse of a car crash.
The space we occupy in life is ever-shifting and changing, yet static after death: so it made sense to me that spirits would want to leave their respective graveyards. I remember once making a big show to my sisters of holding my breath with a large inhale, watching to make sure they followed suit. But I did not hold my breath, thinking: There’s enough room in this body for more than just me. Daring to breathe through my nose, expecting to hear some new being in my head telling me: Now your body has purpose. But the car moved swiftly around the bend and past the graveyard and I found myself alone, still.
My grandmother died sore and small, withered away in a railed bed and traveling between shaking chills and hot-sweat, ripping off and restoring her sheets like waves lapping against the sand. We take little gray and black rocks from the plot of her grave, their uneven surface scores our skin. We honor her memory by flipping them over in our hands, feeling their uneven lightly surface scratch our skin. My father keeps these stones in his bedroom, measuring and cataloguing the years since she passed. She had heterochromia iridium, making her eyes two different colors: one like a golden egg, the other a flat chunk of charcoal. Morning and night. Her gaze was always relaxed on me—the oldest child, her first granddaughter. In the time before the exams, and the radiation, and the pain, she lived with my grandfather in close quarters to the sea. Mounting my small figure on her shoulders, she would feign throwing me into the water. Screams of anxious joy combatted her Irish timbre, and when she tired we would count cockle shells until it was dark enough that the beginnings of the ocean and shore became indistinguishable: one, two, three…
My child died small, too. I woke up in the morning to a small pool of blood, and for weeks afterwards my body was less a home, more a grave. I held my breath at the hospital, anxious for news I didn’t even know I was waiting to hear. The process of inhale, exhale—faster and shorter than I remembered when I was young. Some nights I would scream in my sleep, I’m a grave! I’m a grave! Would the child version of myself ask me how to hold my breath forever? In Aztec culture, women who died during childbirth were regarded and treated post-mortem like female warriors— “Cihuateteo,” they are called, meaning “Divine Women.” I’m trying to find a brave word for women like me.
The deepest circle of Dante’s Inferno does not burn, rather it is frozen. Before leaving Hell, Dante looks back and sees Satan upside down through the ice. This, I was living— my body was a personal hell. I was frozen, too. And my child—not alive, yet still somehow capable of dying—made my womb a suspended grave rising a few feet from the floor. What would the Bo think of that?
The paradox for me existed in death before birth. How was I supposed to treat this loss? Could I even categorize it as a loss if it was something I didn’t know about, didn’t want? I wasn’t ready, unprepared. I awoke to a bed which held the musings of a Rorschach test: confusing, unclear—an image I could not understand.
Epictetus once said, “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.” But Epictetus was a man. Women are equipped to carry more than just themselves. There’s enough room in this body for more than just me. I want to go back and tell my childhood self: you were right.
In fairy tales, the protagonist undergoes three happenings before the final change. This tripling employed by writers like Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm usually results in their characters undergoing three trials or tests for the purpose of suspense, and then: growth. This tripling can also be found in patterns: three children in one family, two of which are evil or wicked while the third is the hero, the goodness. Snow White’s mother comes back three times to kill her. Cinderella is one of three sisters.
Rumpelstiltskin reappears to the miller’s daughter three nights in a row, asking for her necklace, then her ring, before asking for her firstborn child in exchange for weaving straw into gold. The little man took the necklace, seated himself in front of the wheel, and whirr, whirr, whirr, three turns, and the reel was full. However, when the queen refuses to give Rumpelstiltskin her baby and offers him gold instead, he gives her three chances to guess his name instead before the final change: taking her child. To her offer, he replies, "No, something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world."
Conception and birth occur in three stages: the germinal stage, the embryonic stage, and the fetal stage. I am one of three sisters. I was in my third year of college. If things happen in threes then I assume this is my arc:
Love.
Sex.
Loss.
So what is the final change?
Rumpelstiltskin scared me when I was younger, perhaps even more so now—I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child whose face you know, whose voice you recognize and near long for their crying just to feel relief: they are there. My pain feels more bearable.
The term “mother,” according to Merriam-Webster, means “a female parent.” However, it also means “maternal tenderness or affection.” In Henry V, the Duke of Exeter says, “all my mother came into mine eyes and gave me up to tears.” In some states, it’s considered double homicide to kill a pregnant woman if she is pregnant enough—when she can be considered a true mother. Mother is our universal word for caretaker, giver of life. One Jewish proverb notes, “The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. ” What counts as birth? What will my headstone read if I were to die right now—Emma McLoughlin: 1996-2018, mother? Can I have affection for that bloodstain on my mattress everytime I go to change the sheets, a tenderness for something with no name, no story? There’s enough room in this body for more than just me. I kept my sisters safe: telling them when to inhale, when to exhale. But what about you, who I couldn’t keep from harm: when I exhale, are you exhaling too? Can you think, or are you frozen—suspended— in a perpetual state of blood and un-formation? What do you call me?
