[2017] What We Lose Read online

  Aside from her retirement fund, savings, and investments, my mom kept small amounts of cash socked away in separate accounts, some in tiny sums, others in fairly unbelievable numbers. We divided the money, per her will, evenly between me and my father. Even though I was the daughter and he was her husband, she didn’t want to show favoritism. When we finally accounted for all the money and divvied it up, my father and I sat facing the sum in the lawyer’s office, almost unbelieving.

  Most of the clothes we gave away, to either her best friend or Goodwill. We shipped certain pieces of her jewelry to South Africa, sealing each one in a plastic bag and marking it with the name of the cousin or aunt to whom it was assigned. They sent us enthusiastic letters thanking us for the gifts, no matter their value. My aunt even called us crying. It was such an easy thing—a relief, even—to get rid of the stuff, but the gesture meant everything to them. And that feeling extended to us also. We were all they had left of her.

  I put my share of the money in an investment account that could be accessed only by a phone call. I swore to myself that I would lock the money away, like she did when she saved it, and keep it safe. This was all I had left of her.

  I read in “What We Lose” that the bereaved need human touch. Aminah booked me a massage at a yoga studio in Philadelphia. I had a sixty-minute session with the lead therapist, who came into my appointment from her afternoon vinyasa class, still sweating. She oiled me up and rubbed me down expertly, pulling my joints back into place, mincing my back, all the while explaining the purpose of each of her movements. She untwisted my body and my mind, which she explained was like a giant overworked muscle, in control of every other muscle in my body, respondent to all its stresses and limitations.

  With each stroke and crack, tears came, until they flooded out the center of the headrest. When she stood over me, my tears dripped onto her bare foot, and she lifted my head. I told her that it wasn’t long ago, what happened. She hugged me. Reedy instrumental music played in the background. My towel fell away from my chest. She rocked me back and forth like my mother used to. Her body was hard and toned, and I cried because I would never feel my mother’s big soft breast again.

  Unexpected events—UFOs, ghosts—can be explained by subjective experience. A person has lost a pet and is distracted with loneliness day after day. She is so sad over the cat’s death that she doesn’t leave the house and can only stay indoors, thinking about the way the cat used to dart across the floor, from couch to table to armchair, and under the windowsill.

  One day, she is sitting and watching the window in her living room, thinking of the cat. The curtain covers a window that is thin and leaky, and outside the sky is gray, brewing a thunderstorm. She can hear the wind whistling, and it makes her think of the days she would sit inside, shielded from the cold, with the cat curled peacefully on her lap. She sees the curtain flutter, and thinks of the way the cat would walk on the windowsill and flutter the curtains in the same exact way. This could easily be explained by the wind, but because her mind is overwhelmed with grief for her lost companion, she imagines, convinced, that it is the spirit of the cat.

  A ghost is not a fact in itself; rather, it is a symbol for a need. The most important aspect of the ghost is the need that creates it. The cat-ghost is a symbol of the woman’s grief.

  A series of small miracles started to happen around us. A South African friend who worked at my mom’s hospital received a long-prayed-for promotion that he often went to my mother for advice about. Two weeks after my mother’s funeral, after a months-long wait, a cousin who had suffered as an undocumented immigrant for twelve years finally received approval for her green card. Both people credited these events as gifts sent to them by my mother from heaven.

  Aminah and Frank took a long-planned vacation to Vietnam a month to the day after my mother’s funeral. Two days before they left, I cleared out the downstairs storage closet. Aminah called on her way to Best Buy to purchase a new DSLR camera for the trip.

  “Frank wants to take pictures of the temples, with all the intricate carvings,” she told me.

  I was going through my mother’s old things. It was a mix of old jackets, work papers, and her beloved kitchen tools. Not five minutes after I hung up the phone, I came across an old Sharper Image box, unopened. She often fell for the siren song of the pictures in the retailer’s catalog and the ease of automated ordering by phone. She would order gadget after gadget and stow them in the downstairs closet still in their boxes, forgetting that she’d bought them. Inside the box was a brand-new DSLR camera, still in the plastic. I called up Aminah and she came over right away to borrow it.

  On their trip, Frank proposed to Aminah in front of a temple, and after she accepted, they posed for a picture, with her ring finger to the camera to show off the diamond. A local boy pressed the shutter button of my mom’s camera.

  There is the logical conclusion: My family and friends experienced a string of positive coincidences at this particular time in our lives. Then there is the supernatural one, which we chose to believe—my mother, or the power of the universe in recognition of her death, influenced a positive outcome in each of these events to better us.

  I made the choice to believe in my mother’s spirit. I chose to create a ghost, for the purpose of my own comfort. It made me happy to think that my mother still existed somewhere and that she could help us right after her passing.

  Skepticism says that ghosts are merely unexplained phenomena. In our culture, “unexplained” = “explained as a ghost.”

  Whether or not ghosts exist is beside the point. The methods relied upon for their proof are all shoddy, and even in the most certain of circumstances explanations are too easily disproved, subverted by one’s subjectivity. The woman created the cat-ghost out of the moving curtains.

  My theory is that loneliness creates the feeling of haunting.

  I did my best to wake up while my father was leaving the house. I thought that if I could be up by six thirty, and see him even for a few minutes, I would feel less lonely, terrified as I was by the emptiness of their airy apartment. The antique furniture, the African artifacts and trinkets carefully chosen by my mother’s hand . . . they all seemed to breathe and sigh her name. I hoped seeing his face would make the house not feel so large, the empty space not so enervating.

  But I tossed at night, every night, until the early morning, and with nowhere to be the next day, I was never awake before noon.

  As soon as I got out of the shower, I packed a book in my bag and headed to my coffee shop for breakfast. I dawdled and stalled, ordering coffee upon coffee so that I wouldn’t have to go home. I read the question on the baristas’ faces: Doesn’t she have somewhere else to be? When the coffee shop closed, I would finally leave and spend the rest of the day cruising around the city in my car until it was time for my father to come home from work. Then I returned home, exhausted and lonely.

  The things seemed to happen only during the day, when the apartment was empty except for me. The thermostat found itself all the way up at 73, the temperature my mother liked, too hot for me or my father. The vents puttered from the heating pipes, and it sounded just like my mother’s breath.

  I hated to be alone in that apartment so much that I started showering at night, to shorten my time in the mornings. I zipped straight from my bed, washed my face, put on a change of clothes, and headed straight out the door. I made sure to come home after eight, nine on days when my father had staff meetings.

  Soon my father started inquiring into my plans. When will you return to school? Perhaps you should find something to occupy your time during the day. He asked the questions halfheartedly, with little interest in my answers, and I began to realize that he was doing this out of duty—some workaholic’s ideal of busyness—and not because he was actually concerned. Most days, his eyes were empty, and I continued to avoid his gaze because I was afraid of what lurked behind.

  We
stopped eating dinner together every evening. Most nights, our fridge was empty. We stopped sending out our annual holiday cards with a family photo, or thoughtful, hand-lettered Thank You notes when we received a gift. Holidays were a wash. The two-foot plastic tree became the norm—my father didn’t purchase a single new tree after my mother died. All the plants in the house withered away shortly after the funeral, their brethren never to enter our household.

  Before, the guiding instinct of our family was strongly intuitive, compassionate, and nurturing. In a word, maternal. My father and I both became orphans, malnourished, emotionally distant, neglected. Often, when we were sitting in the kitchen eating our takeout dinners, each of us at our separate spots—me on my laptop at the island, my father paging through a magazine at the table—we seemed barely recognizable to me. I looked at us and thought, whose family is this?

  When I visualized my emotions, I would picture a graph. Sometimes I would try to draw it, and it helped to see my feelings organized into a neat line, a process that connoted order and straightforward representation. When I drew the graph, I pictured the x-axis as time, the y as strength of emotion. There was a spike around the diagnosis, when I first became aware something was wrong, when the suggestion of her mortality, the uncertainty of the situation, was first introduced, and, by virtue of its newness, was especially severe. Then the line went down, when I became used to the idea, and I was too wrapped up in the details—treatments, prognoses, outcomes—to be in touch with the emotion. My return home was another spike, and after that, a steady, slow climb, at high altitude, until her death.

  At the point of her death, the line circles inward into itself to infinity, disappearing into infinite fractions. It was so beyond comprehension and feeling that it wasn’t able to be captured on a plane of “hurt” or “sadness,” or any single human emotion.

  Loss is a straightforward equation: 2 − 1 = 1. A person is there, then she is not. But a loss is beyond numbers, as well as sadness, and depression, and guilt, and ecstasy, and hope, and nostalgia—all those emotions that experts tell us come along with death. Minus one person equals all of these, in unpredictable combinations. It is a sunny day that feels completely gray, and laughter in the midst of sadness. It is utter confusion. It makes no sense.

  My graph resembled the form of an asymptote, the mathematical equivalent of ineffability: an object attempting to approach a line but forever failing. In the same way, my mind was trying to reconcile my new reality and failing, over and over again.

  Asymptote: This appears to be a paradox to beginners in geometry, who are generally unable to imagine it possible that two lines should continue to approach one another forever, without absolute contact. But this arises from their confounding the thing called a straight line in practice (which is not a straight line, but a thin stroke of black lead or ink, as the case may be) with the straight line of geometry, which has neither breadth nor thickness, but only length. And they also imagine that if two lines might be asymptotic, the fact might be made visible, which is impossible, unless the eye could be made to distinguish any distance, however small. But if the unassisted eye cannot detect a white space between two black lines, unless that space is a thousandth of an inch in breadth, which is about the truth, it is evident that two geometrical surfaces with asymptotic boundaries, such as ABC, DEC, would appear to coincide from the point where the distance between them is about the thousandth part of an inch. The idea of a geometrical asymptote is therefore an effort of pure reason, and the possibility of it must be made manifest to the mind, not to the senses.

  We will see that the same cannot be said for the sublime feeling. The relation of thinking to the object presented breaks down. In sublime feeling, nature no longer “speaks” to thought through the “coded writing” of its forms. Above and beyond the formal qualities that induced the quality of taste, thinking grasped by the sublime feeling is faced, “in” nature, with quantities capable only of suggesting a magnitude or a force that exceeds its power of presentation. This powerlessness makes thinking deaf or blind to natural beauty. Divorced, thinking enters a period of celibacy. It can still employ nature, but to its own end. It becomes the user of nature. This “employment” is an abuse, a violence. It might be said that in the sublime feeling, thinking becomes impatient, despairing, disinterested in attaining the ends of freedom by means of nature.

  If there is a person who has never eaten a tangerine or a durian fruit, however many images or metaphors you give him, you cannot describe to him the reality of those fruits. You can do only one thing: give him a direct experience. You cannot say: “Well, the durian is a little bit like the jackfruit or like a papaya.” You cannot say anything that will describe the experience of a durian fruit. The durian fruit goes beyond all ideas and notions. The same is true of a tangerine. If you have never eaten a tangerine, however much the other person loves you and wants to help you understand what a tangerine tastes like, they will never succeed by describing it. The reality of the tangerine goes beyond ideas. Nirvana is the same; it is the reality that goes beyond ideas. It is because we have ideas about nirvana that we suffer. Direct experience is the only way.

  I am most troubled when my mother is very present to me, when I dream of her extra vividly and can hear her voice. Even when I wake up I am left with the eerie sensation of how I used to feel—scared, loving, and small, in comparison—in her presence.

  In these moments, I feel that she is still alive and I am talking to her in my mind. But now she cannot answer back. I feel that I have some kind of beautiful secret. I love this new magical Mom who is always watching over me, whose counsel I can seek in an instant, whose advice frequently matches my own wishes and desires.

  I don’t know how to place this new mother, my dead mother, with the mother who was alive. When I look at her grave, I feel it the most. How can she be there when she is still here, inside me?

  My mother is dead. But I still see her. But I still feel her. I can still hear her voice, even right now as I am speaking to you.

  But she is dead.

  When I look at this picture of her at the beach, I can feel the sun on my skin. I can hear the way she spoke to me.

  But she is gone.

  I can dream her, and I can hear her cry. She tells me what happened that day, and she cries with me. She tells me not to be afraid.

  But she is dead.

  A part of her is still alive in me.

  But she is gone.

  She will live forever in heaven.

  But she is not on earth.

  Parts of her will live on in the trees and the streams and the birds of tomorrow. She is the water and the plants and the bits of dust I see swirl in columns of light.

  But she is dead.

  If I look long enough at a flower, I can see the color of her cheeks in the stigma.

  But she is not here.

  Peter comes to New York to decide what we are going to do. This magnitude of decision cannot be made over the phone; that is the one thing we agree on.

  I leave work early to pick him up from the airport. When we get back to my place, I make us steaks. Halfway into cooking them, I realize that iron is one of those tastes pregnancy will make me abhor. He eats his steak and mine and we barely speak. I just sit there and watch him chew. I eat cereal.

  We sit on the small floral couch in my living room, his hands wrapped around my waist. He lowers his head to my lap, his nose nuzzling my belly. I tell him that I’m afraid I won’t be a good mother, but I’m also afraid that I’ll let the time pass by, and I’ll never become a mother at all. We look up phone numbers and procedures on the Internet, and I tell him about the time with Aminah in college. I cry myself asleep in his arms.

  On Saturday, we go through all our finances. Peter’s job is junior level. His pay is barely comfortable for a single person. He says he can leave the position, find a job in finance or at a bank. I see how sad this makes him l
ook and tell him that he doesn’t need to. He tells me he has $1,000 in the bank, but he has just finished paying off his loans. The last part he says with such uncamouflaged pride, I can only sigh. My job keeps me afloat, but, living in New York City, I have no money left for savings. This brings us to another topic: Where will we live? I realize that one of the things I love so much about him might end up being the thing that keeps us apart: He loves Portland. And I love the East Coast. Neither of us will easily give up our respective homes.

  The Sunday is beautiful, sunny and warm, and I wake late in the day to find Peter still sleeping next to me. In the noon light, I think I finally see him fully. He isn’t a spectacular man. He isn’t someone my father or even Aminah would be impressed with. My mother would lament his lack of upper-body strength and bank account. “Despite what you preach, Thandi,” she would say, “you have expensive tastes.” He is an ordinary man. He slowly stirs awake, smiling impossibly at me, as if we have been transported back in time, weeks before this situation occurred.

  We don’t speak of the pregnancy today, but instead spend the daylight hours strolling around New York’s parks arm in arm. Peter has never been to the city before. He is surprised by the amount of green space we have and insists we hit up at least three parks. He marvels at every bit of nature as if it’s a rare find. “You have squirrels here?” he exclaims as we see one dart by. By the end of the day, he is annoyed with them.