Article by Addie Dodge Art by Isabella Hageman
My future comes in an email. And my future comes with fine print. There’s an ultimatum on my future that makes deciding anything difficult.
When my future came in an email, there was a brief breath of relief, of yes, good, this is good, good that there is, in fact, a place for me when I graduate in May. And somewhere between that inhale, exhale, and the next, I started crying. Something was ripping apart inside of me, viscera pulling at the seams, splitting open. Something numb, something very old muscling into motion. My shoes were on and my jacket too and I was already out the door as the sobs continued to break. Fight or flight, and flight seemed like the best option because you can’t really fight an email telling you to decide on your future by January 8th.
Even in the midst of my stumbling, snotting stupor out into the bleak slush of melting snow, I knew that I was upset about something beneath the skin, something that only barely had to do with my future in an email. Upset that I had less than a month to say yes or no, sure, that. But that tearing thing, that torn, toothsome thing, that gnawing ache in my gut, was something else. A new flavor of grief, that he isn’t here to see and speak to the bullshit of this future alongside me.
It was a cloudy day, one of those rare blankets of gloom dripping down over the jutted lip of the mountains and covering everything dark and dull. The sun hadn’t come out all day, the snow was starting to scab over into ice on the ground. And I walked, and I cried, and somewhere in the swirl of that, fingers of light started to thread through. And believe me, I know how bullshit-woo-woo-Jesus-freak this sounds. It has nothing to do with Jesus, I assure you. The sun came out, and the cynical part of me feels embarrassed to even type this, but it was a visceral knowledge that it was some thread, some filament of him made present and made real. He was there. He was there watching me bitch and moan about him not being there. And I kept walking, and some part of my mind was watching this happen, freaking out all the while because I knew this was different than anything I had felt before. You could make saints out of that feeling. Like relief, like a hand held out, palm held up for you to rest yours in. Like seeing and being seen, that kind of relief.
By the time I got home, my fingers stiff with cold and my face frozen under a thin pall of snot and salt, I was calm. I was still crying, but I was calm, for the first time in a long time.
Curled over my phone, I told a friend of mine all of this over a blubbering voice memo, along with a memory that floated up to the surface. I was around eight years old, and my family was visiting a friend of my parents. A man with two boys and a wife who died in her sleep, sudden and shocking. I was in the car with that man and his two boys, watching a river sighing alongside the curving stretch of road we were driving on. Wyoming, thin air and crisp blue and green, and the sun doing that holy thing, that threading thing from behind a perfect fold of cloud, sending plaits of light to lay over the land. And the older boy, I think he was five, in a voice plain with conviction and belief told everyone to look, because there was his mom in those plaits of light. A child of avowed atheists, I kept my lips pointedly thin and closed, but I do remember some part of me, that human part that wants, thinking that it must be nice to believe something like that so certainly. Surely, that man with the wife who died in her sleep worked very diligently to instill that belief in his boys, a sort of survival mechanism. I half-understood it then, but I feel it deeply now. We are meaning-making creatures after all, and death is not known to abide by our need for cause and effect, for effective explanation.
His funeral was last January, and I watched it on the small screen of my phone while everyone was over there, and I was still here. I couldn’t get over there, where everyone else flocked to, because I was here and I was sick, sick, sick, the cruelest joke of all. I watched my friend get buried over YouTube. And friend feels like such a failing word, flimsy, thin, and not the whole of the truth. Know that I mean something very genuine when I say friend, something deep beneath the skin. And that something deep beneath the skin was puckering and hissing up to the surface as I started walking through the doldrums of suburbia, scrubbing hard at stray salt on my cheeks and sniffing up snot like a broken doll.
When he died, and when there were new phone numbers of new people to check on, and be checked on by, still an implied lean on one another, shuffling through the immediate aftermath in a strange coagulation of a crutch, I was told by a few of these new people that they could feel him with them. He was coming to them in dreams, how nice. He was coming to them in deer and rabbits and birds, how nice. He was coming to them in a slant of light that looked like God on the living room rug, how nice. I smiled, nodded, and cried when they cried, but my tears were from frustration. No, thanks, I couldn’t feel him at all. I would stop in my tracks and stare at every squirrel I came across on campus, sometimes even asking him, a thick flush of shame as I muttered a desperate plea for him to show me a sign. The squirrels paid me no mind, and sleep was dreamless.
The thing that most people won’t admit about grief is that most of the time, it feels like anger. I have been very angry for almost a year because anger feels better than the hurt of the truth. It’s not sadness, not mute enough or dull enough to be called sadness. It’s obliteration of a particular kind. It’s a pure blade of pain that is constant, that you build muscle around eventually, making it hurt less until it twists itself again inside you and you’re bleeding out anew. I was bleeding out again, thinking about my future in an email, and longing like a child for him to be here and he’s not and he’s dead and there’s the truth, a thumb dug into the wound, twist and pull.
It seemed like everyone else was being touched by an angel, and I was stuck rotting in my anger. I think, at the most basic level, that religion offers us somewhere to set that anger down. The light became something other than light, and my anger was transfigured along with it.
What I felt and sensed that day on my walk can be called by another name, like most holy things. Divine turned disease. I think of saints receiving visions from God, and the thin line that separates the sacred from the insane. Delusions, thought insertion, the suggestion of a mind starting to unravel. I think mine already has. I think I’m trying to stitch it back together with something that tastes like faith.
Let me make something clear. This isn’t me saying I’ve started going to church, to temple, to whatever place of worship you might name. This isn’t me saying I’ve become a devotee, making a martyr out of my grief. What I am doing is making a religion for myself in order to keep myself alive. I am choosing to believe in sacred over insane.
Nick Cave, a musician who lost both of his sons unexpectedly, obliteratingly, said that religion is spirituality with rigor. An active participation, a belief in something outside the realm of logic and cynicism, and an active maintenance of that belief. It’s a choice to believe that he was there, is here in some strange way. And it goes down much sweeter to think it holy, rather than hallucination.
Grief releases you from a lot of shame. You will do things in grief that you would have balked at previously. Sometimes I ask him to turn stoplights green and it works about as well as random probability allows it to. Sometimes I’m walking on campus and I see the back of a head that looks like his and I stop breathing long enough to remind myself of the impossibility of that. Visions and signs and building a religion out of them, some vague belief made out of juvenile logic that there is something else, that this is as simple, as painless as him stepping out of the frame, still here in some other way.
People pray when bad shit happens, and make answers for themselves out of religion. People get angry when bad shit happens, and hand that anger over to faith. I am trying to do these things. Some of the time, I get it right. Most of the time, I fail and fall back into cynicism. I wake up with my teeth clenched and I stomp around in something close to an existential temper tantrum. In case you were wondering, yes, I am really fun at parties.
This religious, religion thing is an experiment for a cynic, reformed. But I still stop for the squirrels, craning my neck to watch them dip and bob, people parting around the freak stuck in the middle of the sidewalk, interpreting life as a sign in and of itself. I am often late to class because of this.
Sorry, my friend was there. Sorry, the squirrel looked back that time. There are exactly no cultures that consider squirrels holy. Jury’s still out.