AS SUMMER APPROACHES, I often find myself feeling tender and raw. The world warms up, the prairifire crabapple trees begin to drop their blossoms in almost technicolor puddles on the sidewalks in my neighborhood and, as if in concert, the base of my neck gets heavy and sore. I cry more easily, start dreaming about childhood; my own gaze doubled in lakes and mirrors; or phone calls where I recognize the voice on the other end of the line, can hear the urgency, but can’t make out the words. My body always knows the time of year before I make the connection. It’s almost our birthday. It always seems to me that my grief should lessen as the years go by, the farther we get from the brief flash of my identical twin sister’s life, the little collection of hours when she was breathing in the world.
But it doesn’t lessen. Instead, the unwieldy injustice of her absence increases with every year she doesn’t get: the whole fabric of our girlhood, the years in our twenties when she might have dyed her hair, started law school, picked up smoking—though that would have been a bad idea with our preemie lungs—maybe gotten married young, or trekked through Asia, or not gone anywhere at all, because her fragile body made it too hard, but watched the sun rise and set over the red clay mountains where we were raised. And, though this feels almost shameful to admit at nearly thirty-four, when we’re long past the time we would have been certain to live our lives shoulder to shoulder, every year it feels more absurd that I’m supposed to live in the world without her.
“To think of you,” writes Sandra Lim, “is to the have the sense that I will never be seen / by anyone who has language / again.” I read and reread these lines as we prepared this summer’s issue of Image; I’ve only ever really known my sister as an imagination, a site of grief, and I can’t account rationally for how closely Lim’s lines hew to my own experience of loss. But there’s something in that break before “again” and the alternate reality it conjures, ghostly on its own line, that makes me think, Yes, this exactly, I’ll never be completely comprehended. “Truth, exceed fact,” just as Lim says.
And this is, I think, what’s so fascinating and singular about grief. That it can be at once specific enough to wind you, almost shockingly particular in the way it takes shape, and also absolutely universal. There is no one in the world whom it doesn’t reach eventually, sometimes in the shape of one “thin coyote / panting in a dust-choked crater,” as in Seth Clabough’s poem “So What?” Sometimes in a throng of hundreds of dark birds collected around their dead for a crow funeral, as in Ashleigh Elser’s essay “Death Is in Thy Croak.” Together, much of the work in this issue constructs a kind of taxonomy of grief and grieving. Not a hierarchy of suffering, but a tapestry of how we live carrying the inevitable knowledge of loss: beloveds gone and estranged; marriages frayed at the seams until they disintegrate; species dwindling; death witnessed up close and at a distance in newspaper headlines; of our own mortality, increasingly concrete.
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In her essay “Mothership,” Rhody Walker-Lenow writes of her obsession with the story of God’s great flood, beginning with the Sunday-school teacher who read her “a story about paired-up animals and a mighty storm” from a colorful children’s Bible. She’s been reading flood narratives for years—Genesis, Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish—but has “drawn no especially satisfying conclusions.” The story, she tells us, “rests on so many borders: land and sea, saved and unsaved, right and wrong—and it’s never clear to me which side God is on.” And yet she keeps rereading, drives five hundred miles to rural Kentucky in the ninety-seven-degree heat of July to see a replica of Noah’s ark, hunting for the answer to a single question: “How could God have done this?”
This a question I have to imagine nearly anyone faithful, or anyone trying to be—working to hang on to both the solace and the discipline of belief—has asked themselves more than once: as they miss someone desperately, as they hear their slowly dying father bang confusedly around the halls at night, like the protagonist in Andrew Porter’s story “Home,” or as they read, like artist Indira Urrutia Zúñiga, that a child is dying every ten minutes in Gaza. Haunted by the statistic, she turned toward her practice:
So I knit ten tears, each one flowering. A gesture of mourning, but also of life continuing. I installed them with an altar where people could leave messages. Some wrote prayers. Some left blank notes. Others simply touched the tears. That moment became communal. It wasn’t mine anymore.
Grieving, she reminds us, contains ongoingness and, when shared, the potential for something communal: If we’re grieving together, something is still happening. But meanwhile, the question How could God have done this? contains another mirrored one: How could we have done this?
It’s with this question in mind that writer and illustrator Martha Park has been reading Bible stories to her children. When she reads the version of Jonah and the whale that her son loves to pick up in the pediatrician’s office, she edits as she goes. “I’d never tell him the story this way,” she tells me in our conversation, a version where God was so angry he roiled the seas into a giant storm. A version where, “to appease God and make him happy, the sailors had to sacrifice this man.” The storybook makes her “cognizant of how many people see natural events as God’s voice speaking to us or God’s judgment on us,” but she feels an increasing conviction that, if anything, accelerating natural disasters and other “effects of climate change are messages from us to us.”
Sometimes, the cause of our grief isn’t a mystery. In Terry Nguyen’s “Fraying at the Seams,” though her marriage appears to unravel overnight, she knows that “the cause of the blight had been festering in the relationship’s roots.” In Porter’s “Home,” the main character hasn’t seen or spoken to his father for nearly two years after a protracted argument, and knows only fragmented details of his father’s condition that his sister reports over the telephone. A war rages; a habitat is felled. There’s an awful lot of loss that, at least in some great measure, we are culpable for.
Grief has so many component parts, many of them intertwined and buried: Sorrow yoked to responsibility. To doubt. To rage, and dreaming, attention, and desire. To devotion and gratitude. All of it tangled with the way memory warps and frays, the particulars that persist: rosewood from a dream of another time, still fragrant on the fingers of a bewildered child in Christopher Nelson’s “Parable.”
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I weighed just slightly more than my sister when we were born. She was the one deprived of amniotic fluid, and so I am the one who got the world: in all its terror and glory, sadness, and shining from shook foil. I’m the one who got live oaks, and rug burn, and cider donuts, libraries, and the soft, unthinkable fuzz of lambs; global warming; clinical depression; the wind off the water; the heat of a loved-one’s face buried in your hair. I wish her back into our world most days of the week, more steadily than any prayer: wish that she could comfort our mother late at night; watch our nephews play “super-secret spy decoders,” hurling their little bodies around the room, occupied in some intricate imagination. I wish for the tiniest, most inconsequential things: that I could send her a picture of my dog’s sweet face, show her the shamelessly fragrant honeysuckle spilling out onto the street, call her to compare the new threads of silver in our hair.
I’m acutely aware, though, that the life I’m conjuring for her is almost entirely an imagined one, that the real body I’m wishing her back into would almost certainly cause her a great deal of suffering—spastic, unrelenting, and oxygen-deprived—and that the world she’d be returning to is one suffused with griefs much larger than my own individual sorrows. An unjust fallen world, far too often flooded or on fire. But I’ve been grieving my sister my whole conscious life, and so maybe it isn’t a surprise to say that grieving her is part of how I love the world, in all its profound difficulty. That I grieve her in part because I love it, and want to offer it to her. Want to offer her, even, the chance to feel agony. To miss someone, or something. To grieve.
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In early May, the poet Martha Silano passed away from ALS. I’m deeply honored that her poem “To-Do List” begins this issue, an unblinking, concretized, extraordinary record of her grief at dying: “worn, bleached, jagged. Holy, / holey, and whole.” In it, she writes: “It will never be / June in my spine.”
It’s June now, and those of us who are still here are lucky to have her language. To be here: little, brief, and breathing. To grieve together, and go on.
Image: JSB Co. for Unsplash+
