The question of the body

Quick housekeeping note: I initially thought the pay-what-you-can subscription would be ready for you today, but alas, there are some tech issues I’m still waiting to hear back on. Thanks so much for your grace and patience with the slower pace of this transition, and for being here with me, particularly for today’s more tender letter <3

My dear reader.

It has now been 39 days since my father died. 

He died in the early morning hours before dawn, and the phone tree went like this: hospice called my brother, my brother called our other brother, and then he called me. It was 5:40am when my phone rang.

From the morning that my father died I only remember three things:

One. The initial slowness; the feeling of struggling to lift the weight of my own body out of bed; the heaviness of each limb; the mattress as quicksand. How would I get up when my father could not.

Two. Making my way downstairs; the shuffling sound of my bare feet against the wood floor; having to actually say the words — my dad is dead — out loud, first to my partner, Gent, who was standing in the kitchen, and then to my beloved friend, Cody, who was sitting on the living room couch. 

Three. Gripping my phone in my hand, staring down at it, knowing I needed to call my mother to tell her the news but suddenly feeling angry, so fucking angry, that I had to call her instead of the other way around, the decades-long arc of parentification finally reaching its peak now that it was my job to do this, that as her only child it had to be me, had to be me, always always had to be me.

Grief is a mist of the mind, I’ve learned. It settles unevenly over the moments and the memories, holding some in stark detail, bright and crisply outlined and easy to recall, while others fade away even as they happen, leaving holes, dark and obscured, nothing remaining in the gap.

The day after my father died the mist of my grief-mind worked like this: I could think of nothing, literally nothing, other than the fact of his body, and of how it was deteriorating in a room somewhere.

A refrigerated room most likely, I thought, or whatever kind of space exists at a hospice house to hold one’s body while one’s family fills out the paperwork of death, all the tedious admin required by the state, the funeral home, the crematorium. Those tasks were being done by me, by my brothers, and all the while our dad was… what?

I laid in bed that morning, the first full day of my life without my father, and I curled in a little ball on my side, comforter pulled up to the chin. There would be no getting up that morning, I decided. Getting up was for people whose dads who were not just dead bodies in a room. So I asked Gent to sit with me, and to tell me from his past work experience of digging graves at a cemetery, about the specific details of what would happen next. My father had chosen cremation, but what did that actually mean? What happened first? How hot was the machine, and what was it called, a kiln? Is a kiln just for pottery or is it also for death? What does cremation smell like? Did every part of the body actually burn down into ashes, and if not what happened to the rest of it? This might seem like a disturbing line of questioning to you, but a greater understanding of the reality of the process was the only thing that soothed me even a little that day, the firm knowledge of what had to happen for my father to stop being just a dead body in a room somewhere. 

That is the one phrase I could not stop fixating on, could not stop saying out loud — dead body in a room dead body in a room dead body in a room.

Two days after my father died I opened my front door with no plan, no direction, and found myself walking as hard and as fast as I could for four straight miles, to a coffee shop where I chugged a large iced tea (my second of the morning, something I never do as a person who is very sensitive to caffeine), and then I speed-walked those same four miles back home, over-caffeinated to the point where I felt both nauseated and electrified, the boundaries of my body becoming looser, melting into the air around me, an experience of having flown too close to the sun.

As I walked I said to myself, this is the opposite of being a dead body in a room. I said it over and over. Something about that was calming to me. Walking fast, walking faster, the heat, the sweat, the pulse. The muscles in my legs, working working working, that roiling sick feeling of too much stimulant in my system, the joy and agony of embodiment in every breath.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about so much this year: embodiment. 

The experience (the blessing? the curse?) of how in order to exist in this world we must exist in a body, and how in a body there is pain and in a body there is pleasure. In a body there is everything. And once that body is gone — once you get the phone call to go to the crematorium and pick up the singular box that now contains all that remains of the body of your loved one — then what?

My father died at a time when I was already acutely focused on the questions of the body. Personally, through the lens of gender (what even is it? what is it for me?) and of endurance athletics (what am I capable of? how far and how fast might I one day be able go?). And then politically too, where the question of the body screams from within the unconscionable horrors and ever-mounting injustice of which bodies are safe from the violence of the state and which are not. 

We cannot escape the fact that we exist at the level of our bodies, is what I am saying. Not that the mind and the spirit aren’t there, aren’t real, aren’t relevant. Of course, of course. But the body — we must fiercely protect each other’s bodies if we have any hope of being free. 

**

More soon,

Nic