Grief Is the Thing with Fins

“We are fifty feet out to sea being chewed away by sadness.”

-Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers

While the steaming hot water pelts my tired skin, I think of the Mother Orca Tahlequah of the Southern Puget Sound Orca Tribe. For weeks she has carried the body of her dead baby on her back. I feel the twinge in my stomach, that awful twisted wrench of a feeling. I imagine myself crouched down in the water, resting on my knees, and crying it out. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to have love bring you to your knees, but my body can no longer go there. I don’t curl up in the right way anymore. My angles are off. I have no knees to fall to. Like Tahlequah, I must carry the grief upon my back. I must show it to the world.

When the articles first began, a couple of days into Mother Orca’s journey, the newspapers called it a “complex grieving ritual.” As if it was something that generations of orcas had passed on, from mother to mother. A sort of death dance.

This is not a ritual. It is not complex. This is the most basic of things. It is loss so profound and startling that it has taken away our collective breath. Grief distilled into its purest form. This has stirred up everyone’s old wounds. We are all watching in silence, enraptured by a reflection so startling in its revelation of our mutual connection to one another. All of us lost. All of us grieving in the dark.

I want to hold Tahlequah’s grief inside my bare and tender hands but, instead of curling up and crying like I might do, falling into the pound, pound, pounding of it, I turn to literature. I begin shoveling books off the shelf. I pull up Google, find poems, paintings, children’s drawings. Everything around us has turned blue. Even the fires ripping through our woods, our trees, our towns. We are all dipped into the tangible blue sorrow. I want to see reflections of her grief. How can words breach the distance between the love and the loss of something? I imagine the way my dog shakes violently when people shoot fireworks off nearby. It feels like she is going to vibrate out of her own body. She pushes and digs at my bare skin, clawing at my body, trying to climb inside, to burrow into one being, our bodies untogether. Our bodies touching, but not quite one. The Mother Orca clasping onto her dead child, curled around the tips of her fins, hoisted up into the light, seeking to meld together for the rest of time. Two bodies in one body. But not anymore.

A couple of years ago I went to see a close friend perform a one-act play. The stage was empty and dark, save for the depiction of a little room with two white walls and a bed. My friend stood up, pleading to the darkened room. Please, see my grief. My empty belly. The place where a baby was and is no longer. The empty shadow of a seed. A year prior to that performance, this friend had aborted the baby of a man she loved who didn’t love her. Or who did love her, but not in the way she deserved to be loved, the way she needed to be loved. There was an all-encompassing passion, then there was nothing. She was acting.

I was inside the woman’s pain: the loss of a child; the child she would never have. I felt inside her real grief. Did she regret all those days she would never have small hands clasped around her finger, steadily growing bigger? I was moved by something I may write out and then bury again, deep into the soil of my thighs: my unbaby, forever untogether. A girl or a boy, who’s to say, comes for me in my sleep. After my ectopic rupture pregnancy, after I nearly died, my grandmother sent a card: “Sorry for the loss of your baby.” A dark laugh caught in my throat. There was never any baby. The egg and sperm tried to come together but they exploded. There was never anything, never even a heartbeat. “How insensitive,” we said. What we meant to say is How dare you. How could you. Keep your apologies out of our pain. If I had died my Mother would have become Mother Orca, me, almost the baby on her back. Me, a motherless mother. Never even held a heartbeat in my hands.

On social media I ask, “Where were you when you first learned of the Mother Orca? What did you experience?” Hours passed. No one responded. Was no one willing to show me their pain? Americans fear grief and death. It’s the seedy underbelly and the ultimate act of autonomy. It proves something to us that we don’t want to know: that we will all come to an end. We are not almighty powerful beings. In the end, there are no bootstraps with which we can hoist ourselves up. We are not machines. Our bodies can’t be lifted with a lever, fixed with a little oil in between the seams.

We must save the whale from herself, from her grief. We must get her food. She is emaciated. Do we take the baby from her, so that she can move on? The online world hashes out its endless commentary on someone else’s pain. The ferocity of grief, wet and tense shoulders, bodies pushing through a sea of tears.

What if I had told someone? What if I had said? I wanted that baby. I had prayed for that baby on more than one occasion. Not always for the right reasons. Not always for the wrong. She visits me in my sleep. She is blonde with bright blue eyes. She didn’t get her eyes from me. Her face a shadow. I know her as mine. She takes my hand. I’ll carry her on my back into the night. A Mother Orca with no fins to carry my pain through the moonlight.

I wonder what my mom felt as my heart rate dropped on the heart monitor. Or when they wheeled me back on a stretcher behind those cold white swinging doors. Who was she in the moment of my death? Was my whole life collected, momentarily, in the palm of her hands? Did she experience, again, my hasty birth. My bottle rocket late exit. The expulsion of so much life? When she chanted, “Shilo, you have to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe,” was she speaking for both of us?

I wonder what it was like to be my mom driving her son back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge, two small girls and her baby boy, tubes in his nose, going to and from endless doctor’s appointments for the same pneumonia that I was afflicted with in childhood. Only my brother’s much worse. Our illnesses coming for us before we had a chance to form sentences, to make muscles into memory, to form our own steel backbones.

My sister birthed her son, carved open there on the operating table, and they found she was losing too much blood. What happened inside my mom? What happened? Did her heart freeze? Did she imagine clasping her hands tightly over the wound, the life-giving gaping teeth that had sanctioned her oldest daughter’s stomach as the only viable exit?

I will never ask her these things. I can only say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I never meant to be the thing someone loves so fiercely that when they are driving and they slam on the brakes, their first instinct is to fling an arm across my chest to keep me from crashing into glass, going bodily into the night. So far, my mom hasn’t had the misfortune of experiencing the death of any of her children, just a slow, tense series of losses.

When something comes from your body there is no taking it back. Tahlequah holds on to an unfathomable death. I’ve never been afraid of my own pain. I only seek to stop the death of everyone and everything I love. I want us all to be unending, but sometimes, there is never even a heartbeat. The heartbeat is gone. It’s gone. It’s gone, and it never existed, but it’s alive. It is inside all of us.

When the rain falls, I think of you. When the rain doesn’t fall I think of you. Smear your pain, a long campaign trail of tears, across our oceans. Everyone has lost something from a love like this, but your loss is your own. They can’t take it from you. It’s not theirs to take. Children of the earth return to the earth. Nothing is owned. Nothing is forgiven. Nothing is wasted or lasting or without desire. We are all a lonely mother orca, our lights petering out with each rising dawn. 

There is no graveyard for me to visit. No plaque with a name on it. There is only that Pacific Oregon ocean. Frothy, gray, swirling. There are only dreams. There never was a heartbeat. I do not know that kind of pain. My breast unexposed. There is no ghost orphan. No whale on my back. My shoulders tight but untouched, never-before climbed on, never carried a weight as thick as Mother Orca’s. My weight is my own. Mother Orca’s grief is her own. We can only watch as she carries it. The weight of all our world. Her grief is not a shame. Love is not shame. Love is not shame.

“It’s okay that my illness keeps me from having children, in more ways than one,” I tell people. “At least I’m not someone who spent my whole life dreaming of becoming a mother.”

“I never wanted children,” I say.

I never wanted them.

Somewhere in the water waves crash against a body.

-Shilo Niziolek

Shilo Niziolek is an Oregon based writer. Her work has appeared in the Porter House Review, Broad River Review, SLAB, Litro Magazine, Oregon Humanities, and The Clackamas Literary Review, among others. She has twice been awarded residencies with The Trillium Project Spring Creek Retreat. Instagram: Shiloniziolek. Twitter: @shiloniziolek.