Mother Matter by Miel Sloan
1. Matter
“Material substance that occupies space, has mass, and is composed
predominantly of atoms” (Merriam Webster).
2018: physicists found sound waves carry small amounts of mass.1
What space does a voice occupy?
While he grew in your womb, your voice wove itself into his body.
When the newborn heard that voice he turned toward you, tongue
in and out.
In particle physics, a collision “can mean two protons glide through
each other.” If they “resonate in just the right way . . . they will sing
their own tune in response – by producing new particles.”2
His first cry in the hospital – the cry of separation, of new life – tugged at your diaphragm.
The mass of all his cries since has lodged deep in your lungs, the cilia gripping instead of sweeping away.
Which voice do you hear when you glance at the photo of him with the monkey in Gibraltar? Do you hear that ten-year-old boy calling for you at 700 miles per hour, the speed of sound?
That boy is eclipsed by the seventeen-year-old insisting you stop babbling to his boyfriend about how excited he was to sit on the ground, knees to chest, about two feet from that monkey. “Look at my long hair. What kind of mother would let her son look so ugly?” By thirteen, his hair was too short for wind to mess. His cheekbones high. His eyes like steel staring you down.
In your favorite pic, his face is still full and round. Age four, skeleton costume, hands on hips and sealed-lip-grin straight into the camera. He seemed happy. Then.
Despite 45-minute tantrums. Despite the day he smeared his shit along your bedroom wall. Despite his insisting you join the children at every park, every party, every potluck. If you were beyond touching distance, it was as if sirens blared in his brain, belting out find her, find her.
What’s the matter if he can’t touch you?
The matter? “The formless substratum of all things which exists only
potentially and upon which form acts to produce realities” (Merriam-
Webster).
The formless substratum defies certainty.
A mother in the distance might be no more than a painting from an earlier century. But if he can graze a mother’s fingers, if he can feel her breath as light as a brushstroke, then he can know she is real.
During the night he ran to your bed trembling, crying about drowning in a far-off ocean.
Every night he rubbed your veiny wrist as he fell asleep picking at your chafed skin.
He still holds your hand when distressed, still calls for your help with that shaky voice.
The voice of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is an event horizon, that space around a black hole from which nothing can escape.
You try to pull him back from the horizon’s edge with absurd humor. In a Target parking lot, in between hotel check-out and flight, he waited in the car as you purchased him underwear because he was certain nothing in the luggage was clean, and he couldn’t possibly sit through a flight or walk into a store with pants and no underwear. And this was “your fault” for not doing laundry because you were hunched over a toilet after eating eggs with salmonella.
You returned to the car, tossed the Hanes onto his lap, and said, “Damn prudes. What business is it of theirs if I want to buy men’s underwear? So the woman at the register asks why I’m buying boxers, and I say, my clit is so large, I can’t fit in women’s panties. Then she blushes a bright red because it turns out I’m on the loudspeaker.”
He’s laughing. Maybe for five minutes this joke can eclipse intrusive
thoughts.
The brain is a mass of 86 billion neurons.
On average, it weighs only three pounds.
But the gravitational force of thought can add weight to just about any situation:
His room: a landmine of bags and boxes he can’t throw out because he may need the receipts in them, and though you’ve given him an envelope for receipts, he must keep this clutter “just in case.” There are probably two pounds of plastic bags.
The weight of all the food he tosses out because it has bones and skin, because it’s one day past the best by date, because it has too much fat, or because the latest Rx makes him nauseated. In a year, he easily threw out two hundred pounds of food.
This is how his individual substratum produces realities.
Realities can be produced.
Reality: “correspondence to fact” (Oxford English Dictionary).
What are the facts of the matter?
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, high end of severe.
Major depressive disorder.
Generalized anxiety disorder.
Body dysmorphic disorder. 6’4” 128 pounds.
ADHD, inattentive type.
Repeated mumblings: It is? I’m sorry. It is? I can’t continue like this.
Should I feel guilty?For what? Suffering?
I’m sorry. Cigarette in hand. Cell in the other. Should I feel guilty? App addiction. Anonymous men posing as teens. Produced realities on an iPhone.
Etymology of matter: Latin: materia meaning “wood, timber . . . de-
noting the trunk of the tree regarded as the ‘mother’ of its offshoots”
(Oxford English Dictionary).
Matter: change one vowel and it’s German for mother.
Mother Matter, what is the heart of the matter?
He wants
to die.
2. Can
Take matters into your own hands, Mother Matter. Devote every second to preventing his suicide. Shake open a used grocery sack and fill it up with the meds that failed – Prozac, Lexapro, Celexa, Luvox, Elavil, Zoloft, Risperidone . . .
Did you almost overlook the 800 capsule Ibuprofen? Forget your arthritis. Sleep aids? You think you can risk deep sleep and failing to call 911? No REM during code red.
Watch your moisturizer shatter in the sink as you sweep your hand along the top shelf feeling for stray pills. Toss the shards of glass in the sharp objects sack. While you’re in the bathroom, empty the trash can of anything sharp. Toss the razors. Don’t even keep one in the gym bag in the car. Shaving is a luxury.
And the scissors. Two in the bathroom! Pills you can dump in the pharmacy slot for expired meds. The sharp objects sack – triple bag it – fling it in a dumpster several blocks away.
You can do this. Can: able, capable.
Etymology: Sanskrit and Greek meaning to know (Oxford English Dictionary).
What do you know? You’ve read countless peer reviewed studies and books recommended by therapists who’ve failed to help him live in his skin without picking at it.
What you know: not a single day has passed since his birth without images of him: age two collecting cicada shells on a hike; age sixteen people-watching at the drive-thru pharmacy. “Look at her. I need to make a film about South Side fashionistas.” He held his stomach, laughing at the middle-aged woman standing at the drive-thru wearing pajamas with pink polar bears. With his phone he zoomed in on her flaming red curls clumped into pillow dips along her head as she screamed at the intercom: “I don’t have all fucking day.”
If you fail at preventing his suicide, the most important job of your life . . . you try to imagine what it would be like to grow old without new memories of him at twenty, thirty, forty . . .
Can: “permitted by conscience” (Merriam Webster). Your conscience burns for being selfish enough to think about your own future in his absence.
His conscience permits only self-harm, punishing him for imagining he’s hurt others. “I can’t have pleasure,” he cries, tears streaming down his face.
If only you could lock intrusive thoughts inside a hermetically sealed can.
Can (kan), the receptacle, is matter.
In I Ching, K’an (translation: “plunging in”)3 is water
which is a receptacle.
When he was eight, you gave him your hand in a riptide at Jones Beach. He clung to you so tightly, he could’ve drug you under. You pointed to nearby waves heading toward shore. “In a few minutes we’ll be close enough to swim to them. Just relax into the tug. Float on your back. Look.” You pointed at seagulls. “Imagine if we could touch the sky like they do.”
He asked, “How do they never fall?”
When he was eight, you told him whom to call, after 911, if he ever found you unconscious.
A motherless child. A childless mother. Both involve scorching the core with a branding iron.
Mental illness is its own branding iron.
Speculation: in the 12th century can meant a hollow, a depression (Oxford English Dictionary).
Does your depressed teen see suicide as a plunge into hollowing himself?
No can do. Nothing in the Milky Way is hollow. Atomic physics means empty space cannot exist. Annihilation is simply particles and antiparticles turning back into pure energy.
Can (Ken) is the energy required to station yourself on his bed for hours as he holds your hand in between his while he weeps.
In I Ching, Ken is the mountain (translation: “keeping still”).4
Though your body can still, thoughts race around your brain like particles colliding. Would he steal pills from a friend’s medicine chest? Would he grind a pen into his wrist? Did you count all the knives? Twelve in the knife block, out in the open, twelve sirens calling to him.
Can (Ken) is dropping them in a dumpster blocks away after he falls asleep.
Take one you may need to prepare food and wrap it in layers: pillowcases tied into knots. Stick them way in the bottom and back of 97 your closet under books you plunged into when he fell asleep and you could not.
3. Not
An honors student. No prior history of truancy, bullying, law-breaking, or even disrespect.
Symptoms:
• Not showing up for classes.
• Not eating.
• Not exercising.
• Not able to stop reading the same phrases and sentences twenty times in a row.
• Not able to exit rooms without circling perimeters five times.
• Not able to type without deleting and retyping seven times.
• Not able to purchase a pair of pants without returning and exchanging two plus times.
• Not able to shower without rituals he calls seven-nine-seventwo involving natural soap, sulfate-free shampoo, acne
scrubs, and multiple towels he must wash after each use.
• Not able to drive because the possibility that he could kill someone with a car means that each time he’s behind
the wheel he must replay the experience envisioning all the drivers, passengers, pedestrians, pets, and wildlife he
may have killed.
• Not . . .
this list is so long only a physicist could calculate the energy required to not.
Not: “negation; negative particle” (Oxford English Dictionary).
Electrons (negative particles) orbit the nucleus.
The latest obsession: a new boyfriend, an art project, shopping – just spin the roulette wheel – becomes the nucleus.
We are “a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns.”5
He’s spent about forty hours working on a sketch that’s almost finished when his compulsive erasing tears it. The rest of the day, he sits in a chair, arms folded and head down as he rocks and, with his nails, swipes along the artery of his left wrist. That night trigger points at your joints swell like burls on a tree. This is how trees respond to 98 stress: an infection, a flood, a drought, an axe or a chainsaw, and the base becomes knobby.
March 2021: bloating, nausea, occasional vomiting. May 2021: asthma so bad you visit urgent care three times. June 2021: ultrasound shows fluid in your left middle finger, the bone at the middle knuckle has moved over ½ a centimeter from the bone below. Joint like a double knot.
Stephen Hawking: “. . . if you take Einstein’s general relativity seriously, one must allow for the possibility that spacetime ties itself into knots and that information gets lost in the folds.”6
Why didn’t you hear in his voice, back in middle school . . . the pleading? Did I hurt the dog? I backed into her leg. I didn’t mean to. She turned and I was there. Did I hurt her? No answer appeased these obsessions that lasted for days.
You must’ve brought it up to his therapist, but you don’t remember any follow-through. If you plan to blame yourself, this is important. If you intend to help him now, it is not.
There are yards of rope in the basement where he could hang himself from beams.
Remove them from the top drawer of the paint-splattered worktable where he soldered metal wires onto a canvas. He used the screwdriver to deconstruct old cameras, then attached the lens, keypads, and motherboards to the canvas. He was so proud of his Dada art piece for the middle school study of WWI. When he stepped out of the car and reached for it, the lightbulbs he hung from the soldered wire tapped, shattering the bottom of one bulb. “Nooo, I’m so clumsy. How could I do this?” The tears welled.
“Sweetheart, it’s even better now.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“No. Look. One light bulb intact, one jagged. That’s closer to Dada.”
Cars were lining up behind you for the drop off. He tilted his head, his eyes studying it from multiple angles. “It is.”
“Act like you did it on purpose.”
That afternoon he bragged about his teacher hanging that piece up for the whole class to discuss. “The teacher said he’s keeping it up all year.”
Who can solve this brokenness?
You call the psychiatrist and current therapist about his suicidal tendencies. In pandemic land, they switched to teletherapy. Can they see, on screen, how much weight he’s lost? How can they perform Exposure and Response Therapy (ERP), which requires them to expose the patient to anxiety-producing stimuli while preventing the patient from acting out their compulsions?
The therapist guides him but cannot see him in the camera as ERP requires him to move around. He feels lost in the ether. How can he know that individual is present if he can’t smell their shampoo or feel the warmth of their hand as they pass him a tissue?
The ether is not real. Physicists have known that for over one hundred years.
We are mass and energy. We are knucklebones and water. We are receptacles. We are knots. We are difficult to untangle in the four dimensions of the space-time continuum.
The two-dimensions of online therapy are not the real world.
This is the real world: knives and pills and rope. In the trash bags.
4. Be
You inhale and think Mountain.
Exhale . . . Solid
A solid is an object/being composed of particles in constant motion.
Each cell in a human body contains, on average, 100 trillion atoms.
Since pregnancy, you no longer think of yourself as singular anything.
When protons collide, physicists have discovered there seems to be a “correlation function” meaning the particles are linked even after they separate.7
What links us when apart? A voice on a radio wave? A song we hear in passing? An ache?
A teacher, who knows he’s suicidal, brings him to tears, and your neck swells with trigger points.
This is how we transform energy into matter.
Be come. Be get.
You start skipping meals because you don’t want him yelling “pig”
at the sound/sight/smell of another eating. It’s just easier not to eat,
to take up less space, to be less.
Be grudge.
You start to doubt yourself: what did you say that led him to believe
you’d agree to plastic surgery because his face is asymmetrical?
Be lie.
For each pound he drops, a new burl pops up on your body.
Breathe into
the pain.
Meditation transports you
to galaxies of grief
where sound cannot travel; you can wail, and no one hears in your
own outer space.
Where sound cannot travel, voices cannot be.
On the way to not
being,
(which is predicted to conclude in 200 billion years, roughly)8
the universe expands so everything spreads further apart.
Apart, we cannot exist, as existence is the constant motion of particles
and anti-particles colliding and transforming one another.
Being, then, is transforming
and requires an Other.
If he grasps for lovers the way he grasped for you, they can tower over him like a mother over an infant in a crib.
He’s been dumped by the boy who love-bombed him; heaving with tears all over his face, he holds your hand in his while he says, “What’s wrong with me?”
In physics, Pb = momentum of object “b” before collision.9
As in before the breakup.
He seems to be lieve (etymology of believe: uncertain, disputed, Oxford English Dictionary)
if a lover stayed, intrusive thoughts of harms he never committed would disappear.
Anything would be better than
trudging through minute after minute guilty for what he never did.
This is called Harm OCD: consumed by guilt for harms created and existing only in the imagination.
His imagination = Pb 3
What lover can stay
when they receive over a hundred,
literally,
messages a day
asking if/what/how/why?
With 125 trillion synapses in the brain . . . “more than the number of
stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies,”10
it’s amazing we all don’t vanish
into the black holes of our imaginations.
5. Created
You created him from the energy of desire.
Eighteen years later, some man, some college kid, some boy his own age, someone whose name you don’t know, or someone who may have lied about his name, may push your son to a bottle of vodka and a razor blade.
Does this stranger know he fills a sketchpad a month? Does the stranger know that from memory he draws Granada’s homes latticing the sides of hills like endless scaffolding? Do they care that he dreams of designing couture? Have they seen how animals flock to his side, how he cradles a cat like a baby?
They won’t know the sirens wailing past them hold this unconscious boy and his mother praying he survives.
To create: “to produce where nothing was before” (Oxford English Dictionary).
The word “nothing” sends you back to kindergarten, lying in bed, unable to sleep as you tried to imagine the universe before God. Your mother told you God always existed. You found that impossible. Before God, you decided, was outer space. Before that, a starless night sky, pitch black. Before that . . . you tried to wrap your mind around nothing.
You couldn’t.
Nothing doesn’t exist. Except as a theory first called The Big Crunch (as in everything condensed in black holes). The more popular theory is The Big Freeze (as in everything so far apart there is no heat or motion).
But that is probably a few trillion years after the sun engulfs the earth.11
Until then, what will the particles of his being become when he is no longer Iluka?
The more you ponder him transformed, the more your abdomen bulges. An empty stomach is not. Without food, the belly fills and stretches with air.
His intrusive suicidal thoughts multiply; he let it slip that he hopes to pick up a serial killer online. His therapist tells you it’s time for residential treatment; you call every place in the US that specializes in OCD and anxiety. One facility accepts his insurance. Without insurance, the costs vary from $1,000–2,000 per day.
You ask rhetorically, “Who can pay that?”
She answers. “As a rule, no one. But some people can. Cardiac surgeons. CEOs. Some people hemorrhage their retirement accounts.”
The facility that accepts his insurance puts him on the waiting list. “It’ll be a couple of months,” she tells you. “Bring him to the emergency room if he crosses the line.”
Which line? Is forcing evacuation until he bleeds a line?
Not according to the emergency room.
He disappears for the day, for the night. In his absence, your whole body feels like an emergency. When he finally texts, you often wonder if it’s really him. You read for his voice and his typos telling you you’re psyco. Sometimes you insist he call you. FaceTime. When he doesn’t answer, you track his location to an unknown address forty-five minutes away. You take a screen shot, just in case.
You start calling the facility every day asking if his spot has opened up.
He asks, “When will they let me in? How can they leave me waiting like this?”
This means obsessions of harming himself to repent for the harm he knows he didn’t commit, but because he cannot know with 100% certainty, he twists his own flesh.
This means hiding in the bathroom for two-three hours at a time, this means picking his eyelashes out one by one, this means so many Redbulls and cigarettes on an empty stomach he feels nauseous twentyfour/seven, this means lying in bed with the blankets covering his head for days and growling if you approach.
6. Or
If he can’t take teletherapy anymore, if he can’t complete his homework anymore, if he can’t walk up a flight of steps in less than ten minutes, if he can’t leave the house in less than twenty minutes of entering and exiting rooms, if he can’t stop starving himself . . . if he can’t . . . anymore . . . you will have to find the pause button,
or he’ll press stop.
IF (Iluka Finnegan) . . . suffers from a neurological disorder that convinces him he needs absolute certainty.
At the most fundamental level, he suffers from a disease that renders life impossible,
what Dr. Jonathan Grayson calls the what if disease.
Mother Matter, this whole essay is your own what if . . .
as in . . . what if
he kills himself?
If the probability of a teen with suicidal tendencies actually killing himself is relative to the agitated state of his aggregate atoms,
what would happen if psychiatrists studied physics?
If they did, they might trip over Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: the more you know a particle’s position, the less you know its momentum.
OR
the more you know its momentum,
the less you know its position.
OR: Etymology: Middle English for Other (Oxford English Dictionary).
Is there really an Other, if, as scientists assert, hundreds of billions of atoms inside you
have been, at some point in the last year,
inside every other human on earth?12
If each of those atoms consists of subatomic particles
colliding and vanishing into others
which means matter and energy are the same thing,
and if, as according to Entanglement Theory, particles can influence
one another
even when physically apart, then
where do you end and where does he begin?
If you ponder the etymology of create – Latin: cause – probabilities are not about objects/nouns but about events/verbs . . .
If you hadn’t told him everyone else would leave if he raged at them the way he rages at you;
if you hadn’t laughed when he screamed, “It’s your fault I have this bump in my nose. Your
bad genes gave me your ugly nose;”
if you hadn’t urged him to attend this honors magnet school . . . too much pressure;
if you hadn’t sent him to the private middle school with all those rich kids for him to envy
believing money could silence intrusive thoughts;
if you hadn’t screamed at him the other night;
if you hadn’t screamed at him ever;
if you’d been more patient;
or maybe you were too patient? Or too indulgent? Or too Kumbaya,
as he would say.
If . . . the word that undermines all promises.
You never asked him to promise not to kill himself.
That felt like the inversion of a threat.
If you had, maybe you wouldn’t lean against and punch the wall of an insurance company denying him residential treatment because your employer switched plans right after his space opened up.
If you hadn’t worked so hard these past two years, maybe you’d qualify for a grant. One day of treatment = 20% of your monthly income, which somehow means you earn too much for a grant.
If you apply for a second mortgage, if you keep an eye on him until he falls asleep, if you strip the bed of sheets and just leave thick blankets on it, if you offer the universe one of your limbs in exchange for his health.
If hope slides into deep space . . .
7. Destroyed
Destruction happens when an electron collides with a positron and both are transformed
into radiant energy.
If he killed himself, how would you experience the radiant energy . . . of Iluka?
At first you would pull at your own navel, as if you could unravel the phantom umbilical, dig down into your own womb, and find him in the brightness of your blood.
Etymology of destroy: Latin, de construct; de pile up (Oxford English Dictionary).
Your calm demeanor was like an antiparticle to his revved-up particles.
When a particle is destroyed, so is its antiparticle.
If you could birth him again, but never hear his voice, never touch his cheek – give him life and let him be, far from you – just as long as he could be the one and only synthesis of particles named Iluka Finnegan . . .
What you could do if he kills himself:
take your pittance of a pension and a new job in New York,
so you can return
to your mother.
In New York, you can blend into the blur of the streets. You can lean your head against your seventh-story window and watch the lights radiate off the glass. You’ll look at your reflection, and he’ll stare back at you.
After years of bawling yourself into migraines and sinus infections, the tears will dry up as you flow along the current of facts with little desire or fear. The sounds of sirens and gun shots will be nothing more than white noise, even when only a few yards away from you.
You will reserve one spot in your new apartment for his art: landscape paintings, textiles, his sketches of Spain, the middle school Dada piece you managed to pack without breaking the second bulb.
When you glance at the photo of him holding a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace, which of his voices will you hear?
Will it take a few minutes shuffling through memories to land on the six-year-old voice? How often will you hear the toddler racing down the hall when you asked what he put in his mouth. You begged him not to run for fear he’d choke. He hid behind the recliner and when you tiptoed over to him and said, “Iluka, what’s in your mouth?” he replied, “Teeth” and burst into laughter.
His sense of humor shined. Perhaps delayed his suicide.
You know he often laughed with joy. Some days the longing for his laughter will leave you gasping for air.
Longing will resonate in your gut, an acid eating at the linings of your being.
When you hear people on the streets cackling, you will turn toward them, lines like grout slicing their faces . . . In the mirror, the lines divide your own face . . .
you see his deep-set eyes in yours, as if he
were the ancestor.
To survive the death of a child, people devote themselves to a cause. Adopt the dogs no one wants: a blind diabetic mutt that needs insulin, an abused cowering beagle that needs gradual exposure to bustling . . . their panting the metronome of your days.
If it weren’t for the dogs, you’d forget to eat or drink. A tongue lapping a dried-out bowl like an alarm clock.
Sometimes you will rent a car and drive to the Adirondack Mountains. You will take the beagle with you and dangle your legs over the mountain ledge wondering how many of Iluka’s former atoms swirl through the white pine or through the dog at your side or through the thick gray hair the wind flings into your face.
You will let your hair grow because he envisioned you aging with long hair like a frame around the cat-eye glasses he recommended.
You will stare into the vista and suddenly hear the preschooler’s footsteps pattering down the hall in the middle of the night, running to his mother’s bed, thumb in his mouth. When you whispered you’re safe, close your eyes, he ran his fingers over your lids, gently closing yours.
You will try to impose order: isn’t that why you read so many
books and recede from so many people?
Authors producing realities page by page.
Your mother will ask questions about friends, dating, school, and scholarships as she flips through his story hunting for a cause.
You, too, will blame the teacher he thought he could trust, the friends who wanted the token gay boy in their clique but didn’t respond to his pleas for help. And yourself, of course. Oh, you will torture yourself with all the missteps: why, when he responded poorly to ADHD meds 108 at ten, did you assume the diagnosis was wrong? Why did you believe in a singular diagnosis? Didn’t you read the literature about the prevalence of co-morbidities? What if you asked for a second opinion sooner? Why didn’t you arrange an IEP (Individualized Education Plan)? Rewind. Play again. Rewind. Play again. Rewind –
If you track physics, you will recognize how minute you really are. You will interrogate the universe about the ongoing correlations of the cosmic web.
Does the rise in mental illness correlate with the universe expanding?
Entropy on the macro and micro levels?
Everything in the universe stretching further and further apart.
Pharmaceuticals are based on the understanding of mental illness as a condition in which neurotransmitters do not reach the destination neuron; a failure to connect, it doesn’t matter how tiny the space is: the chemical and neuron remain apart.
Communication breakdowns: he had to open and close the refrigerator door five times in a row or someone he loved could die; he said he knew how illogical this was, but the logical part of his brain couldn’t communicate with the fingers grasping the refrigerator handle.
Inside that brain, the macro and the micro must have traded places, so the anxiety gripping the solar plexus was a universe galaxies away from everyone else.
As space and isolation increase, movement decreases leading eventually to a complete lack
of motion – destruction of the universe in the form of atoms in stasis.
If a brain is anxious, wouldn’t the individual hunger for stillness?
30% suicide increase in the US between 2000–2016.13
OCD patients ten times more likely to commit suicide than the population at large.14
“36% of patients of OCD reported lifetime suicidal thoughts and 11% have a history of attempted suicide” (emphasis mine).15
You won’t share this data with your mother.
She will beg you to join her at Sunday Mass. Winters you will bring her to Spain where somehow you can appreciate Mass in ways you cannot in the US, as if the contents of an event change with location. But the Catholic liturgy is as constant as the mass of an object/event, which explains why it comforts her.
You will drive her to remote cathedrals, lighting votive candles at each one. You will stare into the flame and hear his Covid cough behind you. When you turn, no one is there.
You will loop your arm in your mother’s to keep her hundred pounds erect, the two of you hunched and shrinking together. She will rub the tops of your hands and you will feel his three-year-old fingertips tracing your veins.
She will live long, which means you will live long, which is why she lives long.
At her funeral, you will recall how if it weren’t for her, you would have died from dehydration after your son killed himself. She’d part your lips with her fingers and tilt the glass until you opened your mouth wide enough for her to pour water down your throat.
After her death, you will continue to rescue dogs. Sometimes, a dog will rest his chin on your feet, and the warmth will make you smile as you scratch his back. You will pass people on the street and hear your son’s voice: too much midriff for my eyes. You would’ve said, Isn’t it great that person feels so confident in their body? He’d respond, too confident for my retina accompanied by wide-eyed blinking.
Some days, you will throw your head back laughing. Others you will stare at the ground, the three pounds of your head too heavy.
When you can no longer walk the dogs, or yourself, up the stairs; when you can no longer trust your knees to be steady; when you need a diaper; when doctors start talking about sending you to a room with a call button, you will make the decision you made before you knew he was suicidal. You will swallow a bottle of Valium after a late summer afternoon lollygagging on the empty beach, flipping through The Book of Changes (The I Ching).
As you start to feel drowsy, you will enter the warm, amniotic water radiating with sunlight.
Decades before you taught him to plunge into the surf, to ride its rhythm.
You will walk into the waves
with his urn in the crook of your arm.
The lid you loosened before arriving
will slip from your hand to the sand beneath you.
Slow motion. His ashes like moths in the sea.
Let go of yourself,
let each particle of your essence
float away like invisible bubbles.
Your particles, his particles . . .
gliding through
one another . . .
currents crashing
in wobbling song.
END NOTES
1. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.084501
2. https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/whats-really-happening -during-an-lhc-collision
3. http://www.wisdomportal.com/IChing/IChing-Wilhelm.html#29
4. http://www.wisdomportal.com/IChing/IChing-Wilhelm.html#29
5. Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Shambhala, 2010.
6. Qtd. in Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. Norton, 2003.
7. https://www.wired.com/2010/09/new-physics-at-lhc/
8. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02338-w
9. http://www.studyphysics.ca/20/sconserve.PDF 111
10. https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2010/11/17/visualizing_the/
11. https://astronomy.com/news/2020/09/the-big-freeze-how-the-universe -will-die
12. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/04/30/how-many -atoms-do-we-have-in-common-with-one- another/?sh=614bf2bb1b38
13. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db309.htm
14. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160719094234.htm
15. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5479089/
Miel Sloan is a pseudonym for a poet and playwright who uses a pen name to protect her son’s anonymity when writing essays about the trauma of his mental illness. She is the author of a poetry collection and two poetry chapbooks, and a number of her plays have been produced.