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Cat Modlin-Jackson | Longreads | December 13, 2023 | 12 minutes (3,364 words)

The first Christmas my sister-in-law was dead, I watched The Holiday. Early in the movie, Cameron Diaz freaks out when she thinks her love interest, Jude Law, is a cheater. She rushes to his house to demand an explanation, and while his two young daughters frolic in the background next to a Christmas tree, he mouths the word “widower.” She responds with a blend of sympathy and solace. In lightning fashion, her reply whips from essentially, Oh god, that’s horrible, to Anyway, moving on! What happens next?! His grief is her relief. Look, I get it: I’d also be relieved to find out my new bonk buddy wasn’t a philanderer. I’m not mad at Cameron; I’m mad that the dead wife-mom is a plot device in more Christmas movies than I can stuff in a stocking. 

This dead wife-mom lurking in the background is rarely relevant to the plot. More often than not, her inclusion only serves as sympathy porn, a cheap move for even the most ostentatiously bad films. She uses our fascination with the morbid for entertainment. For many, a dead-too-soon character is intriguing in the same way as aliens or Santa—something beyond the realms of their reality. Sure, half the season is dedicated to the mysticism of transcendental things: joy, togetherness, and the other stuff that disappears when the Christmas trees go in the trash. But this trope goes a step further in a Christmas movie. It escalates tragic death into magic.

The subtext is that the holiday season is a great backdrop for closure—there’s something in the air and some fluke meeting or supernatural encounter will heal thy spirit. Like in The Knight Before Christmas, when a romance springs up and the love of Vanessa Hudgens’ chainmail bae motivates her to finally bust out her dead mom’s treasured decorations. After years of finding them too painful to look at, all it takes is a few hours with a knockoff King Arthur, and the grief spell is broken. Or again in The Holiday, when a widower can at last open his heart to someone who’s basically a stranger, and the whole family then lives happily ever after (because of course the kids will be equally psyched about New Mommy). Filmmakers use a character’s grief to evoke viewers’ sympathy and cravings for a quick fix. The Christmas widower trope exploits these very human tendencies, triggering sadness for the sake of sadness and making the cheap promise of a neat resolution tied up in a pretty bow. 

My sister-in-law Rachel* died at 37. That first December without her, I watched Jude drop the widower bomb on Cameron and absolutely lost my shit. Rachel and I weren’t as close as we used to be by the time she died, but that didn’t make our relationship any less impactful. Nine years older, she babysat me as a kid and played Barbies, lent me jewelry and makeup for hot dates when I was in college, and later, when I decided to marry a guy my brother and mom low-key hated, played diplomat and big-sister advocate. Years more, she named me the godmother of her baby girl—just months before her first cancer diagnosis. 

Sobbing on the couch as I watched The Holiday, I cried for my brother. For my nephews and niece. For her best friend of 30+ years. For me.

Rachel had withered over three years. Then on a muggy Tuesday in July, I watched her die. Worse than that, I watched her husband, her children, her parents, and her friends watch her die. She couldn’t speak because of all the tubes, so her only way to communicate was with a small dry-erase board. We “talked” briefly about my goddaughter, the baby girl she’d waited so long to have, and her eyes lit up. “Isn’t she fun?!” she scrawled with a marker while grinning from ear to ear, even though she knew her fun was about to end. That evening, I took my nephew to Burger King in an attempt to distract him from what we all knew would be The Bad Day. An elementary schooler at the time, he told me he could deal with her never again being conscious for the rest of her life, so long as she was still breathing. My heart broke all over again, this time just for him. Then there was the morning after, when my brother buckled on the stairs, choking out “Oh, god” as he went down. I’ll never unsee it. And that is why I shake my fist when Netflix whacks a woman we never see. 

Grief is not linear. There is no expiration date. It’s a way of life; an existence marked by absence. For a lot of us, this absence is weightier during days of celebration that can’t be erased from the calendar. This time of year it’s omnipresent, touching all the senses. The bright Christmas lights my dead sister-in-law isn’t here to string up. The cheesy songs she’s not singing. The bacon and Bisquick pancakes she’s not eating with us. The gawdawful Christmas movies she’s not watching. All of it’s here. Except her. 

Christmas and death have a weird bond. To act like the latter doesn’t exist amidst the former would be ridiculous. Between Charles Dickens’ merry band of ghosts and a month full of birthday parties for a guy who dies twice after a miraculous birth, Christmastime is one big existential crisis. And sure, a movie can portray loss and grief in a way that the left-behind can actually connect with, and maybe—just maybe—derive a little lightness from. But for that to work, the plot would have to focus on what already exists. To get really corny about it, the magic would have to come from within. That kind of magic is a slow burn; it’s moving forward rather than moving on, whether that’s a daughter who gets by with a little help from her friends or a widower who gets closer to his sister as they help the kids navigate the world without their mom. It’s learning how to live a new life that’s always going to be laced with death.

Magic is in many ways similar to a too-soon death. Profound, ineffable, inexplicable—even when a cause is clearly identified. Humans will never know what death is like. (Well, most of us, though a lot of Evangelicals seem to have a pretty good grip on who’s going to which afterlife party and when.) 

When I was in sixth grade, I first met a kid whose mom had died young. The news whisper-circuited to me: that my classmate, Sam, no longer had a living mother. She’d died of cancer. My internal reaction was the same kind of confused sympathy that I—and many other adults—would still have today: Oh, god. That’s horrible. 

I felt that way for Sam’s dad, too. Solo parenting isn’t easy. Just ask Jake Russell, the leading widower in Falling for Christmas. Not only did his wife die, but she managed to die on Christmas! Without the dead wife, he and his daughter, Avy, don’t know what to do with themselves. Fortunately for them, a concussed heiress named Sierra (Lindsay Lohan), reignites Jake’s loins. Sierra bonds with Avy over the fact that they had both survived their mothers’ deaths at a young age. All family wounds healed, the three go on to live happily ever after at a lodge in the boonies.

When I was in sixth grade Lindsay Lohan wasn’t even a Mean Girl yet, so I had to rely on personal experience to draw my conclusions about what life was like for Sam and his dad. My mom was a single parent. While her divorce from my “sperm donor,” as we affectionately call him, was ultimately a blessing, her attempt to bring home the bacon and still have the energy to function as two parents drained her. Watching her power through exhaustion day after day, I figured life wasn’t easy for Sam and his dad. At the same time, I had absolutely zero idea what they were going through.

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Whether in real life or on-screen, the more intangible someone else’s circumstances, the more compelled we are to understand the whys and hows of their life. People watch The Holiday or somehow manage to sit through Falling For Christmas because movies like these distill foreign circumstances into familiar narratives. For a lot of lucky people, and probably the majority of those watching these movies, the untimely demise of a parent—or partner, or sibling, or close friend—will always be someone else’s story. Fortunately for filmmakers, it’s an easy story to sell. Viewers for whom this experience is unknown are taken to a false low, only to be proffered a hollow high. Using one of the saddest circumstances imaginable, the dead-mom Christmas trope kicks the audience’s emotions into overdrive, leaving viewers desperate for a happy ending. But for anyone familiar with this particular brand of grief, we know that’s not how it works. Instead of rubbernecking, we’re reeling over the reminder that we’ll never celebrate with her again.

We hardly ever see the dead-mom or dead-wife or dead-mom-wife in these movies. Just the sullen expressions of people who describe her with whispers. Then cut to the next scene where the main characters are slinging snowballs and sipping cocoa like nothing ever happened. 

When this woman is mentioned, she’s there as a mechanism to evoke cloying emotional monologues or swoony exchanges. She’s a ghost. An afterthought. Rarely do we even hear her name. We just know her as an absence, a tool to shore up sympathy for the main character. Once that transaction’s accomplished, the ghost is erased—resurrected only to inject superfluous pathos for the sake of an emotional garnish.

After several years of poring over trash Christmas movies, I can reliably say it’s almost always a woman who gets the ax, leaving behind a cisgender widower and at least one shiny half-orphaned child. The implication is that it’s sadder when a woman dies; there’s more emotional currency. A kid has it harder without a mom. And a man having to parent without a woman? Well, obviously, such a triumphant feat can only be achieved by DILFs like Jude Law in The Holiday.  

DILFS aside, this is one way the dead-mom trope doesn’t completely miss the mark. Feminist strides and 21st century be damned, women still do the majority of the physical and emotional labor that goes into raising children, making a marriage work, and keeping everyone happy at Christmas. Filmmakers are simply capitalizing on that narrative to crank out a Best-of-[Insert Holiday Movie Theme Here]-List production.

So far I’ve found very few exceptions to the only-dead-women-in-the-movie rule, including The Christmas Chronicles. I stumbled upon the Netflix hit the second Christmas my sister-in-law was dead. Before you get on my chestnuts, let me reassure you that I started this movie well aware it would be garbage. (I was cross-stitching a gift and I wanted a seasonal background movie.) I came for Kurt Russell and stayed for Goldie Hawn, having no idea what the movie was about. It took all of two seconds to get the gist: Two kids, traumatized by the death of their father, are left home alone while their also-grieving mom, played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley, is working the night shift on Christmas Eve. Santa Kurt shows up, shenanigans ensue, and the teenage boy with an attitude problem has his love of Christmas and nice-boy behavior restored.

Unlike the widower-dads who get to be a hero simply for managing to do baseline parenting, Kimberly’s character is out here bustin’ it but her family is still falling apart. Even though the dad in Falling For Christmas is kind of a mess, he’s given grace and sympathy by everyone around him. In Chronicles, however, the teenager’s shitty attitude is cast as a byproduct of the loss of a big strong man who can raise him “the right way.” Kimberly sure can’t do it. She’s out there trying to make rent instead of trimming the tree with tinsel. Suddenly ol’ Kurt Russell shows up in a beard and a sleigh and bim-bam-boom, problem solved.

While men generally have the neat luxury of being able to compartmentalize love, child-rearing, and career, the modern mother is demanded to juggle it all, with or without support. Anything less is a failure on her part. In some ways, my dead sister-in-law was the embodiment of the merry homemaker that Hallmark and Netflix love to torment us with. 

Rachel grew up in Martha Stewart’s House of Christmas. Like the dead moms of our favorite streaming platforms, she carried the weight of the holidays on her back, striving to execute picture-perfect performativity in a commercialist world. She spent time and money she didn’t have shopping for the latest and greatest crap, whatever garland and trimmings Better Homes & Gardens magazine deemed trendy that year. Because that’s what was expected of her.

She adored her children, so I can see why—given that she lived in a world where Hallmark Christmas movies demand nothing but excellence from women—she’d want to give them the inventories of every Target in our tri-state area. But for as much as her labor was one of love, that pull toward performance, toward posting about everything on Facebook and Instagram, toward making sure the tree was surrounded by show-stopping gifts she and the kids could flaunt to the Joneses—all piled up into an impossible to-do list. The toll it took on her was obvious to the women in her innermost circle.

My dead sister-in-law was a human being. She could not emulate a Hallmark movie mom. Nor can her humanity be flattened into a corny hologram smiling over the people who miss her. She isn’t some straightforward Saint Mary watching over all of us. Rachel was complicated and messy and so was her life and her relationships. She gave with her whole heart and, even as her body failed, strived to carry the crushing weight of trying to do it all. It’s exactly this nuance and pressure that dies with these wife-mom characters.  

I don’t know if my nephews and niece have ever seen these movies, but I imagine it would hurt to watch someone gush about how their mom’s not there to decorate the tree. Perhaps worse, a flick like The Christmas Chronicles could give the younger ones the impression that grief can be resolved during the holidays, setting the kids up for disappointment when an angel fails to cross the threshold. I’m not sure how my brother would take it, either. After watching him quiet-cry during a 2020 Super Bowl commercial with an old man telling a Google device about how much he misses his dead wife, my guess is my widower brother probably wouldn’t feel a warm and fuzzy connection with the widowed dad in the Christmas Prince series.

For years now, I’ve wondered if the people who resurrect these zombie wife-moms consider how their creation lands for people like my niece, nephews, and brother . . . not to mention my sister-in-law’s parents and ginormous circle of close friends. What story do writers and producers tell themselves so they can plow forward with the knowledge they could be robbing people of Christmas joy to feed a bunch of unscathed, fascinated folks with the on-screen equivalent of toxin-addled Pillsbury Rudolph cookies? 

Maybe these filmmakers reason it doesn’t matter because we’re all dead inside anyway. Maybe they think that going out of their way to make viewers sad is fine. Or maybe these people genuinely believe they’re doing my sister-in-law’s family a favor by giving us the chance to escape into a world where an angelic woman will appear and melt all our pain away.

Sure, there’s a lot of value to on-screen personalities you can relate to—when those characters are actually relatable. Personally, I appreciate a character who’s estranged from their shitty father and, instead of having some neat and tidy reunion with their deadbeat sperm donor, the character goes on living their life without him—and maybe even develops new coping mechanisms along the way. Snuggly redemption arcs, like the dad and kid reconnecting or making peace (often at the instigation of another character), are not helpful. I know the audience is supposed to go, Oh, god! That’s wonderful! But I’m sitting there thinking Dear, god. Make it stop. For a lot of folks with deep family trauma, teddy-bear endings are nothing more than lies that promise to erase the facts of our circumstances. 

Relationships, whether with a living or dead person, are complicated. It’s hard to stuff that mess into a 90-minute movie. We shouldn’t expect oodles of nuance from a blatantly superficial romcom, but there is a case to be made for uplifting flicks that show how people positively cope with the way things are. That honesty, that realistically achievable hope, is what makes it feel good. And that’s exactly what there could be more of in a movie or show that insists on deploying the dead wife-mom.

An almost good example of this is the development of a stepfather-stepson relationship after the loss of their respective wife and mother in Love Actually. I say almost because there are plenty of places where the plotline and the film overall venture into grit-teeth-and-cringe territory. (In fact, one writer at The Atlantic has apparently made it his life’s work to slam Love Actually.) What does work, however, and makes this left-behind storyline different, is that her death is pretty much the only catalyst that would make sense for launching the story arc between her child and husband. In this case, the widower doesn’t know his stepson well, he’s flummoxed when the kid brings up a problem that only the dead mom would know how to fix, the two figure it out anyway, and they become besties in the process. Their story is about how survivors rely on each other to keep moving forward . . . and that beacon of true hope—hope for a life where pain and possibility can exist concurrently—is the kind of holiday magic that could make those who’ve been left behind feel a teeny bit better. 

Trash Christmas movies are popular for a reason. For those of us who indulge, they’re part of a season that can soften the blow of winter’s darkness. For a few precious weeks, SAD (aka seasonal affective disorder) gives way to GLAD (aka happiness) in the form of bright lights, window displays, tacky houses, catchy tunes, and hot cuppas. It’s a unique, sensory-filling (or overloading, depending on how you look at it) kind of joy in a bleak time in an oft-bleak world. 

This time of year, the mundane feels exciting. I stop to revel in silly things we’ve collectively decided are special. I love the thrill of getting a glittery garland from Dollar Tree and I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for having a safe home to decorate, for the Christmas cards from old friends who remind me I’m not alone, and for the husband whose permanent childlike joy makes even Will Ferrell’s Elf bearable. (Except that shower scene. Gross.) Just ask the Grinch: It’s not about packages, boxes, or bags. It’s about what we already have. What is still here. 

Yet, as Steve Martin’s character says in Mixed Nuts, a cheesy holiday movie in which no mothers were sacrificed, “Christmas is a time when you look at your life through a magnifying glass, and whatever you don’t have feels overwhelming.” That includes everything from family estrangement to financial pressure, to the absence of the ones who are gone. This will be my fifth Christmas without Rachel. Half a decade gone and I still catch myself wanting to pull out my phone to text her when I bake her favorite cookies, and I still get a punch to the gut when it hits me I can’t. 

So I can come home to my apartment, littered with kitsch decor, cuddle up with my husband and a garbage holiday movie, and feel the happiness of this time of year . . . until someone mouths the word “widower.”

A forever storyteller and former journalist, Cat Modlin-Jackson spends her days working as a communications specialist and her nights writing essays about gender, culture, and chronic illness.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Before a person dies, you talk to them. They die, and you still want to talk to them. But their body is gone. When my sister would come home from college, I would sometimes go into her room and just sit there, hoping she would ask me about what felt at the time to me like the major dramas of my life (I would have been four­teen, fifteen). I was too shy to raise them with her. Now she was drifting away and I was in that same room, holding a book of hers from those same years, her notes inside, and all I could do was read to myself.

The touchingly literal conceit of the Olds poem is that death is like this: a problem of a body having gone missing. You face some­body when you talk to them; if their body is gone, and you wish to go on talking, you must search for a new way of facing them. The poem elaborates this hypothesis, testing it out. The speaker turns to a “new rose,” only to realize that at night we can’t see color, leav­ing the lawn “grey,” the rose “glowing white.” Has the poem found a new way of seeing in the dark, or has grief drained all color from the world?

The desire to talk to the dead requires the “as if” of figurative language: a descent from the world of the living to an underworld. As the poet addresses the absent grandmother, she conjures her into the poem, and yet what appears is a person who had already, even in life, turned toward the darkened state of death: not knitting, not reading. The only unbroken lines in the poem are its final ones, in which the speaker seems to have reconciled herself to having noth­ing more than the imperfect, residual knowledge that death allows.

At the heart of the poem, though, lies a terrible doubt. “Are the dead there / if we do not speak to them?” If our speech is what has seemed to grant others their presence in the first place, have we been fooling ourselves all along? Have we mistaken the projection of our own imagination, reflected back to us at night, for a dim impres­sion of the person whom we miss? “Why do I tell you these things?” John Ashbery asks at the end of one poem. “You are not even here.”

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Heather Lanier | Longreads | January 10, 2023 | 24 minutes (6,652 words)

Left Atrium

Blood enters the left atrium, a thin-walled upper room in the house of the heart, through the pulmonary veins, and you enter the Heart Wing through a southern-facing door engraved with a health insurance logo. You step into a tall, red-ceilinged room with crown molding where giant blood molecules float across beige walls and children dart hummingbird-like between stations. Blood enters the left atrium rich in oxygen because it just came from the lungs, and you — if you’re me — enter the museum’s Heart Wing well-fueled because you’ve just dined on a packed lunch in a courtyard outside. 

A spiral of life-sized plastic hearts rotates at the center of one station. The hearts are in ascending order, from smallest to largest. The heart at the bottom is the width of an M&M. It’s the heart of a woodpecker. Someone could pop it in their mouth and use it for a tooth implant. Your own heart — or one roughly the size of people like you — is midway up the spiral, just beneath “ostrich” and above “large dog.” 

Near the spiral, an unassuming gray rubber bulb is at waist level. Shaped like a joystick, it invites you to take hold and squeeze. Above the rubber bulb, a fake heart sits in a Plexiglass box. Can you keep up with your heart? a screen beneath the fake heart asks. Can your hand mimic the heart’s pace for even a minute? Seventy-four squeezes of the bulb?

One, two, three … With each beat, the heart in the Plexiglass box glows pink at its base, illuminating raised coronary veins. The screen keeps tab: How well is your hand mimicking the cardiac rhythm? At 12, you’re a beat behind. At 37, you’re two beats off, and your forearm kind of aches. At 47, the bulb is so squeezed of air that it won’t re-inflate, but you get the point: Your heart is the muscle that never stops. It beats 100,000 times a day, says the display. While you fret about your bank account, your forehead wrinkles, or that person who hasn’t replied to your email, the heart — your heart — just keeps on keeping on in a way no other muscle could.

And this is what, if you are me, you might learn early on and can’t quite shake in the Heart Wing of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute: The heart is an overworked organ. It’s the muscle that never unionized. You are in a daunting codependent relationship with an organ that, if it were a person, should file a lawsuit against you, should summon the ACLU. The heart needs a vacation, a chaise lounge by the sea, and a mai tai with an umbrella. 

Nobody should be drinking mai tais though, at least not according to the section of the Heart Wing that I’ll call The Corner of Guilt and Doom. At its center, a clear column pushes plastic discs through water. They’re meant to be platelets but they resemble cinnamon red-hots or valentine candies, swirling up and down several feet in the clear cylinder. Their cheeriness is misleading. Beneath them, at eye level, a pair of stony-gray wings stands to the left of a photo of similar wings, leathery pink. Except they’re not wings. Plastinated human lungs, reads the sign. Quit smoking, reads a larger one. Preemptive strike, I think, knowing the median target age of the museum visitor is 10. 

Another station invites you to toss bean bags onto a scale. Are You at Risk for a Heart Attack? Do you drink alcohol? Have high cholesterol? A family history of heart disease? Yes? Then toss red bean bags onto the side of the scale marked “high-risk.” Watch the bean bags pile up like pillows at a dolls’ slumber party. (Here’s something the museum omits from its advertising: Glean your chances for the nation’s top cause of expiry!) Do you exercise? Maintain a low-to-average weight? Have no family history of heart disease? Toss green bean bags onto the low-risk side of the scale. Imagine, as I do, a Barbie doll lying upon them, her plastic life never sending her into cardiac arrest. 

I’ve recently entered the age where I get screened for colon cancer. I’ve recently received a call from my doctor that my cholesterol is alarmingly high and I should go on medication, despite running and eating whole grains and having whatever body-size markers the medical industry deems “low-risk.” It’s the oldest story in the book: I’m mortal, and somehow surprised by it. Inching further into my 40s, the collagen-full curve of my chin has been replaced by what some might, accurately, call “jowls.” A cartoonish number 11 sits between my eyes in Zoom meetings whether I’m troubled by the budgetary changes or not. 

A few weeks ago, the heart of a friend stopped inexplicably in his sleep and didn’t restart. He was 42. A year younger than me.

In his essay, “Joyas Voladaros,” the late Brian Doyle tells us that each species gets roughly the same number of heartbeats in its lifetime. Both the hummingbird and the giant tortoise have an equal number of ticks. And tocks. Doyle says that number is about two billion. The heart-as-clock is a cliché the Heart Wing does not entertain.

My heart has beaten approximately one billion, 500 hundred million times in its lifetime, which happens to also be my lifetime. It beat 150 more times while I calculated that fact. Your heart has either beaten more or less than mine, depending on your age. If your heart has beaten less than mine, you are statistically less likely to meditate on the finitude of your heartbeats. 

I can’t help myself: I throw the bean bags. I watch the little pillows pile onto both sides of the metal scale. Like nearly every human who plays the game, I have risk. The scale cannot reassure me that I will not die tomorrow. The surest way to live with zero risk is to not be alive. But then we couldn’t stand in a crowded room of ornate crown molding and toss bean bags foretelling our chances of death.  

Left Ventricle

Blood is continuously moving through arteries and veins and capillaries that measure 60,000 miles long. Where do you mark the start of a daily circuitous trip that stretches the length of the globe twice over? Blood might symbolize life, but it’s not like life: It doesn’t have a clear entry point the way my kale salad entered my body hours ago in the courtyard, or the way the baby version of you entered this world slippery and wailing, at the start of your story. 

But if you begin the life cycle of blood in the left atrium, the next room it visits is the thicker-walled, larger room below it, the left ventricle. It’s the most powerful room in the heart. And if you start the Heart Wing in the room that contains the heart-in-a-Plexiglass-box, the next room you flow into displays the museum’s most iconic feature: a walk-through replica of the human heart.

Two stories tall, 100 times the width of my heart and yours, the giant heart looks alien. It consumes half the room. Its bulbous red self is gripped claw-like by raised blue veins and red arteries. A red aorta emerges from its top. A blue vena cava hugs its right side like the trunk of a ghastly Seussian-blue tree. These vessels ascending from and extending into different parts of the Heart Wing suggest that the entire museum is somehow subsumed by the circulatory system of a giant. The museum says this heart befits someone 220 feet tall. 

You can enter the giant heart. You can let proportion shrink you to the size of a blood molecule and traverse the four chambers, through tricuspid, pulmonary, mitral, and aortic valves. That is, you can do so if you aren’t in a wheelchair or don’t need handrails to manage steep steps. And you might do so if you aren’t yet menopausal like one of my museum guests and aren’t sent into raging hot flashes — because the giant heart is warm as blood and stuffy as a concert port-a-potty. Bipedal and of (albeit waning) reproductive years, I round the back of the 28-foot-wide organ, walk along a muddy-pink wall that’s lumpy and gently marbleized and meant, I’m assuming, to evoke the unsettling aliveness of human flesh. I duck beneath a big blue artery. The drumming gets louder. 

I have not yet said this: The entire Heart Wing throbs with a nonstop lub-dub, lub-dub. Deep as a bass drum, pulsing about once per second, it’s the constant auditory reminder that the organ in your chest can’t stop, can’t stop, can’t stop. This means that, if you’re like me, the zone under your ribs — just slightly left of your sternum — starts to ache.

Brian Doyle titled a book about the heart The Wet Engine, but this giant non-ADA-compliant heart is dry, made of fiberglass and paint. When you step into it, you meet the glowing blue cave of the right atrium. You climb a few steps, then descend a few more into the right ventricle, where the wall’s white ridges evoke a whale’s palate. A kid shouts, Ew, gross, and you ascend uneven red steps. You arrive at a coverless bridge that serves as a brief reprieve from the cardiac claustrophobia, then reenter the heart through beigey-pink hallways, crawling with fake capillaries and fluffy white bronchi. You’re in the lungs, a sign says, and the lub-dub is louder. When you head into the left atrium, you might glisten with sweat. A sign says you’re fully oxygenated. You descend red steps into the left ventricle, head out the heart through another narrow stairway labeled aorta, and pour out of a flesh-painted wall and back onto the museum’s bluish carpet, your own heart now quickened. 

“I remember rushing into it as a kid and then getting a queasy feeling … and bolting to the exit,” wrote journalist Greg Robb on Twitter, when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked for memories of the iconic giant heart. “Couldn’t wait to do it again and again,” he added. This afternoon, kids run into the vena cava entrance, pop out the flesh-walled exit, then round the bulbous veiny beast to enter it again, like the giant heart is a playground slide and they want another turn. They’re giddy and panting. They have all the time in the world and none of the patience for it. I ran around the same giant heart 30-some years ago. Studies prove it: The older you get, the faster the days and weeks seem to pass. Or, as another person responded about the heart, but could have easily written about time: “The older I got, the more it got tighter.” Because the stairways are narrow and the clearances are sometimes under five feet, the giant heart seems designed for children — people with zero face wrinkles and very few reminders that we’re not immortal. That we’re not permanent fixtures on this planet. That we have endpoints. 

The giant heart was never meant to be permanent. Originally constructed in 1953 of paper maché, chicken wire, and lumber, it was the brainchild of Dr. Mildred Pfeiffer, a physician who traveled Pennsylvania, lecturing on cardiovascular health. Popularity kept the heart alive, as have reconstructions and upgrades — “surgeries,” the museum calls them. The version I walked through had a distinct but unplaceable smell, built up from years of heat and sweat and the occasional puking kid. This heart does not smell. Its most recent upgrade involved a paint job and a brand-new beat. 

The old pulse — the one I heard, the one that sent journalist Greg Robb bolting in panic — was synthetic. Now, the lub-dub is drawn from a database of real human hearts. Now, a bunch of heartbeats have been recorded and mish-mashed to stay alive long past their owners.

My friend whose heart stopped was a spiritual seeker and adventurer. He had what some would call a big heart, although not made of fiberglass, and probably not any bigger than yours or mine. His face held a bright-eyed wonder usually reserved for toddlers. His eyes lit in awe at the stick figures my children drew or the dandelions they plucked. He was mostly my husband’s friend, which is how he became my friend, too. They had been Trappist monks at the same monastery, at different times. They’d experienced the same tender wisdom, gentle correction, and odiferous flatulence from elder brothers in long robes who prayed the Psalms six times a day. 

Each time he stayed with us, it felt like we were hosting a beloved brother who we rarely saw but wished lived closer. At night, he sat on our living room rug cross-legged, telling us stories of miracles he traveled to see: a monk who could walk through walls, another who could hide a candle behind his back and reveal the flame by turning his skin and organs transparent. He traveled widely, our friend, our citizen of the world, to places like Mexico and Ireland, and Bhutan. He interviewed Christian teachers and Buddhist masters with a tape recorder, searching for — for what? For the truth of things? For God? For who or what we really are? I can’t say for sure. If we, as he believed, can pass through walls, can render our skin and bones invisible — maybe we are more than flesh. Maybe we are citizens of a world even bigger than this one. 

When he left, I said, “Come back anytime” and meant it, snapping a photo of him with my children. In the picture, he’s kneeling at their level on the grass, smiling the unassuming, simple, luminescent smile of a man who is alive, truly alive, and therefore looks like he’ll be alive forever.

Aorta

Blood exits the left ventricle through the aorta, and the only way to exit the giant heart is to climb up the staircase labeled aorta, hang a left, and walk down the steps into the museum again. 

Just across from the giant heart is another reminder that, no matter how much you think you’re immortal, your body will meet its last moment. Heavy black rectangular slides sit inside a case taller than my body — and possibly yours. Grab a silver handle and you can yank a slide out of the case. I do. It shows the outline of a human body. The ovals and globules and blobs of someone’s innards float like islands inside a yellowy human-shaped ocean. The blobs are labeled: Brain, deltoid, lung. A plaque on the case explains what you’re looking at: razor-thin slices of a man who was frozen solid after he died. He donated his body to science. There are four more slides. I can’t draw them farther than a few inches before wanting to push them back with a thud.

Because he was so young, and his death so unexpected, an autopsy was performed on my friend’s body. Only his close friends and family know the answers, and if I knew them, I wouldn’t share them here. Some things should stay inside the body of a family. 

Slicing apart dead bodies was forbidden in many cultures, like Ancient Rome and Medieval India. The body was seen as too sacred, and necessary to preserve for the afterlife. But in 16th-century Hispaniola, when conjoined twins Joana and Melchiora Ballestero died, the Catholic Church ordered an autopsy. Did they have one soul or two? When two hearts were found, the girls were declared to have two separate souls. The soul, it was believed, resided in the heart. 

Here’s a miracle my friend would have liked: When 90-year-old Tibetan Chokpa Tenzin still felt warm several hours after her heart had stopped, her family postponed the funeral arrangements. Several days later, Chokpa’s skin was still supple. “She was no longer breathing,” wrote one journalist, “but she looked calm, her skin remained warm, as if she was in a deep, eternal sleep.” She stayed this way for seven days. 

And when the Dalai Lama’s tutor Geshe Lhundub Sopa died, Tricycle Magazine described him as “lean[ing] upright against a wall, his odorless body perfectly poised, his skin fresh as baked bread. He looked like he was meditating.” His heart had stopped three days before. He too remained this way for seven days.

According to Tibetans, these people had entered a rare post-death state called thukdam, when the body is clinically dead but the person doesn’t decompose for days, sometimes weeks. Tibetans say it’s because the person’s consciousness is engaged in a deep form of meditation called “clear light” meditation. When Tibetan monk Geshe Jampa Gyatso was in thukdam, a physicist measured his blood-oxygen level at 86, even though his heart hadn’t beaten in 10 days. 

Decades after Saint John Vianney of France died, he was exhumed and found to have a fully intact heart. Called the “incorrupt heart,” it now travels the world in a reliquary. The reliquary looks like a miniature castle, with glass walls, gold spires, and a gold-shingled roof. The heart sits on a red velvet cushion. It resembles a brown fossil or a stone valentine. Visitors say they can spot a bit of pink in its center. 

If the Heart Wing displayed Vianney’s heart, it would be the opposite of the heart-in-a-Plexiglass-box. Where one ticks away your seconds, reminding you of the countdown in your chest, the other stoically suggests that it never quite died — not the way things normally do.  

At secular-humanist funerals, people say the dead live on through our memories, which suggests that people really die not when their hearts stop beating but when ours do. This means that we don’t die until the people who remember us do. It’s meant to be comforting, but I find it a sad replacement for miracles or magic or actual immortality.

Septum

Between the left and right chambers of the heart is a muscular wall called the septum, and between the two major rooms of the Heart Wing are two giant severed arteries. If you’re a kid, you can crawl through them, as mine does. If you’re an adult, you’ll probably stand and watch, analyzing the layers of flesh in the arterial walls. Thanks to a layer of yellow clumps, one artery is significantly narrower than the other, crowding the kids with simulated fat until they can’t make it through. This artery probably warrants its owner to go on medication. There’s a hole at the top of both arteries, and if you’re a kid, you can poke your head out and wave to people, like your parents. You can wave to the people who gave you life, the people whose hearts — if you’re lucky — will stop beating before yours. Riley, look at Daddy, says a man to a toddler in the artery. She won’t quite put her face in the frame. Riley, stand up, look at Daddy. Smile, Riley. I snap a photo of my smiling daughter, her face framed by the fatty artery’s opening.

There’s a hole in my heart / That can only be filled by you. Those are the lyrics of a song I blasted when I was a ‘90s teen. Hole hearted, the large-mouthed, long-haired frontrunner sang over and over. This song is now played on oldies stations. The phrase, hole in my heart, suggests an emotional absence, a longing. A gaping need that begs to be filled.

Maybe that’s why it’s so dramatic to say my daughter once had a hole in her heart. This is what a cardiologist told me when she was a few months old. This hole was in her septum, the wall that separates the left chambers from the right ones. Because the oxygenated blood traveling from the lungs pours into the left chambers, and the deoxygenated blood flows into the right chambers, a hole in the septum means the two kinds of blood could get mixed — which is trouble. A hole in the heart speaks to the potentially unmet physical need for oxygen. “Look for blue lips,” a nurse told us on the phone. 

Her lips did not, thankfully, ever go blue. The hole in her heart eventually closed on its own. Called an atrial septal defect, it’s the most common cardiac anomaly. But doctors don’t say anomaly. They say defect, which always conjures in my mind a factory line — hearts spaced evenly apart on a conveyor belt, traveling toward inspection. Some are deemed defective. Some don’t fit industry standards. They get sent back, called out of order, subtracted from the bottom line. 

Because of my daughter’s heart condition, I spent a fair amount of time in the heart wings of children’s hospitals. They sometimes resemble art museums, with kid-created drawings of hearts, large heart sculptures, and even a lava-lamp-like installation with valentine-hearts floating inside. A painting in one exam room featured multicolored hearts in the sky, each with a set of wings. Hearts soaring to heaven. Hearts eternal. 

I’ve reasoned that all this art is because the heart is a high-profile organ. It elicits an emotional response. Tiny hearts inside tiny children who need big surgeries — this makes us bite our lips and donate.

But once when I arrived at the room to consult with the cardiologist about my daughter’s abnormal echocardiogram, he said this: The heart is just a pump. We like to sentimentalize it. But really, it’s nothing more than a pump. I nodded with my infant in my lap, which meant I held not just my love but my love’s heart and the hole that heart contained. 

I was being told: There is nothing magical about the heart. There is nothing mystical or meaningful. The heart is a machine in the factory of the body. The heart pumps, you live, it stops, you die, the end.

When my father died, I felt like I had a hole in my heart. Rather, I felt like the place where my heart was had become a hole. My chest ached. I thought it was a metaphorical ache. I called it the grief hole and imagined a cosmological black hole under my sternum, a thing made of nothing yet drawing absolutely everything into it. A gravity of grief.

Cardiologists now recognize a condition called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome.” After a big breakup or the death of a loved one, the heart weakens for an acute time. “The grieving heart,” says cardiologist Dr. Sandeep Jauhar, “appears stunned and frequently balloons into the distinctive shape of the takotsubo, a Japanese pot with a wide base and a narrow neck.” Patients with hearts in the shape of this pot are at greater risk of a heart attack. 

Two days after a teacher was killed in the Uvalde school shooting, her husband died of a heart attack.

Although I’ve known plenty of people who’ve died, I’ve never experienced “the grief hole” other than 20 years ago, when my father died. I did not, for instance, experience it when my friend died. 

But sometimes I think maybe I’ve just gotten used to living with something akin to it, because when I hear the highest note in Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” or when I remember I’ll someday pick up my child and put her down and never pick her up again — either because she’s too heavy or I’m not here or (unthinkably) she’s not here — the place I can most accurately call “my heart” throbs unmistakably, and it feels like it’s reaching back to a moment when I lay in a cot beside my father’s deathbed and reached my arm across the space between our mattresses so I could slip my hand inside his still-alive hand. 

Before a man received the first heart transplant, his wife reportedly asked the doctor if he would still love her.

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Jauhar calls for a change in how medicine treats heart disease. He wants us to consider not just exercise and low-fat diets but love. He cites a study where two sets of rabbits are both fed high-cholesterol diets. Rabbits in one set are petted and held, talked to, and played with, while the other rabbits are left alone. The loved rabbits have 60% less aortic disease than the left-alone rabbits, even with similar blood pressure and cholesterol. “The heart may not originate our feelings,” Jauhar said, “but it is highly responsive to them. A record of our emotional lives is written on our hearts.”

Get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit, God tells the people of Israel.

Right Atrium

There are only two rooms in the Heart Wing, but four in the actual heart. Blood enters the right atrium oxygen-depleted, and I stroll back through the Heart Wing’s two rooms fatigued.

Heart valves are meant to be like one-way swinging doors — their closing is what makes the lub and dub. Tiny threads tether the flaps of the valves to the heart wall. If blood flows backward through the heart, the valves aren’t doing their job. You don’t want blood flowing in reverse. That’s called regurgitation.

Still, I keep reversing course in the Heart Wing, revisiting spots I’ve already seen. I pass the heart-in-a-Plexiglass-box. I pass the spiral of animal hearts. I pass a wall of plastic tubing meant to show me how hard my heart must work to pump the blood down my legs and up again. I look for beauty here, for the sense that I’m not doomed at any moment should a fist of muscle decide to stop. I look for an understanding that the heart is more than a belabored mechanism, that my body is more than a machine — one I need to try to keep alive forever, but never will. 

The museum is not coy about the fact that it views the body as a machine. The original heart exhibit from 1954 was called “The Engine of Life.” Today, the museum has an article on its website called “How Your Body is Like a Factory.” In a car factory, the article says, “One team might make steering wheels. Another team might make seats…. They all share a common goal: to make cars. Your body operates in much the same way … [with] the common goal of keeping you alive.” 

By equating staying alive with making cars, the museum echoes the priorities of late-stage capitalism. If you’re not making gadgets or deals or website content, who are you? Like a grinding factory of the Industrial Revolution, your worth is measured by your production — your bolted widgets or sent emails or new clients — which someone can then commoditize. 

In the years we didn’t know were his last, our friend took small troupes of spiritual seekers to Bhutan and met with Tibetan Buddhist monks there. Bhutan measures its progress, not by emphasizing its GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, but by measuring its GNH: Gross National Happiness. In other words, Bhutan has attempted to rearrange the measurement of a nation around the well-being of its citizens rather than their economic output. If you’re a resident, the Gross National Happiness Commission surveys you every five years, asking things like, How many hours do you sleep? How many hours do you work? How often do you quarrel with your family? Do you trust your neighbors? And because Bhutan is a Buddhist nation, it asks, How often do you meditate? How often do you pray? 

The survey takes several hours to complete. Participants receive a day’s wages. Their output for the day is a record of their well-being.

That the Heart Wing stresses me out is probably not good for my happiness index. But it’s also not good for my heart. “Fear … can cause profound cardiac injury,” says Jauhar. “Emotional stress … is often a matter of life and death.”

In the days after our friend’s death, I overheard my husband talking to different people on the phone. He repeated certain phrases. Forty-two. Died in his sleep. Funeral in a week. I know, man. I know. Light laughter. Heavy sigh. The conversations almost always drifted to this: He had a condition. A rare respiratory ailment that conventional western medicine couldn’t explain. 

This is what we do. We piece together the story of a death — and a life — the way we piece together a jigsaw puzzle. One picture that doesn’t make sense: dying at 42 in your sleep. Because a human heart has over two billion beats. And he didn’t get almost half of his. So the phrase, he had a condition, gets repeated into a receiver and changes the direction of the conversation, from shocked to somewhat pacified. As though any of our hearts couldn’t stop at any moment. As though all the beats are owed to us, not bestowed upon us, not graciously and mysteriously and troublingly given.

How can we all be machines, when the deaths of machines would never crush you the way the person you love most in this world will crush you when they leave it? Your heart might even balloon from the loss. Your heart might even stop.

Right Ventricle

It might not be until after you leave the Heart Wing, after you leave Philly entirely, once you’re settling into your home and yanking pots from cabinets for dinner, that you hash out to your beloved exactly why the museum made you feel drained. This is the person whose death — if it occurs before yours — would make your heart balloon into the shape of a Japanese pot. And that’s when your beloved could, as mine did, say to you: “Did you know the heart might not be a pump? Did you know they have no idea how blood actually moves through the body?” 

And your eyebrows, as mine did, might lift past the ceiling and your chin might, as mine did, fall through the floor, and you’ll tell your beloved: “No way.” You might even shake your head. The heart is a pump. You’ve been told as much for eternity, or since third grade. Then you might, if you’re me, spiral like a tower of spinning plastic hearts into research, where you learn that the heart-as-pump is not actually a fact. It’s a theory.

What’s the history of the heart-as-pump theory? When did we turn the circulatory system into a machine? Many credit 17th-century physician William Harvey, who discovered that blood moves in a circuit, from the heart and back to it. But Harvey never believed the heart’s mechanical function was the primary source of blood’s movement. He believed in a divine vital heat called calor innatus. This idea came from Aristotle, who said our vital heat is connected to something called pneuma, “the primal stuff of heavenly bodies.” Pneuma is an ancient Greek word for breath, but also for soul or spirit. 

In the fable that is the first book of Genesis, Adam comes to life when his Creator breathes into him. 

“I found the task so truly arduous,” wrote Harvey of his attempt to map circulation, “that I was almost tempted to think … that the motion of the heart was only to be comprehended by God.” 

The pump, gotta check the pump. My father-in-law repeats these words every summer when he aspires to a crystalline swimming pool. When I research how a pool pump works, in order to understand how people think the heart works, I land on a pool supply website. The first sentence reads: “The pump is essentially the heart of the swimming pool’s circulation system.” To try to understand the way an actual machine works, I’m pointed back to the body. 

Vascular anesthesiologist and professor Dr. Branko Furst cites a number of instances in which the heart, when intervened with during surgery, doesn’t behave at all like we’d expect if it were a pump. He and others also point out the heart’s relatively small size compared to the task for which it’s being credited. Less than a pound in weight, the heart must, over the course of an average 75-year life span, push 400 million liters of very sticky fluid that is made of molecules sometimes larger than the vessels through which the heart supposedly “pumps.” 

Admit it: You’ve made a fist and held it to your chest, just slightly to the left. You’ve marveled, maybe, as I have, at the size of the thing keeping you alive.

Furst says that as the field of cardiology advances, “the number of discrepancies between the observed phenomena and the constraints imposed by the existent circulation model is likely to increase.” In other words, as we intervene with circulation for treatment purposes, the heart will continue to behave in ways that make no sense if we think of it as a pump.

Years ago, I sat in a large meditation hall and listened to a teacher say over and over, “The heart is the organ of spiritual perception.” For the first two days of the five-day retreat, I thought she meant metaphorically. But after listening to her for a few days, I realized she meant literally. The heart is the organ of spiritual perception, she said, like the eyes are the instruments of sight, and the ears are the instruments of hearing. She was an Episcopal priest and meditation teacher, as well as a friend of our friend who died. The heart, she was saying, contains its own intelligence. 

In an experiment, participants were hooked up to a number of brain, skin, and heart monitors and shown 45 images on a screen. Two-thirds of the images were emotionally neutral: a tree, a cup. A third of the images were emotionally charged: a bloody corpse, a snake ready to strike. The images were shown at random — the participant had no way of predicting what kind of image would appear next. But approximately four-and-a-half seconds before an emotionally charged image appeared, the participants showed signs that their bodies somehow knew. Their reactions were physiologically detectable not in their brains, but in their hearts.

If, as Furst believes, the heart is not primarily responsible for the movement of the blood, then what is? He proposes that the heart interrupts the blood already in motion and that the blood possesses its own kinetic energy — a theory that harkens back to Harvey and Aristotle. In other words, maybe it’s not the heart that moves the blood. Maybe it’s the blood that moves the heart.

Maybe the heart, weighing less than a pound, is not an overworked organ meeting an unthinkable quota of labor. Maybe it simply supports something already in motion. Maybe we’re not walking around with doomed-to-stop clocks in our chests. Maybe we’ve just erroneously applied our Industrial Revolution work ethic to the organ that gives us our beat. Maybe we’re walking around with a miraculous, mysterious life force autonomously moving through us.

What makes your heart beat? asks a text box from the editor-in-chief of Pumps Magazine, a periodical put out by a technology company that makes pumps and motors. I expect a scientific answer involving electrical pulses and closing valves. But employees reply in their own text boxes: Old Hindi songs. Reaching high goals. Wild white horses. Travel. Pistachio ice cream.

Sometimes I’m comforted when we don’t fully understand things, when mysteries remain unsolved, and explanations are beyond our minds’ capacity to grasp them. Maybe that’s because when the mind releases a hard question — like why I’ll one day set my daughter down and never pick her up again, like why a 42-year-old friend died in his sleep — it drops that question down, finding answers in a place deeper than our minds, where a steady pulse still beats.

The heart, said the meditation teacher, is capable of living in spontaneous connection with something called the divine heart. And this intelligence of the divine heart, she said, is what lives beyond our death. “You begin to discover,” she said on day three of the retreat, “that the heart knows no death, and nothing is ever lost that has been held in love, if you know how to find it.” 

I think of the grown children of Chokpa Tenzin, placing a hand on their dead mother’s chest on a Wednesday, and still feeling heat on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Thukdam, translated literally, means the mind in a deep meditative state. To date, no discernible brainwave activity has been detected from a person in thukdam. Mind in this case can’t mean the organ located inside the skull. It must point to a consciousness that exists somewhere else in our bodies. 

For a body in thukdam, the skin above the heart is what stays warmest. 

Pericardium

The pericardium is the sac in which the heart sits. It’s a fibrous membrane around the outside of the heart, providing protection. Without it, the heart could over-expand. The pericardium is the heart’s edge, its limit, its reminder to not go beyond its size.

The risk, of course, with an essay about the heart, is that it could go on forever. Expand to include every scientific fact, every mythic association. 

I haven’t, for instance, said that the heart of a blue whale weighs 1,000 pounds and beats just a few times per minute. 

I haven’t said that in 1673, a French nun reported that Jesus appeared to her with his heart on fire, visible outside of his chest. The sister said he spoke these words: My Sacred Heart is so intense in its love for humanity, and for you in particular, that not being able to contain within it the flames of its ardent charity, they must be transmitted through all means. Jesus’s heart, in other words, couldn’t be contained by his pericardium. 

Maybe we think of ourselves as machines because it’s been so long since we’ve seen miracles. Or maybe it’s hard to believe in miracles because we’ve thought so long of ourselves as machines. I want another night with my friend, telling stories of monks walking through walls and turning their intestines translucent.

Here’s something that borders on miraculous but that scientists in California confirm: The heart emits a magnetic field expanding outward in all directions and returning to the chest in a donut shape. One hundred times greater than the magnetic field emitted by the brain, it changes depending on our emotions. Anger, for instance, produces a markedly different magnetic field than appreciation. The field itself can be measured three feet from the body. Some believe the distance of three feet indicates, not the limits of the heart’s emissions, but the limits of the technology used to measure it. In other words, some suspect the heart might emit a magnetic field that extends much farther — possibly, however faintly, for infinity. 

Here’s what I’d like to see in the Heart Wing. Here’s what — as the editors of Pumps Magazine say — would make my heart beat:

A heart-shaped bag of fluid you can touch, heated to the precise temperature of Chokpa Tenzin’s chest a week after she stopped breathing.

The cells of Saint John Vianney’s “incorrupt” heart under a microscope. A graph revealing its chemical composition.

The heartbeat of the man who received the first heart transplant. His wife’s heartbeat when, after the operation, they reunited. A slideshow revealing all the things he enjoyed in the 112 more days that he lived.

A visual representation of my friend’s heart’s magnetic field, arcing like a donut around his body. 

And a platform that, when you stand on it, displays your own heart’s magnetic field. It would display whether you’re feeling anger or gratitude, grief or joy. Your heart’s magnetic field would project on the wall beside my friend’s, radiating three feet to touch his, radiating five feet past museum visitors, radiating twenty feet through the giant heart — radiating maybe even infinitely. 

Heather Lanier is an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University. Her memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, is forthcoming from Monkfish Publishing next year. You can find her on Instagram at @heatherklanier or at her newsletter, The Slow Take.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Copy-editor: Krista Stevens

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Mojgan Ghazirad| Longreads | November, 2022 | 9 minutes (2,335 words)

The first time I saw Gisoo tree, I thought it was a wish tree, people attaching their colorful offerings to it. But when I went close, I saw braided hairs hanging on the boughs.

                                                                                                    Simin Daneshvar —Savushun

The teenage girl stands at her mother’s grave, a middle-aged woman who was killed by the Iranian police during recent unrest in the nation. A white veil hangs around her neck. Her eyes shine with the same rage I’ve seen in the eyes of people who have lost a loved one during the Islamic regime’s brutal crackdowns. Her hair is shorn and she holds her long tresses in her hand. The other hand is obscured by gladiolas on the grave, but I can imagine the scissors she has used to cut her hair. She is from Kermanshah, the ancient city on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. She knows — like all Iranian women — that to mourn is to cut her hair.

Iranian women took to the streets on September 16, 2022, to protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. The Kurdish girl died in police custody after the “Morality Police” detained her for a loose hijab. Every day, I wake up anxious. I read the news, scrolling through horrifying scenes of police brutality against women who burn their scarves in the streets alongside the men who support them in cities all over the country. I go to the neonatal intensive care unit where I work as a doctor, and attend deliveries of premature and at-risk babies, but my heart flutters for yet another day of harrowing news emerging from Iran. Another day of police beating people with batons and shotguns, another day of high school girls shouting Woman Life Freedom in schools, another day of young women sauntering scarfless in front of Basiji militias in a country that has required women to cover their hair for more than 43 years. I am worried, like Iranians who live in Iran. I never thought that after 20 years of living in America, a day would come that I’d be troubled for the country I lived in during my adolescence and young adulthood. The news brings back doleful memories and a desolation that in all the years I’ve been outside Iran, I have tried to forget. But the shocking scenes are so powerful — they erupt remote, fading memories.

My mother didn’t wear hijab; neither did my grandmother or my aunts, like other modern families in Iran. But after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic regime forced women to wear hijab outside the house in public. Even though I saw Maman grabbing a scarf and throwing it on her head before she went out, wearing hijab never materialized in my mind until the first day I attended school. I woke up early in the morning, calling Maman, ready to go to school. She smiled at my blue jumpsuit and said, “I’m afraid you’ve forgotten one thing.” She pointed to my hair and said, “They will need you to cover your hair at school.” All the way to school, I struggled to keep the scarf on my head. It was a small, square scarf Maman had given to me. The knot kept loosening under my chin and as the day went by, one side became shorter and shorter until it freed itself from the knot.

Hijab law strengthened over the years and the dress code for girls in school changed to a black scarf that covered shoulders and breasts, and an extra-long dark cloak. I remember a hot day in June, in the late ’80s. I was sitting on the low steps of our middle school yard in Tehran, wrapped head to toe in heavy hijab, trying to solve an algebra problem just before my final exam. I was writing the solution when I noticed our school principal’s shadow hovering over my head. I jumped up immediately and pulled my scarf forward. By that time, we were conditioned to shove our hair under our scarves as soon as we saw a school official, the revolutionary guard, or Basiji militia in the streets. The principal fixed her gaze on my veil and, without hesitation, snatched the scarf under my chin. “This is too loose. You need to sew a couple more stitches under your chin.” I forgot the solution I had sketched on the paper and took the test with trembling hands and an anxiety that never left me during the exam.

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After Reza Shah Pahlavi ordered mandatory unveiling of women in public in 1936, Iranian women who chose to step out of their homes and pursue higher education abandoned hijab, attended universities, and achieved an active role in society. In conservative families, women had no choice but to stay at home for their reluctance to show their hair in public. Even though the obligation to unveil was relaxed after Reza Shah abdicated in 1941, wearing hijab was dictated by the family’s core beliefs. Men in conservative families set the rules for women’s appearance in public. In those families, women continued to use chador (a long garment that covers a woman’s body from head to toe, but is open in front).

After the Islamic Revolution, the regime forced women to wear hijab and once again the government policed women’s attire. During the first decade after the Islamic government was established, Iranian society was extremely radicalized and girls were scrutinized everywhere outside the house. Even a single strand of hair could put them in trouble at school or in danger of having acid squirted in their faces in the streets. The Islamic regime defined hijab as a core value in a Muslim woman’s beliefs. Women could hardly say a word against obligatory hijab.  The regime’s Morality Police enforced this core value, enshrined as a sacred family law. We are told we are sinners if we show our hair from under our scarves. Islamic regime teachers said that on  Resurrection Day, women who disobeyed the hijab law would be hung from their hair over heaps of fire. They would feel their skin sizzle in hell, just to grow a new skin that would burn for eternity. We were brought up by a doctrine that humiliated and vilified female beauty and alienated us from our own hair and body.

Hijab and women’s hair was always on my mind and we discussed the subject among friends in high school. It was about that time that I read Savushun by Simin Daneshvar, a novel about the life of a landowning family in Shiraz during the British occupation of Southern Iran in World War II. The protagonist Zari, who is a quiet obedient housewife, transforms into an outspoken supporter of her husband’s cause after his death by the British occupier’s agents. In the novel, women mourn for a lost beloved by cutting their hair and attending a ritual deeply rooted in Persian culture. Zari mentions Gisoo tree — gisoo meaning long tresses of a woman in Farsi — and says, “The first time I saw Gisoo tree, I thought it was a wish tree, people attaching their colorful offerings to it. But when I went close, I saw braided hairs hanging on the boughs. The braids belonged to women who had lost a beloved young man, a husband, a brother, or a son.”  The tradition of Savushun fascinated me for years. I read more and paid close attention to the symbolic actions Iranian women took during various mourning ceremonies. 

In Shahnameh, the epic of Persian kings by 10th-century Persian poet Ferdowsi, Farangis cuts her black, musk-scented hair once she finds out the enemies of Iran have murdered her beloved husband, prince Siavash. She wraps the cut hair around her waist like a belt and starts the tradition of Savushun — women mourning the death of a Persian hero whose innocent blood is spilled in the valleys of the land. In the tragic story of Siavash, Farangis plays a seminal part by hiding and safekeeping her son, the next Shah of Iran, signaling her intention to remain abstinent of any sexual encounter with another hero or prince by fastening her long black hair around her waist. Her haircutting symbolizes her refusal to pursue a normal life after Siavash’s death. It is a protest against the sovereignty of Iran’s enemies. 

It is not only in Shahnameh that we read about this tradition. In other literary works such as Darab-Nameh by Abu-Tahir Tarsusi, Burandokht cuts her long hair after the death of her husband, Alexander of Macedonia, and mourns him for 40 days. The tradition is so embedded in Persian literature that numerous poets after Ferdowsi — namely Hafiz, Khaghani, Salman Savoji — use cutting hair as a metaphor for mourning in their poems. 

In many parts of Iran, the ritual is performed in different ways. In central Iran, when a young man dies, the close women of his family cut their tresses and hang them on an erect stone at his grave. The gray of the mother, the black of the wife, and the thin and frail hair of the daughter tangle in each other and dance with the wind. They remind the beholder of the silent mourning that continues for the young man. In Lorestan province, from ancient times, women have covered the croup of the dead man’s horse with a black veil and adorn the animal with a necklace of their tresses. In a ritual called Kotal, women sing in a procession following the horse through the streets. In Bakhtiari tribes of Iran, in a ritual called Pal Boran, women cut their hair, and either stamp on it and mourn, or put it in a clean garment belonging to the beloved and bury it with him, or gather around the hair and sing sad melodies. 

In the kaleidoscope of rituals that vary based on geographical region, there seems to be a fundamental connection between hair and life. “Life” is woven among the strands of a young woman’s hair and cutting that hair implies her unwillingness that life can go on as before the loss of the beloved. Her liveliness is gone with the departure of the beloved, and so is the hair that once signified the beauty of life. She sends a clear message as she mourns: that she will appear and act differently after the tragic event.

Now for over four decades, in a culture where female hair is revered and linked to life, the Islamic regime is forcing women to wear a veil and cover their hair, degrading women’s most cherished beauty into an evil that seduces men and encourages them to commit great sins. Since the Islamic Republic was established, Iranian women have defied obligatory hijab and the patriarchal ideology that wants to oppress the female body. Women activists have challenged this government-imposed law many times, namely in the One Million Signatures campaign for gender equality in 2005. Almost always, the Islamic regime detains women activists to dampen such resistance movements. Women have turned to civil disobedience tactics like showing more of their body and minimizing their scarves to communicate their unhappiness and disapproval for the law. 

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As another day of unrest unfolds in Iran, I think of the symbolic measures Iranian women are taking every day in this fight. Famous women writers, thinkers, and artists in the world have cut their hair in solidarity with them. Elif Shafak, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, and many more are among the writers and artists who have cut their hair in protest. 

I walk up the stairs to the third floor, to the NICU in our hospital, to care for premature babies. On my way to the unit, I think about those Iranian girls and their protest. This time seems to be different from the past. This time, high school and even elementary school girls are demanding what Iranian women have been asking for, for decades. The short clips that trickle from Iran’s heavily filtered, government-slowed internet picture young girls facing whiteboards, their backs to the camera, hair dancing in the air, shouting Woman Life Freedom in class. I am tongue-tied by their bravery in committing such protests in school without hijab. I was a teenage girl in that country — just like them — and I know the courage needed to take off the veil, when showing their hair could cause them to get beaten or detained. It could even cost them their life, and they know this. They shout in schoolyards that they can be the next Mahsa Amini. Their courageous act of letting their long hair flow loose shows they are fully aware of the power hidden in those tresses, and it is not accidental that they shout Woman Life Freedom with their backs to the camera. They know — like their mothers and grandmothers — that their strength lies within their hair. 

Once again, I look at the girl standing at her mother’s grave. She is from Kermanshah, the ancient city on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. She is young, the same age as the schoolgirls who face the whiteboard. She is aware of the tradition of cutting hair. She cuts her hair to mourn, but above that, she acts at her beloved’s grave. She acts in defiance against the oppressor who has killed her mother and silenced her voice. She and all the schoolgirls who protest with their hair may not have read the story behind the Gisoo tree. The old women of Fars believe when they hang their braided hairs to the tree, and water it with tears, the loved departed comes back. They may not know the legend of the tree, but the collective wisdom shared by Iranian women for a thousand years runs in their veins. It whispers in their ears, and tells them that “Life” is stranded there, and to fight for freedom they must first free their hair.

* * *

Mojgan Ghazirad is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has published three collections of short stories in Farsi in Iran and Europe. Her memoir, The House on Sun Street, depicts her memories of growing in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the years of war between Iran and Iraq.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

In this beautiful and emotional piece for Outside, Ian Dille manages to narrate the drama of the 2020 Tour de France, while also detailing the death of his father. The 2020 Tour was the last the pair watched together, after years of bonding through their love of the race. Dille deftly weaves the legs of the race with anecdotes about the ailing parent watching alongside him, demonstrating his love and appreciation for the man who gave him the freedom to pursue his own passion for biking as a career. When Dille is left to watch the final stages of the Tour without his father his devastation is palpable. This piece is expertly done, showing the shared interest that brought a whole family together, and the importance of taking time just to be together, even if it is while also watching a six-hour Tour stage.

Life’s metaphors, its various struggles and successes, seem to play out in a more dramatic fashion in a bike race. At least they did for me and my dad. Riders conquer mountains and succumb to crashes on the way back down. They surge ahead of the group with a violent effort called an attack, form temporary allegiances to share the draft and break the wind, and then try to dispatch each other in the closing kilometers. A rider will lead the race alone for a hundred-some-odd kilometers and then get gobbled up by the charging peloton just meters from the finish.

For my dad and me, watching the Tour became akin to an annual fishing trip or a multi-day hike. Growing up, I spent countless hours pedaling behind him on a shiny aluminum tandem, exploring rural North Texas roads, where we lived in the nineties, and tackling the rocky singletrack overlooking Lake Grapevine. When my dad moved to D.C. in the 2000s, he lost his tight-knit group of bike-club friends, and also his impetus to ride. I was too strong, or too cool, to get out with him then. We didn’t bond on our bikes anymore, but watching the Tour, we came to know each other as adults. 

My dad gave me his hearty laugh and his boyish eyes, but he could also be stoic, gruff, and comically reserved with his emotions. He’d ask how my car was running, and I understood that he loved me. Watching the Tour together, I cherished that, though my dad had never competed, he understood the sport, and through it, he seemed to understand me. Despite its impracticality, he supported my decision to pursue bike racing professionally. He was good at asking questions, and he didn’t fully fall for Lance’s fairy tale. Over the years, we watched heroic performances with a healthy amount of skepticism but also shared an appreciation for underdogs. An unlikely hero would emerge, and we’d root for him to beat the odds.

“Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.” — Colette

In place of an actual child, I have Birdie, a silver tabby cat covered in so much cute and cuddle it should be illegal.

Birdie came into my life almost three years ago after a messy divorce and she’s such a big part of my life now that I don’t know which one of us needs the other more. What I do know is that hardly a day goes by that I don’t think of losing her.

* * *

I was in elementary school when I had my first pet, a goldfish that died twice in one day.

While my family was on summer vacation, Nana was going to watch my fish. Before bringing it over to her house I decided to clean the bowl. It was only when I went to refill the bowl that I realized we were out of distilled water. When I asked my mom if we could go to the store, she told me to use tap water.

Ever the knowledgeable child goldfish owner, I knew you couldn’t just use tap water (the chemical balance is all wrong for their bodies). My mom insisted my fish would be fine for the 10-minute ride it would take to get to Nana and Poppa’s house.   

“We’ll get distilled water when we get there.”

Oh, mother. I wish it were that simple. Not even halfway to their house I found myself with the bowl on my lap and my fish floating on the surface of the water.

“He’s dead! My fish is dead!”

* As an adult, I learned my mom just swirled the water around hoping we’d leave Nana’s house before my fish floated again.

At a stop sign, Mom reached around to the backseat for the bowl. I wanted to tell her “I told you so!” but I waited for a miracle instead. And then it came. When Mom handed the bowl back to me, my fish was swimming around.*

By the time we pulled into Nana and Poppa’s driveway, though, my fish was floating again.

I set the bowl on their kitchen counter when we got inside, and Mom asked Nana if she had any distilled water. (Oh, mother.) Nana took one look at my fish and lifted the bowl. I watched her walk with it to the bathroom at the end of the hallway. Flush.

She returned to the kitchen and set the empty bowl on the counter. I stared into the empty sphere while Mom and Nana agreed with each other that I could always get another fish. I wanted my fish.

* * *

Our family dog Tori, a sweet and cuddly miniature dachshund, had been in our family since I was in fifth grade. By the time I was in my freshman year of college, Tori was nothing more than skin and bones. Mom was the only one who’d pick her up with bare hands because the rest of us didn’t care much for the sensation of fingers slipping between ribs. I’d pick Tori up with a blanket, when she let me.

She’d become so sick that she growled if you tried to touch her. She barely ate anything, kept down even less, and could hardly support herself to stand or use the bathroom. This went on for far longer than I wish to admit simply because my mom didn’t want to “play god” by putting Tori down.

When I was home for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, my family went out of town while I stayed behind to work my part-time grocery store job. Left alone at the house with Tori, and without discussing it with my parents, I called the vet down the street and made an appointment for Tori to be put down that day.

In the time leading up to the appointment, I sobbed every time I looked at her, but I knew I had to do for Tori what my mom would never do.

* * *

Ladies and gentlemen, I confess Birdie is only about three years old now, but facts are facts: Cats have an average lifespan of 13-17 years. I’m expected to live another 50.

Birdie won’t be flushed down the toilet without a chance for me to say goodbye, but in all seriousness, will I have a chance to tell her goodbye? Or will she become sick — unable to eat, hold herself up — and I have to make the decision to end her life and hold her as she takes her last breath? And then, what will I do with her body? Cremate her? Bury her in a cemetery with a headstone that reads “My Darling”? Donate her body to science? 

Thinking about Birdie’s mortality won’t prevent the grief, but in acknowledging she won’t be around forever I find myself loving and appreciating her even more each day. And isn’t that why we have our pets?

For this reading list, I’ve put together seven longreads about how humans experience pet death — the hurt of losing our four-legged friends and how we move on, remembering them along the way.

1. How We Mourn Our Dead Pets (Jessica Miller, November 2015, Literary Hub)

Related reading: Today, in many U.S. states, it’s illegal to be buried with your pet. Sonya Vatomsky writes about today’s movement to change that in this piece for the Atlantic.

Archaeologists uncovered the earliest example of animal burial with the 1954 discovery of Ain Mallaha, “a village built and settled by the Natufian culture between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE in the Eastern Mediterranean, in what is now Israel.” Pictures from the site show remains of a woman’s hands resting on the remains of a puppy.

It’s from this point that Jessica Miller traces our relationship with animal burials through the etymology of the word “pet” to how, with examples of London’s Pet Cemetery at Hyde Park and Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in New York, we have the Victorian Era to thank for pet cemeteries and building the foundation for how we memorialize our pets today.

Pets still sit at the center of many homes, and many lives. With their presence, they remind us of our capacity to empathize with and, often, to love, animals. And with the miniature headstones and the sawdust-stuffed forms, the statues we make in their place, their absence reminds us of this capacity, too.

2. A Dog’s Life: What Would I Sacrifice for the Animal I Love? (Shawna Richer, December 2018, The Globe and Mail)

After an accident left her active dog Scout with a fractured spine, Shawna Richer found herself in an all too familiar situation pet owners face: Do whatever it takes to take care of my pet? Or go with “the other option, unspoken,” which was euthanasia?

Richer writes about the financial, physical, and emotional lengths pet owners go for their pets as she describes the unconditional bond she shares with Scout. Paired with videos and pictures of Scout’s recovery, this piece is an emotional heavyweight. 

People who have not loved a dog will never experience the most honest, pure and unconditional relationship a human can have. But to love a dog is to sign up for heartbreak. You’ll surely outlive them. Accidents occur and illness happens. When you love a dog, you have a say over a life that has a price on it. You know the judgment that comes from loving a pet so much you’d do just about anything for it.

3. How Much is Too Much to Save a Dying Cat? (s.e. smith, November 2017, Longreads)

When s.e. smith found a lump on their cat Leila, the options were bleak, including “a mammary chain removal, the feline equivalent of a mastectomy, radiation, chemotherapy”; options that would give Leila maybe six more months; and options that would only prolong death. 

Through the experience of losing Leila and being present when their grandfather died after “[h]e denied all supportive care,” s.e. smith explores how death is viewed as a failure instead of inevitable and how sometimes letting go can be enough.

“Could” strikes me as more analgesic for human than pet, a sense of doing something, buying time, at a high cost of misery and stress, nausea and fatigue and confusion. For the low, low price of hours of agonizing car rides and long anxious waiting in the lobbies of veterinary clinics while doleful barks and terrified meows filter through the halls, here’s six more months. The monetary cost, which could run to $6,000 or $7,000, seems almost beside the point. Your cat won’t understand why she’s being tormented, but at least you did something instead of just giving up. This is your last chance to show your love.

4. The Death of Pet Can Hurt As Much As the Loss of a Relative (Joe Yonan, March 2012, The Washington Post)

Joe Yonan was no stranger to death when he came home to find his dog Red lifeless on his bedroom floor. He’d watched his father die from a stroke and then, three years later, his sister from cancer. “Yet somehow,” as he writes, “and much to my distress, the death of my dog seems even harder.”

Finding himself questioning why that is, part of Yonan’s grieving process becomes seeking out answers from experts and research into the way we grieve after losing a pet.

 A few weeks after Red died, some friends from the dog park suggested we have a get-together in his memory. I was grateful for the suggestion, but as I came in and exchanged hugs, I felt a bit sheepish when I pulled out the box of Red’s ashes and a recent photo and set them up on the table.

5. How Starting a Pet Euthanasia Business Saved My Life (Ace Tilton Ratcliff, June 2019, Narratively)

Ace Tilton Ratcliff achieved her lifelong dream of becoming a mortician only to have it cut short with the diagnosis of a rare and degenerative connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

Faced with a future unlike the one she ever imagined for herself, Ratcliff shares how she found her way back to guiding families through the experience of death with the start of Harper’s Promise, an in-home pet euthanasia, hospice, and palliative care service she started with her veterinarian husband in honor of their dog Harper.

When I left the mortuary, I had regretfully accepted the hurt of knowing I wouldn’t do this work again, yet here I am. I feel like I have stepped back onto the ferry, wrapped my hands around the rowing oar and felt the gentle waves of the river Styx lapping against the hull.

6. My ‘Recovery Cat’ Would Never Recover (Carla Zanoni, April 2014, Modern Loss)

When the time came for Carla Zanoni to put down her cat Kali, she’d shared a “tome’s worth of love and life” with her. In this piece about losing one of life’s greatest confidants, Zanoni shares how Kali was in on 16 years of her secrets and conversations, relationships, fights, and reconciliations, how Kali saw her through life’s great milestones, both high and low.

My body shook apologetically as our vet injected her with the liquid that paralyzed and sent her into a trance before it stopped her breathing. But as we strolled near the Hudson River moments after she died, I sensed I was living in a gap of space and time. It was like finishing a beloved book, mourning its loss and wanting something to fill its space, while knowing nothing quite can.

 Shall we end on a lighter note?

7. Barbra Streisand Explains: Why I Cloned My Dog (Barbra Streisand, March 2018, New York Times)

Related reading: Sarah Silverman wrote an “obituary type thing” in 2013 for her dog Duck, and in 2012 Fiona Apple canceled her South America tour to spend time with her dying dog Janet.

Lest we forget celebrities are regular people, just remember their pets die, too. When it comes to Barbra Streisand, though, I’ll let you be the judge of that.

When Streisand lost her beloved dog Samantha after 14 years together, she was devastated. Wanting to keep her alive “in some way,” as Streisand explains, she was inspired to clone Samantha after a friend had cloned his. 

You can clone the look of a dog, but you can’t clone the soul. Still, every time I look at their faces, I think of my Samantha…and smile.

* * *

Alison Fishburn is a writer and recovering Floridian living in Ontario. She’s working on a memoir about the sudden death of her younger sister while learning to grieve. You can find her on Twitter @AlisonFishburn.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | May 21, 2019 | 15 minutes (3,975 words)

My mother died shortly after 4 a.m. in the pitch black of a November morning. By roughly 8:30 a.m. that day, the 29th, I had alerted my Twitter and Instagram followers, as well as my Facebook friends. I copied and pasted a few lines across the three platforms, words hastily cobbled together in something akin to a fugue state, accompanied by stray photos of my mother that I had saved on my phone — I had posted about her frequently as her condition worsened, particularly after she arrived at that grim point at which death became imminent death.

Now she was gone, and it seemed appropriate, even convenient, to let people know through these broad, digital strokes. Lethargic, I tapped out my brief requiem, hit post, and then crouched against the mattress, covers pulled beneath my chin — our linens had always, somehow, retained Mom’s smell, and in spite of grief’s zombie adrenaline, the fragrance of clean cotton and vague flora soothed me.

Relatively speaking, I took to social media quite soon after Mom breathed her last, and when I consider this, it feels — at least immediately — both crass and bizarre. I think about the thread of time that stretches from Time of Death to Time of Post, a listless and flimsy string tangled by my befuddled senses, one minute machete-whetted, the next, utterly blotted out.

During Mom’s last couple of months, my tweets had become something of a public diary, more baldly earnest than ever before. It often felt foolhardy, this attempt to convey via social media what death brings: Twitter couldn’t convey the ambient fuzz hissing inside my head as Dad called the hospice service to report that Mom was gone. Instagram couldn’t capture my dumb, feral resistance to the sight of the funeral director’s assistant wheeling a stretcher through our front door. It was board stiff, my sluggish brain noted, coughing up a few desperate sparks of perception, and there was no pillow. How could I express online the watery viscerality of my knees buckling — accompanied by nausea and, briefly, the urge to protest, to rattle the stretcher like a locked door as I screamed, “No, you cannot take Mom from us!” — and how, instead, I dropped onto the kitchen floor, stroking the ears of my sister’s husky, Anya, with painstaking exertion? As if the telltale shuffling in the next room were innocuous, as if Mom weren’t being stuffed into a bag and carted away? I can hardly articulate these things now, just more than a year later, in words uncircumscribed by Twitter’s character limit.

Nevertheless, I cannot seem to stop trying to write about Mom on social media. At first, there was a practical component: The thought of telling everyone I knew, individually, that Mom had died imbued me with the desire to crawl into a cave, never to emerge again. But after her memorial services — there were two, one in Virginia Beach, where my sisters and I had grown up, and one in Mom’s hometown, Plains, Pennsylvania, where she is buried — my grief and I were abandoned, without structural opportunities for expression. Sometimes it stared me down like a tiger, mutating into a menacing presence that bore down against my forehead and glared at me as I lay prone in bed. But in the blink of an eye, grief could become something more emollient, yet no less forceful: thick and heavy like the piles of blankets shrouding me, and viscous, too; it sank into my skin like spilled ink drenches paper.

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Either way, grief held me captive, and I acquiesced to it completely. Yet, despite a disinclination to engage with the world in any material way, I felt compelled to signal my heartbreak, to wave it like a black flag. Tweeting about my mother’s death, and posting photos of her on Instagram, became my own imperfect Victorian mourning ritual, a process through which I took public stock of my grief and asked — still ask — others to bear witness. I craved solitude more than my extroversion has ever permitted, but I discerned the limits with somatic clarity: I could not endure this ordeal alone, and without a space to give grief’s protean bulk a more legible narrative shape, something I could reread and digest. But the internet turns on the flush of immediacy: As the event of my mother’s death gradually, achingly, recedes, transforming, according to outward perception, into a temporal relic, I begin to doubt what I can demand of my online community. Perhaps there will come a day when I am gently judged for this long, discursive trail of mourning. And no matter what, I must grapple with one unmerciful fact that grows monstrously white-hot, like the flash of torched magnesium: Writing out my grief and leaning on the company of friends and strangers are comforts born from acknowledgment; they offer no curative measure. Grief, unlike my mother, will endure for as long as I do.

***

Death’s incorporation into American culture has always been rickety at best. It happens not so much within our communities, but at the spokes, cordoned off to sites unseen, uttered in the hushed, ungainly language we lean upon when we’re talking about things we’d prefer to ignore, that we treat as purely theoretical until the flesh of it stares us in the face. People do not die; they “pass,” a murky term that suits our collective discomfort and, in its ubiquity, transforms the departed into vague events: entities who have been reduced to some beclouded forward motion. Embedded in this euphemism is our most strident anxiety: Death brings us to an utter halt, and we do not want to imagine ourselves, or those we love, in an infinite and unconscious stasis, whatever our views on the afterlife may be.

And because we do not know how to speak about death — and because its presence reminds us that mortals only borrow time — we pack it away into gray-dim and cloistered hospital rooms in a feeble attempt to control its migrations. We recite “Sorry for your loss” with knee-jerk roteness, as if asking pardon for our tardy response to an email. Or, we say nothing at all, because it is easier — even easier than dashing off the lines, “I’m sorry. I’m here for you,” and meaning it.

A corpse, the physical conclusion of every human body, is treated as a ghoulish taboo, suited only for funeral parlors and blood-spattered horror flicks. We rely on imperfect conduits like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to circumvent faux pas and misunderstandings. When the performance of grief was more formal, bereavement was not only more obvious, it was elevated to a form of aesthetic presentation. Victorian mourning culture, for example, was severe, almost punishing — particularly for women, upon whom the brunt of the ritualistic responsibility fell. For a widow, mourning lasted at least two years and was partitioned into three stages. Moreover, it demanded the utmost sartorial modesty in an era when this was already the order of the day: It would be unseemly, after all, for a woman to take pleasure in her femininity when duty demanded that she embody chaste melancholy (wearing jewelry was largely verboten, for instance, although pearls were acceptable in later stages of mourning, so long as they signified tears). Nonetheless, these practices did offer the benefit of communicating one’s grief to the world without needing to say much at all. When a woman was in “deep mourning” — the first stage of grieving the loss of a parent, spouse, or child — etiquette demanded the wearing of a black crepe gown and veil for a full year and day after the death occurred. “In many cases it was intended to shield mourners from the wider world,” writes Lindsey Palka at The Toast, “since a woman wearing a three foot black veil would be treated with deference and gentility in a public place” (in a sickly ironic turn, the chemicals used to produce this attire were poisonous, often causing illness, or even death for those who so reverently wore them).

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For all its potholes and opportunities for flagrant calamity, social media is relatively equalizing: One need not be a Dickensian heiress to alert the world — and to intermittently remind them — that her mother has died, and she feels shitty about that. And because our social media accounts are Frankensteinian creatures of our own idiosyncratic fashioning, we shape them, daily, according to whatever purposes suit our present needs or motivations. When my mother died, these platforms offered me two tenuously competing applications. I could narrate my grief at length, seeking solace through verbosity, and yet, simultaneously, careful word choice — after all, if I was preoccupied with the language of pain, I was less attuned to the afflictions it visited upon me. Transient moments spent puzzling over vocabulary supplied a physiological reprieve, my brain fleetingly fixated on an adjacent and trivial task.

Or, if the prospect of any social engagement was torturous, be it in the flesh or across digital scapes, I could briefly mention that the day felt especially difficult, and I simply couldn’t rise to meet it. Nearly 17 months later, I still call on each of these options as it seems necessary. But now and then, when I’m blinking back tears in the wine aisle at Safeway — some clichés have earned their keep — or when the Moana soundtrack transforms a workout into an hour of cardio sobbing, I wish I had a black diamond spinning above my head like an oversize Sims character, so that I might broadcast my threadbare emotional bandwidth to the offline world, too.

In the swamp dark of mourning, we ought not be tasked with barbed explanations of our grief-based impulses in any context: “I’m sorry that I keep bailing on plans; I’m too depressed to go out” or “Apologies for the five-week delay in responding to your email, but I am literally living inside of a blanket cocoon, crying into my cat.” Still, an evermore digitized world compels us to perpetually account for ourselves: It transforms, with evermore vividness, into an incorporeal coworking space where we offer proof of life to friends and, to potential employers, résumés in the form of droll but insightful responses to cultural and political detritus. As we become habituated to living with our hands on our keyboards, absence from social media suddenly seems like neglect. The responsibility is illusory — we do not owe the world narratives of pain — and yet I can’t seem to shake it. Whether I am tip-tapping through a roving, woebegone Twitter thread or implicitly asking permission to log off for the day — because I write for the internet, it increasingly feels as if I am beholden to it — I am always here because I no longer believe I possess the luxury of indefinite departure. Although crumpled with sorrow, the pricking sense that I ought to explain why, suddenly, I have become a humdrum Twitter entity agitates my sense of professional obligation.

As my mother’s prognosis grew more bleak and I struggled to maintain my quotidien routine, I fretted over the tight tether yoking all of my relationships — friendly, yes, but also writerly — to my consistent online presence. With an online announcement, I could eschew judgment if I stopped pitching stories for a few months, or simply failed to produce a steady stream of observations and pithy remarks — not that I am especially adept at the latter anyway. My writing life is implacably tied to my social media accounts: I’m frequently offered paid writing work through Twitter, and I’ve met editors through online introductions. And frankly, if I were to disappear without a word, I’m not confident that I could maintain the modest following I’ve cultivated. Mulling over my digital presence in the wake of my mother’s death disgusted me: I castigated myself for shallowness and rank ambition when my focus ought to have been fully elsewhere. But I could not deny my material reality, which marched sternly on, with its bills and rent payments, and a checking account entirely reliant upon freelance labor. I thought about every Thomas Hardy novel I had read, in which cruel fate inevitably wields its knife when the birds are chirping. Whatever my predilections, social media had to become a component of my grieving practices.

But to suggest that I never want to speak of my mother would be a bald-faced lie. I merely prefer doing so on my own terms, and behind the safeguarding curtain of my Twitter account, where my avatar is statically placid and will not betray my disheveled melancholy. And when I begin to post about her, it can take formidable effort to cease.

There’s probably little mystery to this impulse. From the months preceding her death until now, just over one year later, I am consumed by a nexus of memory and grief. I do not think exclusively of my mother, but she persists as something more than a recollection or idea: She’s become a foundational presence upon which other thoughts layer like paper. I don’t mind — in fact, I prefer it, because I have become attached to the futile, but no less ardent project of ensuring her immortality. If I am thinking of Mom, she cannot be entirely gone. If I am tweeting about her, or posting photos on Instagram, as I am wont to do on the 29th of every month, I am supplying the ether with digital relics, paradoxically preserving her by commemorating her loss.

Tweeting about Mom supplies an illusion of narrative control — I am nothing if not the most emotional variety of type A — and coddles my yen to navigate the wild ungovernability of life and death, as if I could do much of anything to influence either. Parsing the details of my mother’s life, and arranging them in an order of sorts, one that is readable to others and myself, has become my sole recourse when, seemingly, my agency has flown in every other respect. I compose post after post about her — her adorable idiosyncrasies, mundane memories of her googling recipes with her reading specs nestled into the slope of her nose — because I do not want her to die, even though she is already dead.

These yearnings are by no means an anomaly. Many of my friends have and are grappling with the loss of a parent by sharing brief narratives and photos — and I am always warmed by their willing vulnerability. Social media, particularly Twitter, is at its best when we summon one another’s kindest inclinations, and I have both witnessed and been the fortunate recipient of tender empathy and loving attentions over these past 17 months. Yet I sometimes wrestle with sheepishness when I consider the widening berth between her death and this day, where I am still living — and still inclined to launch into freewheeling anecdotes, or dreary musings on mortality.

These are fairly unregimented recipes for wading through grief. But social media companies, Facebook in particular, have sought to create mechanisms that mitigate the unanticipated barbs that accompany death in an increasingly digitized world. In the midst of funeral preparations, penning an obituary, and wading through my own shock and melancholy, the thought that I could instantly alert hundreds of people that my mother had died was a surprising relief. But there are additional measures that a bereaved family could take to safeguard themselves against social media’s programmatic callousness. Profile memorialization, which freezes the Facebook account of a deceased person so they no longer show up as a friend to add or as someone to wish a happy birthday, exists for precisely this purpose. “We’ve heard in research that people closest to the loved one often are experiencing so much grief that the last thing they want to do is call up the deceased person’s friends and share the news and relive the trauma all over again,” said Facebook memorialization product manager Alice Ely.

But although tech companies thrive on the prevailing thesis that all human behavior can be systemized, mourning resists such a logic. My sisters and I alerted Facebook friends to Mom’s death, but we haven’t taken any steps to memorialize her page — which, until her obituary was posted online, was her solitary digital footprint — and I don’t know that we will. For my part, I’ve avoided starting the process because I still balk at tasks that reify Mom’s absence. But grief will always insist that we acknowledge it, somehow, some way: On her birthday, October 3rd, Facebook suggested that I wish her many happy returns, and that hollow, as boundless within me as it is without, ached anew.

It’s true: I could eliminate this particular torment if I were to do the damn thing — memorialize Mom’s page and be done with it — but I’m reluctant to embark on a process that seems akin to catching a drop of water in a deluge. The digital detritus that comprises us amasses into a jumbled, endless archive of life and death. There will always be the errant photo dredged up on TimeHop, or a Facebook “memory,” unrequested, hearkening back to an afternoon drinking coffee with Mom at the kitchen table, or, for that matter, this writing assignment that I willingly pitched, necessitating sustained intellectual intimacy with the ruthless conundrum of digital life after death. I open my umbrella in the downpour; a gust of water rips it from me like a shred of cloth.

Moreover, the perennial drawback to any online space is its fundamental incoherence: You’re often sifting through the dross in search of meaningful resonance. Perhaps this is the dark underbelly to my grief-tweet compulsion — it’s a game of emotional whack-a-mole, the classic case of a lab rat rapping a bar, only to be intermittently rewarded with a treat. Sometimes mourning before a vast and obscure crowd can be liberating and fulfilling, other times, it’s a lonely enterprise. Like people, venues cannot be what we require on command, at any moment. A venue that takes its shape and tone from the people inhabiting it surely cannot. There is no blame to parcel out here; these are merely the circumstances of feeling sad in a world that cannot always accommodate you.

Sometimes, however, that lack of accommodation is pernicious. I have yet to delete my Facebook account, but as I read with increasing disgust about the company’s practice of issuing user data to corporations I am evermore disinclined to patronize the platform, even though it was the only one my mother used. Ely notes that Facebook now offers the option of appointing a Legacy Contact to manage a deceased person’s page, but this step must be taken before the death occurs. Mom enjoyed posting photos here and there, but when she was dying of ovarian cancer she — and we, her husband and three daughters — simply did not possess the wherewithal to discuss the afterlife of her minimal digital presence. Though, perhaps others should learn from our neglect in this domain. If you plan to remain on Facebook in hopes that they correct their bevy of infringements on privacy, Ely emphasizes that selecting a Legacy Contact, or at least memorializing a page — after doing so it would read “Remembering [David Bowie]” — protects it from “attacks.” These days, however, said attacks seems to be coming from inside the house.

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According to Katherine Hatch, a former grief and trauma psychotherapist at the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing and owner of Grounded Grief Therapy, a grief-focused therapy practice, mourning gathers force with the passing of time: “I often see grief becoming more intense down the road,” Hatch told me via email. “This is something that I don’t think people realize; it takes a ton of time to relearn the world without this person in it and for people to internalize that this death has actually happened. Feeling worse down the road doesn’t mean necessarily that someone is getting worse or moving backwards. It is often a sign that the grief process is moving through someone in a healthy way.”

I was relieved to read Hatch’s assessment: I’ve endured this year, yes — but the increasingly vicious awareness of my mother’s absence has ground against me like sandpaper, an agitating abrasion that, in its persistence, has scraped me to rawness. “There is no fixing grief,” as Hatch says. There is no way to reign it, temper it, or predict it either.

Perhaps, then, I am flailing; it often seems that way. Or perhaps there is a more productive bend. Hatch has noticed in her bereaved clients a range of usage when it comes to grieving on social media. “Some … engage with it; others find it terrible. Those who struggle with it voice their dismay at content that can feel trite and oversimplified,” she observed. But then, “Others find it useful to foster a continued bond that is both personal and shared with their community to keep the person present. Some use it as a way to continue to narrate their story. Some use it as a platform and as a way to search for some meaning within their loss.”

And when social media discourse seems so tied up in disaffection — we now warn our followers prior to posting an “earnest tweet,” as if any content that is not slathered in irony is unpalatable and downright embarrassing — illuminating our grief, and the demands it makes of us, could be a useful byproduct of the desire to express our pain in a public way.

Because I work online, and, in the process, have nurtured friendships here — many as dear to me as those initiated IRL — it has followed that I grieve online, too. And I am grateful for the potential it offers, even as I ultimately find it insufficient. Although the boundaries between my online and offline relationships are dwindling, a meaningful exchange on Twitter will always — at least in my case — a distracted enterprise, one in which I am resisting the pressure to respond to some cultural event in my wheelhouse or fretting over some announcement that has triggered my impostor complex. And ultimately, I will find myself longing for physical engagement — a tight squeeze or a cozy nestle on the couch — and if I am talking to a friend on Twitter, it is because they cannot be here with me now. Hatch would likely be unsurprised by this assessment. “I do not feel social media replaces the healing potential of compassionate human physical presence in the face of suffering,” she stressed. “I do not think online communities of support are an equal stand-in for in-person community.”

At the conclusion of my mother’s memorial service, I stood idly near the podium as people milled about, all of us flush with adrenaline and the awkward solemnity begot by such a charged gathering. I had delivered one of the eulogies, my hardest writing assignment to date, and now, softly jostled by the crush of bodies, my damp and weary eyes settled on whatever was before me. After a few moments passed, I discerned the face of my high school best friend, who I see rarely, and who is as perpetually offline as I am on, although our intimacy persists in the way that girlish affection does. My mother had been something of a confidante to her, and they had loved each other. Suddenly, she was standing before me: IRL. I choked out her name, and we embraced, all hot faces and rivulets of tears and years melting away like a dewy fog.

I probably tweeted about this reunion at some point. I don’t precisely recall.

Rachel Vorona Cote is a writer living in Takoma Park, MD. Her first book, TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing. You can find her on Twitter here.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

In December 2017, we knew it would soon be time to make a decision to euthanize our 8-year-old lhasa mutt. The best vet and all the medications in the world could no longer forestall a growing belly, heavy with the water his failing heart couldn’t purge from his system. We thought we’d get to choose when. Author Pam Houston thought the same thing about her 39-year-old horse, Roany.

As Houston recounts in this poignant essay at Outside, she and Roany had been together for 25 years. After a lengthy period of lameness, despite exceptional care, she knew it would soon be time for her friend, a horse known for his gentle disposition and a keen emotional intelligence. On the night before his scheduled departure, Roany made his own decision, but not without Pam by his side.

Roany was stoicism defined. As his condition worsened, he learned to pivot on his good front leg—and would, for an apple or a carrot or to sneak into the barn to get at the winter’s stash of alfalfa. He blew bubbles in his water bucket because it made me laugh, and he would sometimes even give himself a bird bath by splashing his still mighty head. I also knew that just because he could handle the discomfort didn’t mean he should. He had been so strong so recently, such a force of nature thundering back and forth across the pasture. There was no chance I was going to ask him to make another winter, but as long as he was hobbling to his golf course and chortling to me each morning, it seemed too early to end his life.

He was still standing when I got there. But the minute he saw me he went to the ground with relief. He curled up like a fawn, and I could hear that his breathing wasn’t right. Mike and I sat beside him and petted his handsome neck. Above us, stragglers from the Perseid meteor shower, which had peaked over the weekend, streaked the blackness.

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