Time is hurtling us inexorably forward. Each second – minute – hour – day – week – month is taking us further and further from the time when we could at least hold Jules, feel his skin on our skin, savor the touch of his downy soft hair.
We are powerless in the face of time’s passage. We can’t get back to him, can’t hold time at bay. We couldn’t undo time at the moment of his death, when it mattered most, and still even now, it cannot be reversed, it cannot be halted, it cannot even be slowed. Time is beyond our control. We are its captives.
There is an unreality to this world that we now inhabit.
When I first saw Jules in the operating room, the first thing I said was: This can’t be real. The emotional punch of the moment was so strong, so simply indigestible that I felt myself leaving my body. I watched the scene unfold from above and behind. It has been many years since I have had such an experience — the experience of touching madness. But once touched, madness never fully leaves you. It lies coiled within your chest like a snake that requires kind words and careful tending.
Since then, Willa and I have waffled between various dream worlds. Maybe it’s because grief has drained us of our vitality, as we sleep 9 or sometimes 10 hours a day. Or maybe it’s because we hope that when we wake up, we will find ourselves back in a world where we are with Jules and Jules is with us.
The experience of the unreality of death is widely reported. A friend sent me a book of poems and prose from Denise Riley after the death of her adult son, Jacob. In the two pages we have read of her essay Time Lived, Without Its Flow, she recounts her experience one month after his death: “The notes and emails of condolence have stopped arriving and I’ve acknowledged each of them.* Yet after all this ritual effort, he still hasn’t come home. What more does he want?”
The psychologist Kübler-Ross — coldly, medically — calls this denial. It is common among the grieving. Yet, there is a sense in which death — our own or the death of those we know — must always be treated as an impossibility.
Living requires us to do things like set up the nursery, fasten the carseat into the car, make sure we buy a few disposable infant diapers for those first few days at home when we’re too tired to figure out how to use the snap kind (if we ever will). Living requires us to imagine what it will be like to rock a crying child to sleep, to dream about changing the diapers before passing the child to be nursed at its mothers breast, to picture collapsing into an afternoon nap when the child finally goes to sleep at last. Living requires desire, hope, and fear, too.
Yes, we can imagine death. And indeed we do. Willa and I were, of course, worried about the risk of stillbirth. But one calms oneself with statistics — how could we even imagine that Willa would be the 1 of 22,000 women whose unscarred uterus spontaneously ruptures? While one can imagine death, no one can live with it. It must remain an impossibility for us to go on with the living.
What we are experiencing, then, is not so much denial as the work of acclimating to an alien reality. It remains easy to get lost between worlds.
As we mourn, our house is silent. At times that silence is deafening: Jules’ eerie absence echoes through every room. At other times it feels familiar: the silence of our house is the only house we’ve ever known. We ease into that normality, until the undercurrent of sadness gushes to the surface, making the normality itself profoundly upsetting. How could we betray our beloved Jules with this sense of normality?
As time passes, it has felt difficult to hold onto Jules. We know so little about him, though we ritually recite the things we do know, they are few. The four days we spent with him feel so few, so we try to replay every memory, place it somewhere in our mind where it cannot be forgotten, even as we are upset by the feeling that the passage of time is eroding their vividness. The profound shock we felt during the moments we held him means that our memories of him are more difficult to bring into focus, more prone to bleed into one another and decay.
As we move forward, sometimes Jules’ conception, birth and death all seem like a fever dream. Last year was an excruciatingly painful year in my work life, a morbid symptom of the broader decay of our shared political life in the era of global crisis. The anticipation of Jules’ arrival felt like the one unalloyed piece of goodness that I could hold close to my heart, that was making my days tolerable, survivable. The unreality of Jules’ death gives the entire year a sense of unreality. I try to hold onto the idea that even death cannot undo the goodness, the miracle of Jules’ conception, the fleeting coming-into-being of his person. Even if it was a promise never fully realized, the joy and the love cannot be erased. But can they? Holding onto whatever joy there was is a delicate business and the slightest jostling can make it impossible to hold beside the fact that he has been stolen from our very arms.
We have kept our nursery intact, but to fight this dream-state of erasure and unreality, Willa had us take his bassinet, high chair, and baby bouncer up from the basement where they have been stored. Perhaps it sounds odd, but we need to feel his absence. We need to feel that other possible world, that world where he is with us, to keep our foothold in this world where he is not.
Still, some days it feels like perhaps it is possible to move back into that other world, that world where Jules is still alive. Another friend, who lost an infant child, wrote to me of waking with the sense that there must exist two realities now. That somehow, it might be possible to get from one to another.
Willa, too, has told me eloquently of her feeling that all that separates us from Jules — alive, breathing, happy — is the thinnest of veils. That somehow, it must be possible for us to reach through, to pull him back across the river Styx to be with us in the land of the living. But the further we travel through time, the further the distance between us and Jules. What once felt traversable, is slowly becoming an expanse that cannot be bridged.
Over the weekend she told me of a song that she has been singing to herself, whose meaning she has now re-inscribed as a description of our strange world. We have been singing it at night beside his bassinet:
The water is wide,
And I can’t cross over.
Neither have I,
Wings to fly.
Build me a boat,
That can carry two.
We both will row,
My love and I.
We feel stuck in that river between two worlds.
Philosophers have long been captivated by thoughts of possible worlds. Leibniz claimed that this must be the best of all possible worlds. A thought so absurd that Voltaire ably and savagely devoted an entire novel, Candide, to the enterprise of lampooning the mere thought of it. Of course Leibniz also believed that we are monads: unitary minds, whose bodies exist only as an extension of perceptual capacities. Reason, like grief, can take you on odesseys to strange lands.
I have not, however, been dwelling on the absurd theses of Leibniz these days. Instead, the ideas of a philosopher named David Lewis have returned to me.
Lewis famously explained our intuition that the world could be otherwise, and indeed that the world is in fact otherwise “somewhere” by defending a thesis called modal realism. According to this position, there are a countless number of worlds — where a world is understood as the totality of entities that surround us throughout all space and throughout all time forwards and back. These worlds are not merely possible; they are actual, concrete worlds that differ from ours in ways small and large, but are no less real than our own. Throughout his life, Lewis maintained that this theory provides the simplest and best explanation for a number of findings in logic and other fields.
If Lewis is correct, then there are many, actually existing worlds in which Jules is alive and with Willa and I. Or rather, technically speaking, there are many worlds in which there exists a person who resembles our Jules in every way except that he is alive and in his second month of living. And so too, in those worlds, there are people who resemble Willa and I in every way except that they are in their second month of being parents to a living child named Jules.
If Lewis is correct, one wants to ask, why can’t we travel to that other world? Perhaps we could meet that other Jules and live there with our counterparts, that other Jacob and Willa. Or, perhaps they would let us take their Jules back to this world for short trips so that we could introduce him to all of you. Then you too could know Jules and love him.
If Lewis is correct, one wants to ask, why are we this Jacob and this Willa? Why could we not be one of those Jacobs and those Willas, who are living with their beloved son Jules, alive and in his second month of life?
If Lewis is correct, one might take some comfort in the thought of all those countless Jules who are traveling through their worlds, even if we can never get to them or meet them or know them. Some of those Jules have already begun sleeping for longer stretches during the night. In others, weary-eyed Jacobs and Willas are tending to collicky Jules. Death gives you a different perspective on such things – would that we had sleepless nights! – and so all those worlds are infinitely more desirable than this one.
There is a kind of poetry to Lewis’ theory. Our world, echoing among many other worlds, subtly different from one another in their lines and stanzas.
Whatever consoling beauty might be found in such an idea, the bitter truth is that we are alive, stranded here in this world, where our Jules has died. We are left alone, and without him, captive to our time, the time through which our bodies are moving, even as our minds — like the minds of rabbits writhing to escape the trap which has been set for them — desperately search for a way out.
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*We are grateful that many of our friends have continued to send us messages of love and support. Unlike Denise Riley, I am regretful that I have yet to respond to many of you individually, despite my sincere appreciation for your words.
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash