#160: On preparation and its limits

Re: birth, death, and the restless in-between

Before Bug died, we’d been planning to reorganize our kitchen. I’d bought several plastic bins, drawer organizers, and air-tight canisters from The Container Store. When they arrived in early August, I unpacked them like fine china, placing each one carefully on our dining table, reveling in the possibility they implied. They sat there for days. At first the pile charmed me, then it taunted me. Eventually, I moved it to the floor, where it taunted me still (by tripping me). Then my cat went to the hospital and never came back, and something changed about the pile. It stopped representing a failure of my execution, and instead became a totem of lost faith.

That first night without Bug, Avi sat on the edge of the bathtub and read me negative reviews of Barbie as I washed my hair. We’d seen it that day around noon, and had spent all afternoon complaining about it, but when Bug started breathing fast, the shift in our attention was swift. To return to the movie hours later felt like rewinding the clock. No putting Bug in his carrier for the last time, no airless waiting room, no deciding to kill the thing we’d been working so hard to keep alive. Only Barbie. On Barbie, our opinions were confident and low-stakes. On Barbie, our attitudes were defeatist, but in the fun way. “The idea that dolls offer girls a prefabricated range of options for what they can be, rather than a set of objects on which to play out wishes and fears, aggression and desire, grants an enormous amount of psychic power and civic responsibility to corporations,” Avi read aloud from N+1 as I sat in the tub, the water raining down on my knees. We agreed this was the strongest argument for Barbie as fascist art.

When we got in bed, Avi told me to wake him if I couldn’t sleep. When he stirred around 2am and I confessed I was still up, he suggested we go sit on the couch. We put a blanket over our legs in the dark living room and took turns crying and talking about Bug. We’d prepared for this, hadn’t we? If we did the right thing, why did it feel so wrong? Also, were we sure we did the right thing? That last question we confessed to asking only days later. That first night, we were full of reassurances. That first week, neither of us ever cried about Bug at the same time. It was as if we were pulling from the same well of grief, but there was only one faucet, and so the other could always stand by to wipe up the spill.

The house got messy fast, the plastic bins no longer an eyesore compared to everything else. All the energy I’d been spending on nesting was redirected to not thinking about the exact moment Bug died, which meant thinking about it all the time. I wondered if the baby could feel it when I cried, like the video I’d seen of a fetus shaking violently in its mother’s womb whenever she laughed. Sobbing and laughing cause a similar movement, produce a similar sound. Physiologically speaking, this seemed promising. Worst case, I was passing my sadness onto the baby. Best case, the baby thought something incredibly funny had happened. That I’d been laughing about it for days.

When Bug’s care—the pills and shots and rotating cast of side effects, the weekly sink-baths and medical haircuts, the vet visits and pharmacy fuck-ups, the incessant worrying and inability to leave town—felt overwhelming, we’d remind ourselves that at least, in the end, this part would be over. Maybe we could take a couple trips on a whim, leave the house for longer than a few hours, go to bed without a 10-point checklist. It had been two-and-a-half years. Before that, lockdown. The first time Avi and I actually did laugh about Bug was the other day in the kitchen, when Avi looked at me and said, “Well, at least we have our freedom now.” We stared at each other in silence, then cracked up at the exact same time. The baby is coming in three months.

As we picked up the house, it started feeling cleaner than it had felt in a long time. Not tidier, but less textured. No litter or spare bits of kibble are currently embedded in my bare heels. Our vacuum needs have plummeted. I’m sneezing a lot less, breathing much easier. It’s been over a week since I wiped down our glass coffee table, and I keep marveling at its persistent gleam. Whenever Avi and I think of something that’s “better” now that Bug is gone, we always clarify: Not worth it.

Eventually we tackled the pile from The Container Store. Taking everything out of our kitchen cabinets, purging it and putting it back, but in the bins. There’s a quiet dignity to food products stacked neatly into clear bins that can be peered into, slid out, or taken fully down to the counter for further probing. When we finished the kitchen, we kept opening the cabinets just to admire their innards. This act was utterly Pavlovian; a pleasure-seeking behavior. We needed the hit.

I’ve been like this all summer: cleaning out drawers and cabinets and closets, rearranging them, then most importantly, peering repeatedly into them for days afterward, getting high on my own supply. This compulsion betrays an ulterior motive than the obvious one, which is that we want the apartment to be more functional for the baby. (I’m sure parenting involves a lot of digging through random old tech cables, so thank god we cleared those out). This tactical version of nesting strikes me, now, as more pathological than I originally gave it credit for. To dismantle and rebuild your home in perfect order is a kind of spiritual offense; a bludgeon against the tyranny of the unknown. I will not be set off-kilter by this baby. I will not be caught off-guard. I know exactly where my 2015 tax forms are filed.

I have always invested a lot in preparation. More than preparation can return. When we first found out Bug was terminally ill, I grieved him then and there. When he didn’t die right away, I tried to consider the grief logged, reinforcing it whenever I could. I’d rest my hands on his back and try to memorize the feeling of life flowing through him. I’d verbally accept his death. I’d press my cheek to his fur and thank him for being my pet. As if I could use it all later to mitigate the loss. When he eventually did die, in a wicker basket on my lap, his little chin resting in my palm, there was no accounting for the sadness. My efforts had been in vain. If it were possible to prepare for the unknown, we’d probably call it something different.

One of the last things I did for Bug was clean his ears and muzzle with cotton rounds and soap. I knelt in front of where he sat breathing heavily on the couch, gently separating his infected whiskers and opening his tiny ears. He sat still as I did it, like he always did for me, and this occurs to me, now, as the more appropriate way to greet the edge: not to fortify myself against the sharpness of his death, but to tend softly to his life until the very end.

There’s no preparing for groundswells. That’s one thing Bug’s death has taught me. No matter how many drawers I rearrange or cabinets I organize, my life will inevitably be thrown off-kilter, and I’ll be caught off-guard. It is very unlikely I will ever need to know the location of my 2015 tax return. Today our apartment feels too empty and too quiet, and someday soon, it will feel the opposite. Everything will feel inconceivably hard again, and also, hopefully, inconceivably worth it. Until then, our preparation list is long, but the most important thing we’ll do is wait. And accept the limits of preparation itself.

On our way home from the animal hospital, Bug’s empty carrier in the backseat, the baby kicked me harder than she’d ever kicked before.

My favorite thing I read last week was “What Are Dreams For?” by Amanda Gefter for The New Yorker, on the fascinating new research on sleep twitches, and what they have to do with dreams. Last week’s 15 things also included my favorite oatmeal, some Hudson recs, my new pants, and more. The rec of the week was what I should do before I have the baby. Thanks for all your Dear Danny love this past week. :’)

Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley