We take for granted that certain things are weighted in granite, anchored in epoxy, and will always just be. How do we exist otherwise? What does it mean to lose the thing unimaginable?

It’s presumptive to define “the thing,” so I won’t. Pain is incomparable yet connective. This is a look at pain and the fear of pain. Pain that drips upon the heart has us fumbling in abstraction and forever reshapes our existence.

Lydia Davis’s short short story “The Child” captures an actual moment of routine in the fog of unspeakable grief.   Davis’ collection Can’t and Won’t won her the Man Booker International Prize, which is well-deserved. Her writing, short short stories, sometimes only a sentence is often from dreams or translations of Flaubert and Proust. Her work is simply imagined but speaks directly to our deepest humanity and truth of being.

She is bending over her child. She can’t leave her. The child is laid out in state on a table. She wants to take one more photograph of the child, probably the last. In life, the child would never sit still for a photograph. She says to herself, ‘I’m going to get the camera,’ as if saying to the child, ‘Don’t move.’

The mother rolls on tracks that no longer exist—the movement of emotional gravity.

“When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children,” writes Joan Didion in her elegant memoir about her daughter's death at thirty-nine.   When she lost her husband to a heart attack, Joan Didion treaded grief and wrote the extraordinary A Year of Magical Thinking. A year later her daughter died after a sustained illness. Whereas Magical Thinking was an eviscerating, immediate account of grief, Blue Nights takes a more removed (but no less painful) view.

I imagine she means that the loss of a child is as close as we come to experiencing our death. “Once she was born,” writes Didion, “I was never not afraid.” My daughter’s possible death affects me so deeply if I look at it so closely that I cannot breathe. The loss of this thing unimaginable is real before it exists.

Because we’re not meant to live in an emotional coma, we diminish the object in an attempt to care less. Didion regrets never giving her daughter appropriate personhood: “She was already a person. I could never afford to see that.”

Didion wrote Blue Nights to make sense of the nonsensical.

[T]he way in which you wake one summer morning less resilient than you were and by Christmas find your ability to mobilize gone, atrophied, no longer extant?

[…]

The way in which your awareness of this passing time—this permanent slowing, this vanishing resilience—multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life?

Losing a child has bespoke intimacy, but losing the unimaginable thing need not be so personal. The loss of anything infinite—how does that affect us? How does the fear of it affect us?

Last Chance to See is an emotionally insightful odyssey between Douglas Adams—the inquisitive, creative, and often playful mind behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — and Mark Carwardine—a dedicated zoologist and conservationist. They travel to specific and remote spots like Komodo Island and the Zaire mountains to introduce us to critically endangered species.

Adams’s account is superb, yet tragedy vibrates beneath. Losing one of our brilliant species, one that you “know” from childhood (from the zoo, books, stuffed animals) and love and imagination, fills me with shimmering pain. Adams asks why we care. Empathy, certainly. (Like Emerson, I believe man is not apart from nature; when we care for it, we care for ourselves.) And because, Adams argues, “the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.”

In the home of my heart, New Zealand, my husband and I visited a bird sanctuary where they protect, track, and nurture deeply vulnerable kiwis. Led by an expert, we followed Kami, unearthed her from her grassy daybed, and checked her weight and other vitals as she burrowed into our sweaters for darkness. Her vulnerability delivered visceral pain in all of us.

Once again, the immediate real superseded the immediate imagined. That was years ago, now it has a name: eco-anxiety.

It is overwhelming to view the big reality, especially an eternal to which we are all part and must return. So, we hunker down and laugh and take and post photos. 

What things that are unembodied? Harder to see, are they harder to lose? I worry about the loss of humanity. Yours. Mine. Under the right conditions, what prevents me from becoming inhuman?

I think of the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who wrote during WWI and chose to see murder as horror, not as a morale boost. From his “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”:

I, too, saw God through the mud,–
The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child. Merry it was to laugh there–
Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

I think of Elie Wiesel, who wrote one of the most important books of the 20th century, Night, a lidless look into a body reduced by hunger and deprivation. It is the most personal story of personal stories, a Holocaust survival. Reduced under the inhumanity of his oppressors Wiesel becomes—in a small and insignificant way— numb to his own father's death. Uncaring.

I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast?

Most people don’t fret over their humanity. It is always someone else who concerns us. Someone else, we must stop, not us.

But that isn't enough, as Owen and Wiesel show us fearlessly, and brutally.

And then, of course, there is the most internal loss: our minds. Something exacerbated by an attentive focus on the immediate and something we often don’t realize is happening.

When the unexpurgated diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky were published for the first time in 1979, they showed extant psychosis. Nijinsky’s relevance to ballet, dance, and choreography, his unquestioned virtuosity, and his long life spent in a mental institution for schizophrenia is the stuff of dark legend—a soul without mind.

I went out for a walk, once, toward evening. I was walking quickly uphill. I stopped on a mountain. It was not Sinai. I had gone far. I felt cold. I was suffering from cold. I felt that I had to kneel down. I knelt quickly. After that, I felt I had to put my hand on the snow. I was holding my hand down, and suddenly I felt pain. I screamed with pain and snatched away my hand. I gazed at a star that did not say ‘Hello’ to me.

He goes on and on and on—rhythm without meaning. He is losing his mind, right? Or is this normal and I'm losing mine?

I am not psychotic, but I have moments of distress and instability. I spent hours drawing lines during a particularly difficult period in my life without purpose or direction. Straight, long, short. Lines that folded back in on themselves connected. Delineated a path I could not. Pen, paper, line—I contained myself in those items. They were all that existed.

When life whisked me out of the circumstance, I put down the pen and folded the paper into boxes to contain the episode. Humans are wonderfully adaptive. We manage pain. We manage joy.

As I read through these works and write, these words sink into my heart; what strikes me is that we are less adept at managing both simultaneously and carrying both joy and sorrow in our hearts, to love our children and fear their death.

Is that possible? Imaginable?