5
IT’S THE MOST NORMAL THING IN THE WORLD to be born and the most normal thing to die. When Sinclair was born, I was holding onto consciousness as if my mind were two sets of fingers gripping a narrow ledge. I was supposed to have a planned C-section. Sinclair was breech and when I researched the risks, it seemed like I would incur more and she would incur fewer if she was born that way. We’d tried a procedure to turn her; an obstetrician at the hospital had pressed her hands to my stomach and gotten Sinclair halfway before Sinclair ducked and wouldn’t keep turning. The obstetrician turned her back to breech.
I had an epidural before the C-section, and I reacted poorly to the anaesthetic. I was being prepped for surgery and Will wasn’t yet in the room. My blood pressure dropped and Sinclair’s heart rate dropped and the edges of the room went blurry and the doctors and nurses began to move very quickly. A nurse knelt by my ear and described what was happening. Her voice was quiet and reassuring. I felt the scalpel at my stomach as if the blade were a memory instead of a current event. Everything was happening very fast and very slow, very close and very far away.
When Sinclair emerged and let out a wail, I began to cry as if it was the first time I’d ever cried, as if tears were part of the viscera of birth. Two nurses asked me if I was okay. Was I okay? “I’m fine,” I said, sobbing. “I’m fine. Just overwhelmed.”
Will was ushered in, brought to Sinclair, just as they were about to do her Apgar test, which would measure her breathing, heart rate, muscle tone, and colour. The blue hadn’t yet faded from her skin. And then Will sat behind me to the left, where the nurse had been sitting, and someone, maybe my OB/GYN, put Sinclair on my chest. She was curled up like a little frog and seemed impossibly small. As my OB stitched me up, he joked with the nurses in French. “That was quick,” someone must have said to him. “Under four minutes,” he responded. “Three and a half.”
EARLIER IN THE PREGNANCY, Will and I were sitting in a corridor at Montreal’s CHU Sainte-Justine, waiting to take a gestational diabetes test, when a pregnant woman collapsed. The hallway was full of pregnant women, sitting in a row of chairs lined up against the wall, all at various stages of the hour-long test. Nurses rushed to help the woman who’d collapsed. They helped her into a small room off the hallway; she was murmuring and moaning. Five minutes later, the hospital called a code blue, meaning a critical medical emergency, like cardiac or respiratory arrest: our floor, our block, the room number where the nurses had rushed the woman. I noted the nearest exit stairwell—down the white-tiled hallway, a short 200-metre dash—just as a nurse called my name to start the test. I looked at Will, who nodded in the direction of the nurse’s station with his chin, and I reluctantly let him walk me down the hallway. We passed a cluster of nurses and residents gathered outside the woman’s room. If I believed in God, I would have prayed for her (and for myself). As it was, all I could do was take a few deep breaths to calm my nerves.
Maternal mortality rates are relatively low in Canada, around 9 for every 100,000 deliveries. Before I got pregnant, I thought the deaths of gestational parents existed solely in the context of childbirth, the Gothic and tragic kind you see depicted in books and on television—Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey, Oliver’s mother in Oliver Twist, Cathy’s mother in Wuthering Heights. In reality, mortality rates include deaths during pregnancy, childbirth, and up to forty-two days after childbirth. Rates are tied to direct and indirect factors, everything from the age of the gestational parent to circulatory disorders and hypertension to access to education and regular medical care. Less discussed: a more recent meta-study discovered that one in nineteen deaths of gestational parents in Ontario between 1994 and 2008 resulted from suicide.
At twenty-six weeks pregnant, I thought about dying several times a day. Thirty-two years old and in good health, I had none of the physical risk factors associated with death before, during, or after childbirth. I had access to high-quality medical care; through our local community centre, Will and I went to a free prenatal education class where we learned about labour, which I wouldn’t experience, and breastfeeding and caring for a newborn, which I would.
I was worried that I would die, and that Sinclair wouldn’t make it to birth. When I learned I was pregnant, it felt tentative, like something that could be taken away at any time. I tried not to, but I made bargains in my head: if we get to twelve weeks, the pregnancy will last; if we get to thirty-five, she’ll be born safe. Another bargain: once the fetus reached viability, Will promised to wear a helmet while he rode his bike.
My doctor’s appointments proceeded well. I was physically fine. By my second trimester, though, I’d started to experience a blue hour. Midafternoon, I cried until I was heaving. One day, the sight of my cat curled up on my bed reminded me of a fox-fur stole, and I pictured her little body, evacuated of life, and burst into tears. Another day, when I was about to go for a bike ride, I was overcome with memories of every car accident I’d ever been in or witnessed. My usual anxiety about death had been ratcheted up past the boundary of the volume knob. I told myself that I was lucky and that it was nothing but a type of selfish empathy to keep thinking about the woman who collapsed during her gestational diabetes test. I thought about accessing psychiatric care through the hospital but dismissed the idea as soon as the peak of each wave passed. I didn’t want to sponge up resources that could be better used for someone else, I didn’t want to be unwell, and on a very basic level I thought—because I’d previously attempted to treat it—that there was no real cure for my anxiety about mortality. In retrospect, I was also so worried about developing postpartum depression, or, worse to me, postpartum mania, that I neglected to notice that I’d developed a type of antenatal depression I probably should have sought help for.
Instead, I made more bargains. After reading the study about suicide and maternal mortality, I promised myself I’d go to the doctor if obsessively fearing death began to feel like standing on a suspension bridge and experiencing a downwards visual tug towards the chasm. Sinclair reached twelve weeks, and then thirty-five. I had some late-term pregnancy complications and couldn’t understand why we weren’t just yanking her out. She was small and breech, and I began to itch all over, as if I’d become allergic to being pregnant. The longer we could wait, the better, the doctors said, but I didn’t fully trust them.
After she was born, for no good reason, Will and I both were worried that maybe she’d die in the night if we didn’t watch her closely enough. She was strong. She was bright and alert. She drank so much milk. Still, Will and I stayed up late listening to her ragged breathing. We’d learned all about how newborns adapt to life outside the womb—they pause between breaths, they can make what sound like gurgling or choking noises, they breathe very rapidly, not very evenly—but in practice it was very hard to tell what was terrifyingly normal and what constituted a sign that she needed to be whisked off to urgent care. We worried, yet we continued to be lucky. Sinclair got to six months and then a year old, officially out of SIDS territory. And then it became clear that all the survival goals I’d set—twelve weeks gestation, thirty-five, birth, six months, a year—though statistically meaningful, would never bring me the relief I was seeking. I would need to accept a different kind of relief, or accept that relief would never come.
I AM NOW THIRTY-FIVE AND SINCLAIR IS TWO YEARS OLD. My dad is in his early sixties and so is Will’s mom; Will’s dad has reached his seventies. Sinclair even has two and half living sets of great-grandparents. When I was her age, I had one set. Most of my grandparents lived through the Second World War, and my maternal granddad was an airplane mechanic, stationed on the west coast of Africa. None of them lived in prewar Canada, but they all lived in postwar Canada; most came from England and one, later, from Jamaica. Together, linked as a family, our lifespans cover a lot of history; I like to think about these links, and to picture my grandparents at Sinclair’s age. But Sinclair’s arrival also reminds me how temporary this is: eventually, she will be older and my grandparents will no longer be alive. I won’t get to have them all, together, for as long as I’d like.
Will and I had Sinclair at the right time for our lives, but I wish the numbers marking our ages were smaller. If the numbers were smaller, then statistically, we’d have more time with her. I am gripped by this counting-focused anxiety, even as I know that life isn’t statistics: my time could end now, or next week.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, people in North America began to write more about death. About how the rituals of death here have been sanitized, about how we’re too far from it, how we’d have a healthier relationship with it if we cultivated a bodily closeness. Doulas helped people through the liminal state between womb and outside world, so death doulas emerged in the popular consciousness, guiding the dying and their families through the process of moving from existence to non-existence.
But distance from death is a first-world problem, and one that isn’t even experienced by everyone in the first world. Mortality rates vary fairly significantly by race, economic status, and gender identity. Between 2016 and 2019, the opioid crisis killed over 14,700 people in Canada—that number has been climbing year after year, and thousands more people would have died if not for the administration of naloxone. Many communities, often Indigenous communities, don’t have clean, potable water; many more, sometimes overlapping, are affected by the kind of environmental racism that makes it unsafe to breathe, to swim, to live. As a result of this and many other long-term and continuing state policies, the lifespans of Indigenous Peoples in Canada are fifteen years shorter than the average. Trans people, in particular trans women, in particular trans women of colour, also don’t generally have to think abstractly about how close death is or could be: the current US average lifespan for a trans woman of colour is thirty-five years, a number I can quote without googling.
Still, middle-class people in cities and suburbs keep having the same conversation about whether photos of dead people, often drowned, often refugees, should be shared on social media. The idea is that to allow death to be proximate and visible is to increase empathy, to make death, and in particular this kind of death, real for those of us who lead safe lives, those of us who can turn on the tap and drink the water that comes out.
I am against showing the photos. The dead were living, breathing humans with interior lives as full and rich as mine. I don’t need to see photos to “humanize” them or the circumstances that war and conflict and politics forced them into. They are already human. All they were trying to do was live. When I am falling asleep, if I haven’t managed to avoid seeing the pictures, I see the pictures. They’ve been added to the carousel of images I would like to wipe clean, a carousel that haunts me. Also on the carousel are hypothetical images of Sinclair: potential violence, illness. I try to banish the images. I stay up late picturing the images and banishing them. I read several times about how to save tomato seeds, pea seeds, basil, how to coax a new plant from the life the parent plant has given, as the images recur. I feel sorry, and who I want to apologize to is the dead, who have been desecrated. I’m not sure why we need to view their lifeless bodies in order to push the state to be responsible for killing fewer people. I’m not sure why we—the “we” many people think about every four years at the ballot box, the “we” some of us are more complicit with than others—need to be responsible for killing so many people, when any other alternative seems preferable.
When I interrogate the way I feel about life and death, I think about how life is a cycle that runs through matter. I want everyone to live forever, but that is not the way life works. When I interrogate the way I feel about life and death, I wish I could think less about death while I am still living.
IN TOM SCOCCA’S ARTICLE “Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die,” he plays the same game of sliding numbers that I’ve been playing since I was a kid and began to obsessively subtract my family members’ ages from Canada’s average lifespans for men and women. (“How old are you?” I’d ask my nana again and again, as she demurred. “What year were you born?”) “Everyone who was forty-seven years old when my father was born is now dead,” Scocca writes. “All of them. That entire group of middle-aged people, who made up the adult world when my father was a child, is gone.” The essay is a meditation on the ways our culture thinks of time as something one gains through age, rather than something that slowly ticks away. Basically: the longer you skateboard, the more you push off parenthood, the longer you think you’re young. For Scocca, what made reality click into place—that’s not how time or age works at all—was the reality of having a kid. “If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children,” he writes. “You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.”
The largest part of me identifies with Scocca’s new-found fixation on mortality, generations, kids, parents, grandparents, life; a smaller part of me doesn’t, because I’ve never thought of time the other way. Not for the same reason that most trans women and people assigned female at birth probably wouldn’t—the overwhelming message to women and girls is that your worth is tied to beauty and fertility, and both of those things have a looming expiry date—but because this numbers game has been my game forever, and it seems naive to me that Scocca got to it so late.
It might just be heterosexual cis white men, in particular WASP-y ones, who get to skateboard nonchalantly into their mid-forties. The averages for some of us lengthen, whereas others bear the weight of earlier death—the ultimate expression of how our society is uneven, inequitable, unequal, unfair. The libertarian response to this might be that life is not fair, and it is stupid to expect fairness, but the truth is that some of the people who die young do so in order that we might grow old. The water company drains an aquifer to send bottles to Arizona; twenty minutes down the road, the residents of an Indigenous community have no clean drinking water. I am not saying that Tom Scocca should feel bad that the weight of time hit him a decade later than many trans women die, but I am saying that all of us who have a reasonable assumption of becoming octogenarians should not literally be taking life from others in order to get there.
WHEN SINCLAIR WAS BORN, Justin Trudeau was prime minister. When I was born, his father, Pierre, had just stepped down. When my dad was born, Louis St. Laurent was just about to be replaced by John Diefenbaker. When my grandmother was born, William Lyon Mackenzie King—the Presbyterian spiritualist who communed with the dead via mediums and Ouija boards—was in power. I learned about the October Crisis and the Quiet Revolution in school as if they were a chapter that had ended several chapters back, not realizing the same long-serving prime minister who was in power around the time I was born had been in charge for most of it. The longer I am alive, the closer history seems—and the more it becomes clear that the people I love and care about lived through eras I used to consider the distant and undisturbable past. Put another way: it was when I started being able to reliably answer Trivial Pursuit questions that I knew I was fucked.
When I was pregnant and crying every day at three p.m., I sobbed uncontrollably like I used to when we’d leave my maternal grandparents’ house in Florida to go back north. Part of me thought that if I held onto my grandparents tight enough, I’d never have to let them go. When I cried while pregnant, the sorrow was the same: my grandfather had died, and my nana, siding with my estranged mother, no longer wanted to speak to me. Why was the sorrow the same before I knew what the loss felt like, when I was just anticipating it? Why did it still feel the same after I did?
Every day I live with the discomfort that I might die today, that I will die someday, that everyone I care about will die, probably my grandparents first—it’s supposed to start like that and then go on down the line, because that’s how it works when you are lucky and privileged, and you should be grateful for it. I know now that the idea that Sinclair would get to a safe point—past miscarriage, past SIDS—was fantastical. The days ticking forward are teaching me that it’s fantastical. New worries have replaced the old ones.
I have always wanted something that did not add up on an abacus, or anywhere else. At the same time as I want to live forever, and I want the people I care about to live forever, I also want there to be space and time for everyone to live forever, not just everyone wealthy and white. I need Sinclair to be able to live forever even more than I want to live forever myself. (I even regularly tell my cat that she needs to live to be the oldest cat in the world, a Guinness World Record–holding cat.) Unlike Scocca, I have worried about mortality my whole life. Like Scocca, having a kid threw the normal progression of time, and what it would mean for me, and for her, into a terrifying new kind of relief. Even if I could quiet the part of my brain that imagines worst-case scenarios as if imagining them were the first step of a protective spell to banish them, I would still, impossibly, want us all to live forever.