If We’re Going to See the Body, We Need to Leave ​​Now

–Ann Carson, Antigonick 

I once heard a saying that goes, your mother gives birth to you twice–first when you’re born and again when she dies. 

I don’t know where this saying comes from. I don’t even know if it’s a saying. Maybe I made it up. 

Maybe I dreamt it. Maybe it’s one of those ambient ideas that floats around in the discourse all egg-headed and obtuse until your mother actually dies and then, suddenly, it seems brilliant. But ​​​​this realization is mine and not necessarily yours. How you will feel when your mother dies is another matter. You might think this thing about two births is ridiculous. You might prefer something a bit more definitive, less woo-woo. Death, it turns out, is highly personal. As for me, I felt very much born again. Not in the way some evangelical Christians are born again. Not in the way some influencer after a thirty-day cleanse is born again. I mean freshly assailable. I mean newly tender. I mean the fontanel on my skull came back. I mean that I could only focus my eyes on what was black and white and right in front of me. I was hungry, or I was not. I was speechless, literally. 

The first time my mother gave birth to me, the doctors had to drag me out. The second time my mother gave birth to me, I arrived quickly. All it took was a phone call. You really should see her, my sister said. I just think you’ll regret it if you don’t. ​​​​I cried while looking at my swollen face in the mirror: this is what a woman with a dead mother looks like. It’s not like you didn’t see it coming. She lived a good long life. I stumbled into the bathroom, clutching my stomach. Any number of platitudes I may have considered I drowned out with the sound of my own vomiting. 

The first time I gave birth, my doctor tried to hand me a mirror. Look, she said, you can see the head crowning! No thanks, I said. But, my sister warned me, if I didn’t look at our mother’s dead body, I wouldn’t find closure. Weeks, months, even years might go by while I continue to believe our mother is still potting gerber daisies and hoarding cats. As for my doctor, she probably thought I’d never understand the miracle of my own vagina. In other words, I would go crazy. But is it crazy to think that that the proverbial rock is rolled in front of the proverbial cave door for a reason? What if instead of rolling the rock away, I just turned around and walked in the opposite direction? The second time I gave birth, my doctor installed a curtain in the operating room that separated my top half from my bottom half so that any chance I had to see my own blood and guts was taken from me. But I don’t consider it a theft. I consider it a mercy. I “don’t want to understand everything / or even understand anything / [I] want to understand something else,” as Anne Carson, translator of the Ancient ​​​​Greek, says. I’m the sort of person who avoids maps and plans and prefers to stumble around a city. Set me loose in the Greek islands and I’d probably sleepwalk onto ferries and daydream my way right into the Mediterranean Sea. I get this attitude, I think, from my mother. She slept herself into death without a ticket or a timetable. 

In ​​her introduction to her translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, Anne Carson says that Antigone’s “name in Greek means something like ‘against birth’ or ‘instead of being born’” and she wonders how that can be. How can one be “against birth?” Birth is inevitable, though not as inevitable as death. 

Anyone who’s had a miscarriage can tell you that. Maybe the word birth isn’t quite right or, at least, it doesn’t mean what we think it does. To be born is to change the atmosphere with your breath, to bend resources and love toward you, to manipulate the trajectory of the story. Maybe Antigone isn’t so much against birth as she is unbending. The laws of the universe, unlike men’s laws, are unbendable and, yes, stubbornness can be a good thing, but it can also be very, very bad, as the play itself shows us. Antigone’s dead brother must be buried in the right way and she will not bend on this matter. 

If we’re going to see the body, my sister said, we need to leave now. 

Love is an abstraction but like living things, it gets a birthday. Love starts one day then one day it ends. Does love need to see? Some people think so. Still other people say love is blind, as blind as poor Tiresias who tried to warn everybody about all the deaths that were coming. Some people believe that when the object of love dies, love has nowhere to go. Without its object of affection, love becomes restless, causes mischief, gets bad grades, says it doesn’t want to go to college. The impulse is to put love in therapy, start it on a course of meds. Love is at loose ends. Love cannot have loose ends. Love cannot just walk around with unreciprocated feelings. That’s what grief is. ​​​​Love needs somewhere to go. A beam of light needs to bounce off something. Maybe, I thought, by seeing the body, by seeing that it’s empty, my love will relinquish its obsession with that particular person, my mother. Maybe my sister was right. Maybe if I see the body, my love for that body will evaporate, dissipate, become a cloud and rain down, ooze under the automatic doors of big box stores, pool in parking lots, coat windows like pollen. My love would become a natural phenomenon thousands of strangers will step over or through, maybe notice, maybe not, like a rainbow in an oil spill. 

I said to my sister, I’m not ready. The aides who met us at the nursing home front door hugged us, brought us coffee, and spoke very gently and quietly, both out of concern but also–I could tell–out of procedural duty. It’s ok. I could see it from their point of view. A family arrives all discombobulated and sad and it’s their job to usher them efficiently and with empathy through a process that only begins with the body, with seeing the body, but there are other patients to deal with too: the mean guy who screams for his food, the woman who doesn’t remember where her room is, the woman who thinks her wallet is stolen, the woman who is looking for her mother. Why were they still alive? I know this is an awful question to ask, but I asked it, then sat down outside my mother’s room like a toddler in time out while my sister went right in, shutting the door behind her. 

What’s behind this door? ​​THE BODY is behind this door. How many game shows begin and end this way, except there’s a BRAND NEW CAR behind the door or a BRAND NEW LIVING ROOM SUITE behind the door or, for the unlucky, there’s nothing behind the door at all–a kind of mediated representation of loss, as in, YOU DID NOT WIN THE BRAND NEW CAR or YOU DID NOT WIN THE BRAND NEW LIVING ROOM SUITE. God, I was so sleepy. If I closed my eyes, there’d be nothing behind the door at all and that, in my case, would be good. A good, dark nothingness. 

Maybe the best option was to put out my eyes altogether. It was what the ancients would do. Then I would see stars. Then I would see the whole universe. What’s a single dead body in light of a whole universe? There were never doors on caves, were there? Stones. There were stones. And that’s how you knew the corpse had risen from the dead: the stone had been rolled away– 

​​​​​Lesley? It’s Trish Powers. 

I opened my eyes. A woman was standing over me. We were your neighbors back in… 

She seemed vaguely familiar. A moment went by. Maybe two. Oh, yes, I said. I remember you. 

I came to visit with your mom–  

–but Mom’s dead. 

I tried to be polite, but I couldn’t control the water leaking out of my eyes and nose. This wouldn’t do. I felt suddenly as if this woman I used to know had caught me naked and rolling in my own shitty misery like one of my mom’s dogs. I’m sure she remembered all my mom’s dogs. The white one, the one-eyed one. No, this wouldn’t do. In order for any community to prosper–whether it’s a town by the Ionian Sea or a middle-class suburb on the East side of Cincinnati–certain rules are required, non-negotiable commandments by which community members are known to each other. Think of them as landmarks. Take them away and what’s left? A flat plain in every direction and no GPS. I suppose there was a part of me–probably instilled by my mother–that longed to keep things normal, to keep things socially acceptable, even as the dead body behind the closed door throbbed like a bruise, even as parts of my personality were dying and new parts were being born. I believe the saying goes, between a rock and a hard place–the hard place being Trish and the rock being, of course, the body. I regarded her. Oh, yes. I remember you. You were always so good, always such a good girl. Now Trish was a middle-aged woman but her goodness was still so evident, so clearly marked, that when I looked at her, I knew exactly where I was. 

Are you alone? Trish asked. 

My sister is in there, I said, with the body. 

Antigone wants to bury her brother’s dead body according to religious custom, but her uncle the King refuses. He’d rather leave it out in the field for dogs to eat and crows to peck. Antigone’s brother had been a traitor. Some people are just unknowable, I guess. If, after so many years, I’d seen Trish again at a cocktail party, I might’ve shown her photos of my kids then excused myself to make small talk with somebody I liked ​​better, but Trish had come to the nursing home believing my mother was still alive and only a few hours prior, ​​​​I’d had the same belief. I felt–for some reason–responsible. Some may call this irony or coincidence or divine providence or bad luck or even just really, really bad timing, but I suppose it depends on how one sees things. The ancients would say the gods were up to something. 

Trish, I recalled, came from a very religious family. Oh, she exclaimed, hand to heart, I was thinking of your mom recently, about how much she loved spring! I heard a saying once about how a person’s favorite season says something fundamental about who they are. Trish’s face has that kind of earnestness that causes her eyes to crinkle and her mouth to turn downward at the corners. She doesn’t wear makeup. She’d never dye her hair but, even in her fifties, it’s still long, nut-brown, and shiny. 

There’s a nun-like quality to her that is not not attractive. She knows how to work her mild face into a Marian expression of condolence and something told me it was what she did best. It was, in fact, what she lived for. I remembered how smart and talented she and her siblings were, playing instruments, singing arias, getting degrees, feeding the homeless. Our dad would say to my sister, Why can’t you be more like the Powers girls, when she got caught sneaking out of her bedroom at night to see her friends. I don’t think Trish ever snuck out of anything. Trish, I’d heard, was a doctor now and a mom to four (or five?) beautiful children while continuing to serve the indigent both here and abroad. Her perfection was indisputable. She even caused a stink at her daughter’s high school (where my sister teaches) over The Handmaid’s Tale. Nobody should read that, she’d said, and a lot of people believed her. So I suppose she’s a book-banner, my sister told me. Everybody at McNicholas is afraid of her. She goes to mass regularly, eating the eucharist without any of the self-doubt that plagues me when I eat a sandwich. She knew, somehow, to alight like an angel at nearly the moment of my mother’s death with a look of beneficent tenderness. Or did she know? She’s only human, I thought. She’s hardly some Olympian or a hydra-headed gorgon. It’s just a myth we started, my family and I, to pass the time, to keep my wayward sister in line, to perpetuate the outlines of a very old story. 

I’ve been meaning to get here, she said, distraught, but things kept coming up. A tear slid out of her eye. 

–and now it’s too late. I didn’t know if I meant it as a joke or, or what? Too late for me too, I thought. I didn’t get that movie-scene moment by my mother’s bed. I didn’t get to say to her, It’s ok, Mom, you can go now. She just up and went. I found myself getting angry. I wanted to hold a mirror up to Trish and say, Look! Pity is crowning, but that would be rude, I guess. She did love spring, I said, while wondering what it meant, in Trish’s worldview, to love fall instead. 

In Bertold Brecht’s 1948 version of Antigone, the actor playing Antigone wore a door on her back. Yes, there was an actual door strapped to her back. I’m not entirely sure what the door was supposed to ​​mean and I don’t think Anne Carson does either, but she uses the Introduction to her own version of Antigone to speculate how “a door can have diverse meanings.” “I stand outside your door,” she says, and 

Mean old Uncle Kreon orders Antigone to be buried alive. I suppose it’s hard to build a cave onstage and shove Antigone into it, but a door she can’t open or close seems like a good theatrical metaphor. It’s a door she’s burdened by. It’s a door that follows her everywhere. She can’t choose to leave or choose to stay, can’t open the door and look in or leave the door closed and walk away. I think Brecht was asking his audience to recognize the anti in Antigone’s name, the negation, the unbending aspect of her character. On one hand, if an old neighbor after years and years came upon Antigone in her grief, I believe that old neighbor would still know her indisputably. Antigone is always herself and does not dissemble. She does not need to look at her own crying face in a mirror. She does not need to listen to a podcast about grief to know she is grieving. On the other hand, Antigone’s immutability is what ultimately kills her. I was hoping she’d see it without my having to say it: Trish had stumbled (inadvertently) in on our vigil, our wake, our shemira, though we wouldn’t admit to believing in any of it beyond, as my sister said, the secular ritual of closure. Maybe our closure didn’t look the way Trish would prefer it to look. Was she judging me? Us? After all, her mother at ninety-something still lives at home, is still alive altogether. We did the dutiful daughter thing wrong. Must have. The dirt we threw on the body, metaphorically-speaking, was actually plastic. The birds got to it. Now the whole neighborhood is talking. While Trish’s rituals are codified, ours our slapdash, agnostic fiddle-faddle. She wins, in other words, and we fail. Oh, God, she’s not that bad! She talks to God and He answers her, which is fine. No Handmaid’s Tale for Trish. No religious solace for my sister and me. Though Anne Carson would disagree, I think life must be so much more complicated now than it was for the ancients. So many more choices. I mean shampoo, candy shapes, ways to bury somebody. I felt my body start to cave in on itself, my sadness rolling its boulder in to block the exit. I thought, if I stay here too long, I’m never getting out alive, so I said to Trish finally, Is it ok if we just call you later? Of course I had no intention of calling her later. It’s just what people say. 

​​​I’m so glad you feel comfortable saying that to me, she said, then I turned around and opened the door. 

CHORUS: 

In every play, a problem enters the room, or at least it should, otherwise it’s not a play worth watching. There’s a subtle shift in mood, the sudden arrival of someone new, an unexpected turn of events, and now the pulse quickens. The story speeds up. An old, familiar-but-almost-forgotten feeling turns and stretches in the hippocampus. This is what it’s like, you think, to be outside of yourself while giving birth to yourself. This is how it felt to be a child when the scale and scope of life were proportional to the eternal. What’s wrong with the heroine is also wrong with you: pretension, refusal. Maybe you never really grew up. Maybe that’s why you don’t want to look in the mirror. Oh, that’s not a maybe. That’s a fact. You still talk to make-believe friends and prophets and horses and love your sister, your brother, your mother unconditionally. You still sometimes call her Mommy. Called her. And when the play reaches its end and you lose–as you must–whatever battle you were waging over whatever fistful of dirt you did or did not sprinkle over the dead, ​​I find that your love is left to drift, bootless. I’m ashamed of you, sitting on the opposite side of the room while your sister is right beside the body, stroking its hair. The air feels utterly and completely bent though the body’s breath is no longer bending it. She seems asleep, that’s all. “To feel anything / deranges you. To be seen / feeling anything strips you naked,” Anne Carson says, and it’s true. The impulse to cover your genitals and the frankness of your expression comes over you quickly, as if you’ve been caught in the Garden. When you gave birth, all shyness about your body went out the window (when God closes a door, God opens a window) and whether you shat on the birthing table or spit or screamed or your breasts swung down upon her chest, what did it matter? Birth is inevitable though not as inevitable as–. You look at her dead body but it is not going to give you answers to questions you haven’t asked or somehow ease your suffering. The tragedy is in this realization and not in Antigone’s death or Haemon’s death or Eurydice’s death. You find yourself looking instead at your sister who is smarter and braver. We are alive, you think, in the tomb where our mother had only just been living. “If you help me / help me lift the corpse…” Antigone begs her sister Ismene. Your sister reminds you that your mother want(ed) to be cremated. 

Oh yes, you remember, and you feel suddenly horrified by the prospect. Now you know why some people do not want to demolish the beloved’s skin, deface the beloved’s bones, turn the beloved’s face to char. But there’s no one left to see and no reason to be seen, so what else is ​​there? 

finis