Subject: A Horse with No Name, Part 2

June 3, 2022

CW: Death, Grief. Previous post: A Horse with No Name, Part 1

The ocean is a desert with its life underground
and a perfect disguise above
- America, A Horse With No Name

Fragments

I.
I am 12 years old and I’m seeing the ocean for the first time. It’s not even the ocean proper, just the Puget Sound, but I love it as instantly as I fear it. A few years ago my dad gave me an enormous book, “Venomous Animals of the World.” Of course I loved it and read it cover to cover, repeating my favorite sections on gruesomely painful deaths over and over again. Now I am finally seeing the ocean and all I can see are hiding places for lionfish and box jellyfish and blue-ringed octopi. All of these animals live in the coastal regions of the Indo-Pacific, i.e. around Australia. None of them live near Seattle. I know this, because I have read every word in my venomous animal book, but now that I am faced with the prospect of dipping my toes in Pacific waters, I am frozen with fear. Poison is a toxin that enters your body through inhalation, skin absorption, or swallowing. Venom is a toxin that is injected into you, and the act of injecting the toxin is called envenomation. Being envenomated by a blue-ringed octopus can result in full body paralysis within a matter of minutes. Victims who have survived its bite report being fully aware of their surroundings in spite of paralysis; however, they are prisoners in their own bodies, unable to signal or call for help.

II.
When my mom was young, maybe 8 or 9 years old, she stood on the banks of a river, helpless, as she watched her older sister drown. I don’t know her sister’s name. I don’t know which river it was. My mom never learned to swim, and remained afraid of water for the rest of her life. Unexpectedly, in spite of her fear of water and hatred of all types of seafood, she always did enjoy fishing.

III.
I am 35 years old, standing on a deeply familiar stretch of the Oregon coast. I’ve lived in Portland for nearly 18 years and visited the coast more times than I can count. I have favorite haunts, like Gracie’s Sea Hag in Depoe Bay and the Irish pub in Newport, and favorite tide pools (by Yachats). I have a list of the best places to get fresh crab, and an even longer list of places where I will never buy coffee again. I am filled with a deep sense of regret that I never brought my mom to see the ocean. As far as I’m aware, my mom never saw the Pacific ocean and she wasn’t interested in seeing it. That knowledge has no effect on the regret I feel. I wish she could be here with me now. The ocean is massive and ancient beyond reckoning, and every mistake you’ve ever made is completely insignificant in comparison.

IV.
The day my mom died, as soon as we got home I decided to run myself a bath. I wasn’t sure what to do while the tub filled, so I lit candles, turned off the lights, stripped off my clothes, and stood naked, waiting, in the bathroom as steam curled around me. Are you familiar with Zeno’s paradox? An oversimplification is that it should be impossible for two objects to touch, because there are infinite half points in between. In grief, I have experienced the opposite. At one moment, I am in one place, in the next, another. There is no memory or consciousness of anything in between. The half steps which should be there are conspicuously missing. At one moment, I stood watching the water level slowly rise, unsure of what to do. The next, there I was—naked, prostrate on the not-nearly-clean-enough linoleum. It was not a Natalie Imbruglia moment. I was neither cold nor shamed. Palm touched palm, an unfamiliar, unlearned gesture turned automatic by urgency, prayer I did not know I possessed. I do not know who I prayed to or what I said, but words tumbled out with utmost feeling, passion, and I wonder if we’ve got it all wrong—prayer came first, gods, second. I did not have to be taught this thing.

V.
In the days that follow my mother’s death, steam becomes my confessional and I baptize myself anew in hot water each day. I sit on the floor of the shower and let the running water take the place of the tears I find that I could no longer cry. Having neither rites nor culture around death, I have been left to invent my own. I wonder what it would be like to know, “this is what you do when someone dies.” In the water, I rock back and forth repeating words. No one taught me to do this, and I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but I let the animal part of my body lead me and I don’t try to question it. “I forgive my mom, and I forgive myself,” is all I chant at first, but after a while it changes and expands. I layer words and weave together the fragments into something bigger.

VI.
When we are in the hospital and my mom is dying, I order a drug test on my mom. I immediately feel guilty, because I do not know if she has any awareness of her surroundings, and I don’t want her last memory to be of me narc-ing on her. The doctors do not think my mom is conscious and they assure me that she is completely brain dead. While we wait on the results, my mind spins with possible scenarios. Although my mom has not had access to opioids in years, she has recently been getting to know her neighbors. I don’t trust Tyler, the guy in the apartment across from her. It’s easy to distrust him; someone recently spray painted “You Killed Her” over his entire front door. His wife is dead and someone blames him. What if he’s selling drugs, bad drugs, laced drugs, drugs maybe intentionally or unintentionally cut with fentanyl? I am ready to deliver a verdict: Tyler killed my mom, and I am rabid with desire for vengeance. Then the results come back: my mom is clean, and I am left with an aimless sense of injustice.

VII.
Recent advances in EEG technology have enabled new research on coma patients. Previously, those in vegetative states were thought to be fully unconscious, unaware of their surroundings and outside stimuli. This is a nice way to think about a coma, imagining a very long sleep. However, new findings show that many patients, so-called “vegetables”, may be more conscious than anyone has suspected. Although they cannot move to such an extent that their pupils do not even react to changes in light, their brain waves react to sound and touch stimuli in ways similar to healthy subjects. Saying the word “tennis” will light up the parts of their brain responsible for imagining playing tennis. I have trouble believing the doctors when they tell me there’s no way my mom is aware of what’s going on. It may be true, but it may not be. Every part of me hopes that she died, whatever that means, back at home, before this nightmare at the hospital. The part of me that does not trust in hope plays the complete albums of Loretta Lynn quietly on my phone, set directly beside my mom’s ear.

VIII.
Tita reports back. I sent her, mercifully, away from the hospital and the seemingly never-ending process of dying. She went to feed my mom’s cats and make sure the apartment was closed up. She ended up talking with Tyler, the neighbor I was so ready to throw under the bus. He had been the one to find my mom and to call 911. He’d stepped out of his apartment around 1 am for a smoke, when he noticed that her front door was wide open. He went in to check on her, and couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. He shook her to see if she was okay, and at that moment, she seized up and stopped breathing. He called 911 and performed CPR for 10 minutes until the ambulance arrived. The EMTs continued CPR, finally reviving her, but her brain had been without oxygen for at least 15 minutes at that point. After the ambulance left, Tyler brought all of the cats inside and closed up the apartment. By the time Tita had gotten there, he’d already been by to make sure the cats had food and water for the day.

IX.
At the coast, the high tide line is a carnage of baby crabs, their dismembered body parts haphazardly left behind. I walk the sand and nod solemnly, trying to make the most of the lesson in front of me. What I glean: death is a constant, and it is a given. Death is a mundane occurrence. We are, all of us, nothing more than flotsam and jetsam in this world. I breath in the salted air and try to ground myself in a reality larger than my own solipsistic worldview. Later on, I go back to my room and do some research. What I had interpreted as carnage was nothing of the sort. It is molting season for female Dungeness crabs. There was no stench of death, nor gulls feasting on the remains, because those were nothing but bits of discarded exoskeleton. Rather than a fleeting memorial, what I had seen had been a testament to the great regenerative power of life and growth. I am once again reminded that I am wrong much more often than I am right.

X.
Today, I received a call from the Coroner’s office. My mom has been dead for three months. They have updated the cause of death, and want to let me know personally. My mom, i.e. my mom’s corpse, had a large quantity of fentanyl in her system. They have ruled her death an accident, due to a toxic interaction between fentanyl and alcohol.

XI.
The hospital said my mom was clean. The coroner said this isn’t unusual. Fentanyl doesn’t show up on standard drug screens because it is synthetic. You have to test for it specially. However, we specifically mentioned our concerns about fentanyl to the hospital when they did the drug screen.

XII.
The onset of fentanyl overdose symptoms is often very quick, sometimes as little as 2-3 minutes after taking the drug, although those number may just refer to injection (envenomation). None of the literature makes it clear what the timeline is when ingesting fentanyl (poison) as a pill in conjunction with alcohol (poison). What I wonder is: if the overdose symptoms can occur so quickly, what are the chances that Tyler just happened to wander into my mom’s apartment at the exact moment that she stopped breathing?

XIII.
Imagine this. Your name is Tyler and your wife died a few months ago of an overdose. Other people blame you, but what are you supposed to do? Now you’ve got a neighbor, asking about pain pills. Maybe you sell her some, because you need the money, or maybe you give her some, because you know how bad withdrawal sucks. How were you to know that she’d mix too many pills with half a handle of vodka?

XIV.
Imagine this. Your name is Tyler and your neighbor has stopped breathing because of the pills you gave her. You call 911. You could tell the EMTs about the fentanyl and the pills, but you do not because you are afraid of the consequences. The EMTs could have administered Narcan and saved her life if only you had told them. Instead, you are a fucking coward and she dies. Later on, her daughter gives you the neighbor’s TV and some appliances and furniture, because she has heard how heroically you attempted to perform CPR. Your name is Tyler and you are a fucking coward and you let a woman die and now you are sitting in the dead woman’s chair, watching the dead woman’s TV.

XV.
Imagine this. Your name is Naomi but pretty much everyone calls you Nome. Your mom is dead and the pieces don’t add up and at this point there isn’t much to do about it. Every story in your head is just that: a story. You are not going to find any answers. Justice is an interesting idea but it doesn’t seem applicable. Maybe Tyler really did knowingly sell your mom fentanyl, so what? He’s probably an addict himself. You don’t want him to go to jail or get slapped with a fine. If anything, and again, that’s only if he’s responsible, a conjecture for which you have no proof, you wish he’d be haunted by your mom’s contorted face just like you are. Then again, you wouldn’t wish that on anyone. The real culprit is something bigger. What do you want to blame? Throw a dart. The pharmaceutical industry is surely responsible for the massive rise in opioid-related deaths. Your mom grew up in poverty, and this country offered almost nothing in terms of a safety net, leaving her in a state of physical and mental crisis. It’s no wonder she’d seek a chemical-induced escape. Your mom had little relief from physical and sexual abuse throughout her life. The rampant misogyny and prevalence of rape culture is mind-numbing. Again, it’s no wonder she’d seek a chemical-induced escape. There’s more, but you’re too exhausted to enumerate every systemic injustice she faced.

The truth is that it is so much easier to blame Tyler, even though he’s just another victim of the whole system. You cannot take down the medical-industrial complex, or the patriarchy, or the class system by yourself. But you can hate Tyler, a person with a face, who is probably watching something on your dead mom’s TV right now.