I grew up with a narrative of my uncle’s death that was incorrect. Parts of it, anyway. In the version I remember, he and some of his friends were driving a convertible on a particular highway that stretched through loess canyons nearly twenty miles north to an Interstate community. We’d driven that road many times to the cattle barn to sell our cattle each spring, and that’s where I mentally recorded the setting of his death, the roll of the vehicle, the snapped necks, the three friends who made it out alive, haunted by their friend’s death like my father was haunted by his brother’s. Uncle Matt was twenty-one years old when he died. Though the road was beautiful, it was isolated with little traffic. I had always imagined their bodies had lain there for hours before they were found.
It was not the first car accident Uncle Matt had gotten into. He’d wrecked my grandfather’s 1969 Ford Galaxie driving home one night from a bar twenty miles from home where he and his high school friends could drink. A couple of black Angus cattle blocked the road. Uncle Matt tried to shoot the gap between them but failed. “Your Uncle Matt was not the most well-behaved,” my father would say. “He was worse than me.”
Was my father thinking of these stories the night he stood in my bedroom doorway and asked me if I had been out drinking with my friends? I was in high school, and he seemed surprised to learn that I had vowed not to drink. I knew from the story of Uncle Matt’s death that he and his friends had been drinking the night of their fatal accident. Because of this detail, my young brain associated alcohol with death.
“Alcohol was what killed Uncle Matt,” I said, matter-of-factly from my bed. My father stood in the doorframe, surprised by my answer. Was I surprised by his surprise? I knew about the bottle of peach schnapps he kept stashed behind his pickup seat. I knew that he offered the top third of his Coke or Mountain Dew to our dirt driveway and replaced it with whiskey. I knew that he and my mother had made some sort of arrangement that he would give up beer. I knew that he might be a few drinks into the evening already.
Though I never met him, I felt my uncle’s absence throughout my childhood. He died in August, three years and a month before I was born, three years and three months before his brother and sister-in-law would adopt me. His birthday was four days after mine. Maybe that was why my fate felt so entangled with his: a child born after such a loss, born on a day so close to his. If nothing else, I was brought into an energy of expectation, a void conjured from loss that my existence would fill. I wonder if children born after miscarriage feel this. I wonder if my own daughter feels this, born as she was into a narrative that I myself might never have children when my ovaries, one after another, twisted under the weight of cysts. The doctors removed one and saved what they could of the other, and I was thrust into a six-month preview of menopause at age seventeen that would take full hold at age twenty-eight. When I tell her she is my miracle baby, is it a blessing or a curse? A burden or a freedom?
Uncle Matt’s presence was a kind of anti-presence, an emotional black hole drawing me toward its gravity. He was defined by his absence. I was confronted with images of him on nearly every wall and bookshelf of my grandparent’s home, a home I visited daily since we lived in the same homestead farmyard. He was a fly in amber, never aging beyond twenty-one years, simultaneously present and absent. I stared at the photographs of him, trying to match his facial features to those of my grandparents. I was obsessed with this as an adopted person, because I knew I didn’t look like anybody. I knew I didn’t have Grandma’s Armenian nose, that dark hair, my grandfather’s long face.
My grandparents spoke overtly of Uncle Matt only rarely, but my father would occasionally dole out delicious morsels like, “Brother and I used to camp out in the sweetcorn patch to keep the coons out.” I would beg for more details. I learned that the two of them slept in sleeping bags with their border collie Sad Sack between them to alert them. My dad, being the eldest, held the rifle, and Matt held the flashlight. One night, what they thought was a raccoon turned out to be a skunk. Before my dad could shoot, Sad Sack went in for the kill. Sad Sack was victorious, but the brothers spent the rest of the night with a skunk-sprayed dog nestled between them on the ground. In the few stories my father would share, I got the sense of them as partners in crime, as pranksters who were always testing just how much they might get away with. I saw delight in my father’s eyes, heard joy in his voice when he shared these stories of Uncle Matt, and I wondered why, if this were the case, he didn’t speak of him more often.
When my mother’s sister gave birth to a baby boy nine months before I arrived on the scene, she named him Matthew after my uncle. And when my father’s cousin gave birth to a baby boy that September a few days before I was born, she did the same. While everyone else in the family was honored by these namesake choices, I resented my aunt and cousin for not reserving that name for my father to use. What if I had been boy? And I resented my boy cousins their connection to Uncle Matt through his name. Did they think about him like I did? Did they ponder his absence?
I felt personally insulted that I never got to know Uncle Matt. I picked up very early in life the broken story. There was meant to be a living uncle. I fantasized about what life would be like if he had lived. Would he have liked me? Would he have had kids? Would I have grown up with cousins my age on the farm? Would we have even lived on the farm? Uncle Matt had planned to take over the family farm, and with his death, the trajectory of my father’s professional life changed; he sacrificed a position as an agronomist to move back to the family homestead.
As I grew older, I fantasized about what life might feel like without the specter of loss hanging over my family. Long before I knew of ghosts as apparitions, I understood them simply to be the presence of the deceased. In this way, I was raised with death, a silent death that lurked largely unmentioned in corners. My grandmother and mother were fastidious housekeepers (the first more prone to packrat tendencies than the second), but I could see the gossamer shadows lurking in corners, in the seam of wall and ceiling. It couldn’t be wiped away.
I continue to live with death—my own. Or rather, the omnipresent possibility of it. I am reminded of it multiple times an hour, sometimes multiple times a minute, by way of my heart, which has stopped keeping regular time. The cardiac arrythmias in my heart are the latest manifestation of my congenital heart disease. The very next arrythmia could stack into couplets, then triplets, at which point they are classified as ventricular tachycardia. V-tac that lasts for more than a few seconds at a time is life-threatening. Which means I am always aware I am going to die. That it could happen any minute. That the presence of the deceased lives inside my own heart.
I tried everything to stabilize the timing of my heart: beta-blockers and calcium channel blockers prescribed by my doctor that sent my already-on-the-verge-of-low blood pressure dipping. I stopped drinking alcohol and caffeine, eliminated chocolate from my diet. I stopped working out, stopped my daily hikes, stopped swimming. I stopped anything that triggered the fluttering succussion of thumps, the dizziness, the shortness of breath. I scoured databases for research articles and found one that outlined a protocol of certain amino acids to treat arrhythmias. Amazon delivered jumbo size bottles of Taurine and L-arginine to my doorstep, and I took them three times a day with meals. My therapist, who was teaching me dialectical behavior therapy skills to cope with the emotional effects of trauma, suggested I try to activate the mammalian dive reflex, which is meant to trigger a series of physiological changes, including decreased heart rate. I filled a giant bowl with ice cubes and water, set it on the dining room table and plunged my face into it. This had no effect. I joined forums and Facebook groups of others with arrhythmias. They swore by magnesium supplements. My vitamin D was low, so I supplemented that, too. I tried acupuncture and medical cannabis. Homeopathy: arsenicum, aconite, ignitia. Weekly massage. I’d undergone two cardiac ablation surgeries in which rogue cells were burned away. Nothing worked.
In a last-ditch effort that I desperately hoped (but cynically doubted) would work, I begin a bhakti chanting practice. Every night, I chant one or two devotional mantras from my partner’s Hindu traditions. Like Scheherazade, every night now I try to save my own life. I vow to commit to a one-thousand-and-one-night chanting practice.
At first, my western brain struggles to pick up distinct phonemes, and then my western tongue stumbles over the cerebrals, the sounds that come from touching the tip of the tongue to the hard palate rather than the back of the teeth. I listen to western singers—Krisha Das, Deva Premal, Snatam Kaur, Jai Uttal— hoping their native English tongues might help me more easily decode the sounds. Night after night, week after week, I slowly begin to pick up verses from Krishna Das’s Sri Argala Stotram. The first verse I fall in love with, the way the sounds roll through my mouth, is T?rin?? durga-sa?s?ra S?garasya kulodhbhav?m. It helps that I recognize the word samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth. Reincarnation. I think of my own adoption. If there is such a thing as family karma, but I am not of this family by blood, then how did I negotiate my way into this situation? I think of my father, his struggles with alcohol, and whether I might have agreed to some sort of “soul contract” to help him with his alcoholism.
One night in my chanting practice, I imagine Uncle Matt in the spirit world (I’m guessing he’d probably call it heaven), desperately trying to get back to his brother, my father, by any means possible. I don’t know where my parents were in their infertility journey at the time of his death. Did they know yet that they would not be able to conceive a biological child? I imagine my uncle, on the other side of the veil, searching for any open seam in the fabric. How to get back? Not through my mother’s womb.
As I chant, I imagine the possibility of myself as the reincarnation of my uncle. Never mind the logistics of this, of how a soul could possibly successfully navigate the routes of bureaucracy that brings a relinquished child to an adoptive family through interruptions of medical foster care. Suspend your disbelief, please.
I imagine the shock of arriving in a different form, a soul constrained by the particular physiology of this new body, constrained by the cultural forces working on a girl raised in rural Nebraska in the mid 1970’s, constrained by the role of daughter instead of brother. How much of ourselves can we keep from one life to another? How much of ourselves can we possibly recognize? When my father forced my scraped-up ten-year-old body onto the horse that had just dragged me across pasture, was some part of him reaching toward the brother who used to race him on horse? When he demanded I lift my face from manure after being trampled by a thirteen-hundred pound 4-H market beef steer and take the halter rope, was he wishing for his brother’s resilience?
During one phase of my marriage, my partner and I decided to work our way through all the different Star Trek series. When we got to Deep Space Nine, I became entranced with the xenomorphic character Jadzia Dax, who I felt represented the core of my personal eschatology. A symbiont, the Dax live inside and bond to Trill humanoid hosts. Dax is multiple entities at once. Jadzia Dax had been joined with four men and five women over the course of more than three hundred years. What better metaphor for the joining of soul to body? Except we don’t keep our memories like Dax does.
Imagine a soul eager to help:
This new body comes with limitations? Sure, sure, no problem.
A totally different personality I’ve never had to navigate? I got it. Let’s get on with it.
Lose all my memories of my previous lives? Yah, yah, fine. Just let me incarnate already!
This sounds like something I would do.
If we believe in reincarnation, who is the “I” behind each life? If I am the reincarnation of Uncle Matt, and Uncle Matt was a reincarnation of someone else, then who am I? Can I ever be a single entity? Do I want to be? Whose heart is beating in my chest? Whose misfortunes does this body remember?
I learned much later in life that Uncle Matt didn’t die on that road to the cattle barn. He died on an entirely different highway, just east of town, so close to civilization, and his shattered body was found quickly. I’d correctly recalled all the other details of his death I’d been told except for the location. If I was the reincarnation of my uncle, you’d think I would have remembered, that my pulse would have quickened whenever we drove by, that my skipped beats would have proved love.
The year before my arrythmias began, motivated by his own cardiac scare, my father briefly stopped drinking. The doctors were not entirely sure what happened—perhaps a minor electrical cardiac arrest or alcohol-induced cardiomyopathy—but confronting his own death was enough to do what my I, my mother, and my sister had been unable to do. I wondered at the hidden blessings in misfortune, grateful for this misfire in my father’s heart, if it meant I had my sober father back (though when I thought about it, I wasn’t entirely sure I could pinpoint with certainty a time in my life when alcohol wasn’t a daily presence in my father’s life). For about six months, he didn’t drink a drop.
But death did not make itself a constant presence in my father’s life like it has with me. My morbid joke is that I share my marriage bed with Death, woken as I am throughout the night by my own ill-timed heart. Death has commandeered my partner’s spot, and he sleeps in the other room now since I’m such a light sleeper. But my father’s symptoms abated, and when they did, he began drinking again.
For a while, I was angry with him. Here I was trying so damn hard to do all the right things so that my own heart stayed on the rhythmic straight and narrow. I felt boxed in, trapped inside my own body, but there had been something of a feeling of solidarity with him when he had been sober, a shared intention to do the right things by our hearts. When he started drinking again, I felt abandoned in the quest for health.
One night when chanting, I remember that high school conversation I’d had with him about alcohol. My relationship with alcohol was simple then. It wouldn’t be until college that I would flirt with misuse, when I would learn the magic of alcohol that my father conjures daily: the power of an anesthetic. Though my own relationship with alcohol never morphed into addiction, I try to remember—when my father calls me in the evenings, his voice ebullient and slurry, his ability to encode the memory of our conversation compromised—how good it felt not to feel. Was it the loss of his brother he needed to numb? His own lost dreams? Intergenerational trauma? The ever-growing rift between him and my mother? I ask myself questions not unlike those I’ve asked about reincarnation. How much of himself can he keep from one drink to another? At what point will he become unrecognizable?
Not long after I reach the one-thousand-and-one-night chanting milestone, I begin attending Al-Anon Family Group meetings. Like so many other participants, I expect the program will help me figure out how to get my loved one to stop drinking. It takes me a while to understand I am there for myself, for my own recovery. It occurs to me that entertaining the possibility of myself as the reincarnation of Uncle Matt might be just one more manifestation of my enduring belief that I need to fix things that are not mine to fix. Powerless to change my father’s behavior, maybe I have offloaded my compulsion to fix my family onto my dead uncle. Maybe I have been trying to shirk responsibility for my own actions. Uncle Matt made me do it.
Except, whenever I imagine my uncle, I feel the opposite of angst. The opposite of shame. The opposite of guilt. All I feel is love. Imagining a dead brother loving his still-living brother so much that he would get back to him using any possible body at all, blood-related or not, triggers in me an immense feeling of love. It’s trite to say it washes over me, but it does, a fully physical release, perhaps of some hormone—oxytocin?—released as I meditate on love. It’s a flush, a fullness, something of an emotional hot flash. I realize that the entities to which I am praying—though they have many Hindu names—can be called simply
Love
It’s all about love. And I quite willingly give my full consent to serve Love. As soon as I decide, my heart jumps, just a couple of times, a missed beat followed by a few quick beats. I don’t say this metaphorically. I mean the actual arrhythmia I’ve lived with as part of my congenital heart defect—a medical condition expunged by law from any documentation provided to my adoptive parents. The sound of my skipping heart is the voice of a goddess speaking:
I don’t know how
I can make it any clearer
What is more symbolic of love than a heart? And what does a better job of getting a person to pay attention to their heart than disrupting its natural beat?
Four years after I made my one-thousand-and-one-night vow, I am still chanting. I am uncertain when the electrical tides turned, when the arrythmias became so infrequent as to be almost nonexistent, when I started sleeping uninterrupted hours at a time, when death slipped out of my bed and left a space large enough to imagine a future. Was it the chanting that helped? Confronting my past traumas? Al-Anon? Or did the arrythmias simply resolve on their own and I am mistaking correlation with causation? They still happen on occasion when I stray from the boundaries my heart has set for me, and when they do, the old panic consumes me. Intellectually, I subscribe to samsara. I play with it, engage with it every night in chant, but when my heart stops in the middle of the night, even for just a second, I don’t feel samsara in my body. I feel like I’m going to stop existing. I become full of terror. You do this nice chant practice, you feel love, and still you’re left with terror.
I can only imagine what terrors my father is trying to suppress. I have accepted that, unless he chooses to stop drinking, alcohol is probably what will kill him. Maybe this is the gift he offers: that we will not be surprised by it like he was with Uncle Matt. Most days I accept that the only life I have any real chance of saving is my own, and that whatever life I might choose in my next incarnation, right now my only job is to choose the one I have.
