There are moments in my day where I catch myself during a dissociative moment and have to bring my consciousness back into my present body. I did this last night on the way home from St. Louis. I don't know if this is something anybody else is familiar with (I am not so vain as to think this is an only me kind of thing, I just mean I haven't talked to anybody about these moments), but to try and explain what it's like, I feel like my brain disconnects from my body and my body is a separate thing. It isn't like floating outside of myself and observing my body, it's like...well, maybe kind of. It's like leaving the body I call my "self", being only my invisible, intangible "self", and then drifting from a self entirely. It's a blissful few moments where I am aware of nothing. I don't feel my body, I'm not thinking, I'm everywhere and nowhere. The empty half of the meat bag.
When I pull myself back from wherever nowhere place I am, I think about death. If that's what death is like, a blissful nothing stretching on into forever, there isn't really anything to be scared of. The power of not knowing is heady and I have never been able to force it on myself, it happens organically, and over the years I've learned to move straight into thinking about death instead of trying to get back to that omnipresence that is also wonderfully oblivious. It's kind of like trying to will yourself back into a wonderful dream you've woken up from...it isn't going to happen.
While those moments truly help me feel like death is nothing to fear, and I have come to reflect on them with anticipation and to deepen my embrace of my mortality, it isn't like I personally don't maintain a dread of death. Will it hurt? Is there something after this? Will everyone I leave behind be ok? I certainly understand an inability to find death a comfort when it's something we witness others do before us. While I often discuss death being a kindness, that doesn't mean it's wholly kind. I do think death is an ambivalent occurrence (as a natural force only. There are plenty of ways death is a tool of cruelty. Free Palestine), but the things left in its wake are hard. Grief, sadness, fear, uncertainty...they're a lot to grapple with. Mourning is a process, one we often put off because taking it on head first and immediately can feel really hard in the moment it's necessary.
Which is why it was particularly cruel of me to intentionally trick my sister into thinking her dead hamster was still alive.
When Stef and I were kids, the only pets we were allowed to have were hamsters. I had a hamster named Midgie, and she had a hamster named Hammy. We both loved our hamsters so much, but neither of us were very keen on taking care of them. Midgie died before Hammy did, and it's more than possible I was a little bit fucking bitter about Stef's hamster still being alive when mine left me for that hamster wheel in the sky. So when Hammy died and Stef was distraught over it, I thought it would be funny to trick her into thinking otherwise. When she ran downstairs to tell our parents that Hammy had gone the way of Midgie before her, I screeched down, NO WAIT, SHE MOVED TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CAGE!
She did. Because I moved her. Stef came upstairs crying, so relieved that her beloved hamster hadn't yet pushed up daisies. She spent the rest of the day oscillating between playing and watching the hamster cage for Hammy to move, but everytime Stef went to the bathroom, I would move Hammy's pretty fucking obviously dead body into another part of the cage. Neither of our parents came to check on the dead hamster, and I'm unsure how much to judge them for not checking, but really...why wouldn't you believe a kid shouting down NOPE, STILL ALIVE, IT JUST WALKED OVER TO THE OTHER END OF THE CAGE! I would hope that my sinister sense of humor and horrible sense of comedic timing weren't obvious at such a young age that my parents would be like...no, this sounds like a Drea lie, let's go check the body.
That night, I grabbed Midgie's hamster wheel and cackled to myself in bed while I spun it around myself, whispering to my sister, see? Hear that? That's Hammy in her wheel!
No, man. Hammy was dead as fuck, rotting away in the cage.
I kept up the charade the next day, and I can't say if I got lazy and stopped moving the hamster enough, if Stef caught me moving Hammy's PetCo corpse around the cage, or if my mom finally investigated the hamster herself, but the fuckin' jig was up in a major way. I got in serious fucking trouble, but not for being so cruel to my little sister, who wouldn't have been more than 8 at the time (I don't think our sibling was born when this happened, and I am eleven years older than they are and two years older than Stef, so MAX I was 10 and Stef was 8), no....I got in trouble for touching a dead animal. The clearest memory I have of this is my mom screaming at me about playing with dead animals, dragging me into the kitchen by the arm (she wasn't gonna touch my death covered grabbers), and lecturing me about how dangerous it is to touch dead things...as she boiled a pot of water. And told me she was going to have to boil my hands clean.
And I believed her. And was terrified.
Now, make no mistake, I am not trying to pull focus from the fact that I did something heinously cruel to my sister in a moment of profound grief. Pets are often our first experiences with death and loss, and they set us up for how we approach and view death for the rest of our lives. We can build on the foundations, of course, but these things are pretty integral to our view of losing a loved one. I am solely to blame here, do not feel bad for me and forget that I did something so far beyond big sister-little sister fuckery. I was old enough to know better, and my cruelty is immeasurable.
My mom still threatened to boil my hands, and the wild truth of that can be separated from the wild truth of what I did.
My mom.
Threatened.
To boil.
My.
HANDS.
And as I started wailing, she started laughing at me for crying. And mocked me for crying and asking if getting boiled was going to hurt. She told me I was stupid for thinking she was actually going to boil my hands and told me to go upstairs and wash my hands and to never do something like that again because it was gross. I really want to drive the point home that I was not in any way in trouble for being so fucking mean to my little sister, I was in trouble for touching something dead. I went sobbing upstairs and told my sister I was really sorry for being so mean to her, and she hugged me and told me it was ok, she was just sad about Hammy (sometimes, y'all, we really do not deserve our little siblings because they can be so much kinder than big sibling shenanigans deserve). I regretted doing that to Stef after my mom made me understand that doing something that YOU find funny but someone else finds scary or cruel isn't actually funny, it's just scary. Or cruel.
This was also my first massive brush with death, in some regard. This was death of the ego, and that's a fucking undertaking at such a young age. I understood that pain is a network, and pain isn't the only thing that connects us. In most of our emotional connection, there is no self. We are not separate from the sadness of our sibling just like we are not separate from the pain of our parents just like we are not separate from the consequences of the actions of others. In the revelations of the young, that mind opening awareness is...at best...short lived. I may have never again considered gaslighting my sister about how dead her pets ACTUALLY is, but I was still mean to her in the ways that siblings can be mean to each other. In explanation not defense, our household was one of kindness scarcity, and we had to compete for it. If Stef was getting loved by our parents, I was getting shit on because our parents were incapable of kindness for all. As we got older, I took on a lot of heat for my sister, because I did notice how cruel our parents were when we were in trouble, and as the oldest, I felt a duty to my little sister to carry the worst of the nastiness so she didn't have to. The only person who was allowed to beat her up was me, not her dad and not my mom. Me. Anybody else trying to fuck up my little sister was going to hear about it. I was smaller than my parents so I rarely put my body on the line for Stef (I did a few times, but not as often as I should have), but I would scream at them to leave her alone when she was in trouble and getting hit for it.
I wondered to myself in the shower the other day if I grew so protective of her because that was a natural progression of the person I was turning into. If I was always going to see myself as needing to protect other people from harm because I don't want to see anyone suffer. None of us should be suffering. "The children are ours" James Baldwin says, "the children are always ours, all over the globe. And I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of realizing that may be incapable of morality." I wasn't aware of James Baldwin when I was playing trauma chess with my sister's dead hamster, but I'm aware of him now, and we should care about the suffering of anyone because we're all interconnected. Our struggles and liberation are woven together. I see it now, and I would like to think that years before I made Hammy a puppet of my cruel sense of humor, I was set on the path of realizing it and living that truth the way I try to now.
Or perhaps.
Perhaps what I needed to understand how interconnected our struggles are was to have my mother threaten to boil the dead hamster patina off of my fingers.
