Heather Christle

Beth, the librarian, joins us, and I tell her too of my archival weeping. Beth says she cried when she saw the Gutenberg Bible at the British Museum, so profusely that a concerned guard bade her step away.

She critiques Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” as hopelessly “tryborg,” with none of the disabled person’s actual melding of self and circuitry: Haraway is a tryborg: she’s not disabled; she has no interface; she uses the term as a metaphor. The strategic move where one group says, “I shall speak for them because they do not exist do not live here do not have thoughts” is common of the tryborg. When they are not speaking for us, they may take a detour into animal studies, a field where they can rest assured that their subjects remain silent.164

i’ve been thinking about my father a lot. memories. some of them i think i’ve completly made up

If I had a prayer, it would say, Let this not be a mirror to the past, nor a window to the future. Let each night be only itself.

While we’re driving to the airport I tell my mother that I’m grateful for the way we spoke, for the openness between us. I tell her I am less afraid now of her death. She tells me about the last time she saw her own mother. She asked Nannie if everything was all right between them. My mind fills with all the things that could have still been wrong, with all the suffering my mother endured, but her mind moves differently. “Yes,” her mother told her, “everything is wonderful.” And I believe her. I believe her enough.
“And us?” my mother asks. “Is everything all right between us?” I can hear her voice changing, the roughness of encroaching tears.
“Yes,” I say, and I take my hand from the wheel to place it over hers. “Everything is wonderful.” And I mean it. I mean it enough.

When I was a child, Return to Oz—the unofficial sequel to the first movie I loved—terrified me. Dorothy is back in Kansas and she can’t sleep. Nobody believes her stories. Aunt Em brings her to a frighteningly calm doctor, who plans to treat the child with electrotherapy. Dorothy’s acquiescence is not consent.
“Will it hurt?” she asks.
“No no. No no no. It just manages an electrical current,” replies the doctor, speaking half to Dorothy, half to her aunt. “The brain itself is an electrical machine. It’s nothing but a machine.”
Later, when Dorothy’s treatment is about to begin, the doctor peers down at her on the gurney.
“Hello Dorothy, how are you?”
“I wish I wasn’t tied down.”

I’m chopping onions for dinner when a professor on a podcast describes a medieval statue of the Virgin Mary whose miraculous tears were, in fact, generated by the movements of fish swimming around in a chamber of water hidden inside her head. The chamber was filled nearly to the brim, so that if a few fish had a moment of simultaneous vigor, the water would slosh about and spill from holes in Mary’s eyes.176 Or that is the story. I can find no other reference to the statue’s existence. Another scholar speculates it could be a bit of Reformation-era anti-Catholic propaganda.177 I don’t care; I’m in love with the fish.

The next song—again, random—is the Smiths’ “Cemetry Gates.” Is this really happening? It is like living inside a book. When, after a while, Zach needs to charge his phone, and the car starts to play a song by St. Thomas—a Norwegian singer whose death was attributed to “not a suicide, but an unfortunate combination of prescribed drugs”181—we decide the book is becoming unkind. I turn the stereo off.

Walking back down the hill we talk of suicide, of what it is to lose someone to it, or to fear that loss. I find myself telling Zach I have felt close to it myself, but I do not want to scare him, so I tell him I am okay now. And I think for now it is true.

In the years that followed the publication of Kühne’s study, the idea took hold in the popular imagination that the retinas of a recently deceased person would always show the last image they saw before their death.