After Me

It is an old blade that splits the umbilical cord and the womb, fracturing the bond between mother and daughter. I know that now. It wasn’t her that welded the ancient blade into its rough-hewn shape. The knife was given to her just as she gave it to me. It’s lucky, in a way, that I’ll never get to use the knife on my own children. I will forever hold this blade without ever turning it on someone else. And I do mean forever. I never grieved that. I never expected I’d live for very long, so the idea of not having children was something I was long reconciled to. I did want them, though. I remember that.

The day I died looked like every other day I’d lived. I went to school. I stayed quiet. Other people tried to get me to talk: the teacher, the couple friends I had, the more outgoing girls. Those girls had made it their personal mission to lure me out of my shell, as if my life was their project. I didn’t have my homework done, again. They thought I had trouble remembering to do it. The principal called me and my mother to her office, taught me how to tie a string around my pinky, and told me that the string would remind me to do my homework. My mother smiled, played her role for the principal, and like every other day, spent the forty-five minute car ride home detailing the innumerable reasons I was unfit to be alive. I didn’t agree with everything she said, but the overall message resonated with me. I didn’t deserve the air I breathed. And like every other day, the second she parked the car, I ran to my room, locked the door, and cried under my sheets.

Like every other day, I prayed to some God I hoped was there. I prayed, “Please let there be a God and if there is, please take me from here.” The first time I prayed like this, I asked God to put me in someone else’s family. God, who I assumed to be a man, like my father, considering how little he spoke back to me, did not concede to this wish. The next time, I asked God again to “Please put me in someone else’s family, even if they are dirt poor and live out of a cardboard box.” I had only one condition: “Please let the mom love me." I imagined her with her mousy hair tied back in a low bun, one arm holding a crying newborn, and the other arm stirring a nondescript stew over a hot stove. Our cardboard box filled up with the steam and a million little rugrats ran around her skirt, pulling on her Dickensian rags. But the way she looked at me. It was barely a smile. She was too exhausted to muster up obvious signs of love, but her eyes told me everything. She loved me. My school had put on Oliver Twist the year before, if that wasn’t obvious. But God didn’t want to give me this either.

So I started to negotiate. I didn’t need to be alive. Just take me back to where I was before. You know, the place out there in the dark with the floating orbs, one of which I used to be. I had some memory of being a glowing ball out in the universe, my only social contact being the occasional run-ins I’d have with other orbs. We’d bounce off each other and back into our own little worlds. God didn’t go for this either.

And now we return to this particular day, the day I made my last negotiation with God. I didn’t need to be in a well-off family, and I didn’t need to be in a poor one. I didn’t need to return to the eternity I once belonged to before being dragged out and brought into this life. I didn’t need anything, in fact, except for it to end. I didn’t need the relief of escape. I didn’t need the relief of knowing I was somewhere safer. I didn’t even need to know it ended. I simply wanted it to end. Even if this misery was the last thing I ever felt and I never received reconciliation, I would settle for that. I would settle for anything, even nothingness, if it meant that I no longer had to live this pain and these tears everyday, over and over again. And when God wouldn’t give me this either, I knew there wasn’t a God or, if there was, that this God did not care about me. So I cried harder, closing my eyes only to reopen them to the same pink bedroom, the same disappointing world. I was powerless. I couldn’t change what was happening at home. I couldn’t run away — where to? A cold death in the forest that surrounded our house? I couldn’t tell anyone — tell them what? That I’m such a terrible, undeserving girl that my own mother hates me? No, all I could do was beg God for rescue and there was no God willing to give me that. There wasn’t even a God willing to give me nothingness. And that’s when I realised. I didn’t need God for that, did I? I could give myself nothingness, if that’s what I really wanted.

This time, when I opened my eyes, everything did look different. A little bit softer, a little bit smoother, a little more beautiful. The word I would use now to describe it is ‘ethereal.’ I’ve done a lot of reading in my afterlife. I did a lot of reading in my life, too, but reading goes much faster now. I didn’t see my body after it happened, in the way they usually show it in movies where you float above and see your spirit detach. Once I left it, my body was invisible to me. But not to them. My sister found me first. I wish it didn’t happen that way, but it did. I hadn’t thought that part through. When my sister screamed, my father ran into the room. Then my little brother tried to come in, but they wouldn’t let him. They pushed him out closed the door behind them. I heard them crying. The next time the door opened, it was Mom. She could barely look at me. The door closed immediately, but not completely. She left it open a crack. An ambulance arrived. Serious-looking grown-ups in shiny vests came in and went out. Then my mother came back into my room. She put flowers on my desk beside newly framed pictures of me. An altar of sorts. She had always kept altars around the house, but usually of Jesus or Mother Mary. She kept the door closed, but looked in every so often to check on the flowers. I remember not understanding why she did that.

Time doesn’t exist where I am, so I can’t be sure how much “time” passed before I got my bearings. The first stretch was a blur. I’m sure it was for them, too. I watched my brother and sister get bigger, without me. It felt like it was happening too quickly. It wasn’t until Anna grew taller than I was that I even considered leaving the room. All this life was happening and I could only see it in snippets, whenever they decided to come into my room. When I did leave the room, I learned that only a couple weeks had passed since I died. It didn’t make sense. Anna and Theo looked so much bigger. If not their bodies, some other part of them had grown, and that’s what I was seeing. Dad looked like he’d shrunk somehow, and he looked a lot older than two weeks could explain. Mom looked different, too, but I couldn’t name the change.

One of the first things I noticed was how much quieter the house was. The grief, of course, explained part of it, but it wasn’t until my death that I understood the role I played in my family. For all the drama and chaos that my relationship with mom brought into our house, it seemed that wasn’t all that I brought into the house. I was always quiet at school, but never at home. At home I was outspoken. Loud, even. It was one of the problems Mom had with me. As I watched the grief deepen and regulate, become more of a normalised presence, I saw old routines reemerge. But I saw them return as partial, incomplete echoes. Someone would start to tease Theo for forgetting what day of the week it was, then everyone would get quiet. He never could remember the order correctly, no matter how old he got. Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Saturday. Mom would chastise him for it — she reminded him of herself and her own lack of education — and when I was alive, I would interrupt her and turn it into a joke, working the crowd that was my family until I got Dad laughing, then Anna, and finally even Theo. That was when I most felt their love, when I could get them to laugh. The jokes that got the best response inevitably became inside jokes that we repeated to each other. Dad really loved joking with us. I think that was also when he most felt loved. But now, as the rhythms of the house slowly returned, they would chance upon one of these old jokes, and the rhythm would abruptly disintegrate once again, and they would all feel lonelier than they did before. A collective energy of distance and disconnect. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why their shared memories were keeping them apart from each other.

When I was alive, Mom always told me that I was the odd one out. The black sheep. That I didn’t seem — to her, anyways — like I was a real member of our family. But now I was gone, it felt like there was no family, and that if anything, my passing had positioned me as the former glue of the family unit. In this quiet space where I used to be, the emptiness revealed what used to be there — me — and my family struggled to hold its centre without me. Perhaps another family could handle grief better than mine, but my siblings were too young to carry the family themselves, and they were being raised by a mother who was, emotionally, a child herself, and a father who was, for the most part, emotionally checked out, even before I passed. I watched them grow up and grow apart and try to work their way back to each other, but never successfully. It wasn’t easy to watch. How I wished I could reach through the spectral veil and show them the way. The right move is obvious when you live in the realm of every possibility. But they were lost in their human lives where everything always feels just out of reach.

After some time, Anna grew tall, taller than I ever imagined she would be. One day, she came home from school even quieter than normal. I followed her into her room and watched her pull blood-stained underwear out of her backpack followed by a box of pads. She had gotten her first period. I cried. They were teaching us about this at school just before I’d died. What you were supposed to do, what it all meant, what it feels like. She’d gone on without me. I never saw her tell mom. She dealt with it by herself, and I guess mom never thought to ask her about it, though she must have known it was coming. Then it felt like, overnight, she shot up to 5’8, spent all her evenings talking to a boy from school, and the next day she was moving out to attend a university on the other side of the country. After that, I never saw her again. They would go to visit her, especially Dad, but she never came back.

Theo stayed with me for a long time. He would talk to me, too. That little boy had so much more imaginative depth than any of us knew. I felt like it was only in my afterlife that I got to know him. The family atmosphere had become one of resolute normalcy, where the wrong word was never spoken, and everyone was anxiously careful about everything they did in front of each other. As if they were trying to avoid another accident from happening, as if they could. When they would retire to their rooms, I would see what they were really like. Theo’s room was my favourite. I was always in his room. In there, it felt like no time had passed. His was the only room where I could remember what our family had been like at the best of times, and it made me wonder why I couldn’t have held on just for that.

He played with his toys for longer than mom thought was acceptable, but dad made her leave him alone. Dad became harder with mom after I died. He blamed her. They all did. But so did I. When Theo eventually gave up his toys, he didn’t stop playing. Whenever he played whatever games he had concocted in his imagination, he was always playing with me. He always felt my presence. He wasn’t shy about it either. Whenever he was alone, he spoke to me, out loud. It felt wonderful to be seen. Often, he would address me while looking directly at me. I don’t know how he did it, but he was tapped into other realms. I don’t think he even thought about it. Everything he did, he did intuitively and without question or judgement. As he got older, though, he got lonelier. He didn’t fit in with the other kids at his school, and everyone seemed to view him as the boy whose older sister killed herself. Mom thought he was being bullied, and worried he would do something reckless, they made him keep his door open. That only made him quieter, more reserved, angrier. By that point I’d been practicing different ways of interacting with the physical realm. Sometimes I would move things in his room, hoping he would notice and know I was still there. He did notice, sometimes, but it didn’t seem to help him much.

One day, when he was in his last year of high school, he brought a girl home. She was a bit eccentric, a bit of a loner, like him. Mom was out that day. Theo went into his room with the girl and I saw Dad close Theo’s bedroom door behind them. I thought it was a weird thing to do. In TV shows, parents always wanted their teenage kids to leave their doors open, especially when they brought a girlfriend or boyfriend over. But Dad was right. I’d never fallen in love before and through Theo I watched the most pure thing I had ever seen be borne. You can’t imagine the colours that true love assumes in the immaterial realms. I never saw them do anything gross, luckily. They did like to kiss a lot, but I would leave whenever that happened. Mostly they talked, and they played, like Theo used to do when he was little, but more grown-up in a way, and always silly. I watched that girl bring Theo back to himself. Her name was Chloé. Everyday, he began to look more and more like his younger self.

But eventually, the time came for Theo to move out of our childhood home and into a small apartment across town with Chloé. I tried to follow him. Every time I attempted to cross the threshold, I was ricocheted back into my bedroom, back to the spot I died. No matter how many times I tried and how many ways I tried it, I couldn’t get past the front door. In the end, I stayed just behind the doorframe and watched him leave from there.

Now, I was alone. Anna was gone. Theo was gone. It was just me, mom, and dad. The halls were quiet. The bedrooms empty. In the whole of my afterlife, I had only ever seen Mom in passing. I avoided her even more than I did in my life, since now I had the freedom to. When Anna and Theo still were in the house, I spent some time with Dad, wanting to get to know him a bit better, but compared to Anna and Theo, Dad was kind of boring. If he wasn’t working, he was reading the news or watching it. I liked some of the old movies he put on. When it was just us, I would curl up in his lap and we’d watch Jimmy Stewart, Jack Lemmon, Irene Dunn. His favourites. Mom was almost always out of the house by that point, and now that Dad was retired, he spent a lot of time watching old movies. I even watched old war documentaries with him and developed a mild, but growing interest in that kind of history. Mom spent her days visiting friends, attending church meetings, running errands. Mom had never had a real job (other than raising us), so she was good at findings ways to fill her time. Dad, on the other hand, was used to being told where to be and what to do and when, and he spent his retirement in much the same way he used to spend his weekends and evenings.

Me and Dad liked having the house to ourselves. When Mom came home at night, Dad would turn off the TV and go up to bed. By the time she walked through the front door, he was fast asleep. Mom would stay up for a couple hours, usually on the phone gossiping about one of her friends or complaining about Dad. One day she took up beading. She came home with cartons full of beads that she strung into rosaries for her church friends, and sometimes tried to sell, and from then on, that’s what she would be doing while she talked on the phone. I didn’t learn anything new from her phone conversations. It was all the same stuff she used to say when I was alive. But whenever one of her phone calls ended, and she had no luck finding someone else to pick up her call, a strange feeling came over her. On the surface, she looked like she always did, but in the silence of our empty kitchen, I would see her engulfed by something, an uncomfortable something that I didn’t recognise, then she would quickly put away her beads and go to bed.

Dad passed away in the hospital. He woke up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe, both hands grasping at his chest. Mom rushed him to the hospital, and that was the last time I saw him. After that, the house was empty most of the time. Mom’s routine didn’t change much after Dad died. She got older, her steps moved slower, but she stayed busy. Eventually she started sleeping on the couch. The stairs were too much for her. Whenever Theo visited, he would look a little bit older than he did the last time, but as mom started aging faster, Theo began to age slower. I took that to mean that he was visiting more frequently. Most of the time, he was taking care of things around the house for Mom. I’d move things in funny places, trying to play with him, but he seemed to have forgotten about me. He didn’t notice anymore if things weren’t in the right place.

Then one day, both Theo and Chloé came to the house. They brought with them a baby. A baby! It never occurred to me that something like that might happen. Mom was quite old now, and they decided to move in with her. It gave them more room for their newly growing family and it meant that they could keep an eye on Mom. She was starting to forget things and she’d sometimes have little accidents around the house. The sort of accidents she used to punish me for, like dropping things or losing things. She broke a lot of glasses, and whenever that happened, I’d want to punish her like she used to punish me, but I couldn’t. I tried it once. My hand was right there, hovering right above her head, ready to strike, but I couldn’t do it, even though I knew it wouldn’t hurt her. Instead, I watched Theo help her clean up the mess she made.

They put the baby in Anna’s room, so I moved in there, too. The baby could see me. She couldn’t say much, but she talked to me in her own way. Her favourite thing was when I would spin her mobile of flying ducks and swans. She would laugh and try to grab them. One time I was spinning the mobile for her and she grabbed hold of my thumb. Her little baby hand was fully latched onto my little ghost hand, then she let go. I hadn’t felt real like that in a long time. The baby could not only see me, she could feel me. At night, when everyone was asleep, I would crawl into her crib and teach her different games. I taught her patty-cake before she could even hold her head up. Like most parents, Theo and Chloé thought their baby was a genius, but I knew she was just well-educated.

It was around this time that Mom started getting sick. Theo didn’t like leaving Mom alone with the baby, but when he was out of the house, Chloé would let Mom hold her. On one particular day, Chloé was busy in the kitchen, coming in and out of the living room every so often to check on Mom and the baby, when the baby started talking to me and grabbing my hand. Mom looked up at me, looked me straight in the eye, then dropped the baby. The baby was screaming. Chloé rushed in and grabbed the baby off the floor, and Mom kept watching me, dazed. After Chloé soothed the baby, she laid Mom onto the couch, but Mom was never the same after that. She kept saying my name and asking for me, asking where I was. Theo had a hard time with it.

As time went on, it seemed like Mom was more and more living her life in reverse. She never knew when she was. Her timeline was getting jumbled up. She didn’t see me again after the day she dropped the baby, but she sensed me everywhere. She started talking to me. She told me stories I’d never heard, stories about her life as a little girl growing up in her small provincial village in the Philippines. Stories about the strange man in her village who everyone said was a demonic witch doctor. About the many times he tried to kidnap her in her dreams, telling her that he was going to marry her. How when she told her uncle about these dreams, her uncle jumped onto his motorcycle, drove to the man’s house, and beat him up. The witch doctor left her and her dreams alone after that. She told me stories about the other kids at school who called her Satan and tauntingly made devil horns at her. She told me about the bad guys in vans who would go to her school and kidnap her classmates using candy and lassos. She was full of stories she’d never told me, that maybe she’d never told anyone. She told me about all the times her father came home drunk after spending all the money he’d made that day on booze and bets. He liked to gamble. How he would line her and her siblings up in a row, all eight of them, and make them recite their multiplication tables for him, and how if any of them made an error — whack! She told me about the time her drunk father was so angry at her brother that he tied him upside down from the ceiling and beat him until he beat the life right out of him. She told me she was the one who had to bury him. My mother told me these stories as if she were there, living these moments all over again. As she told me these stories, I saw the little girl in her peer out and briefly resume her former position among her facial features. As she told me her stories, I saw her for the first time.

When I was still alive, whenever I couldn’t get myself to stop crying, I would look in the mirror and tell myself that I didn’t love my mother. I would look myself in the eye and say, “I don’t care if she doesn’t love me, I don’t love her anyways,” and I would feel the lie as I said it, but it was the only way I had to keep my head up high. And now, as I learned more about my mother and spent more time with her, the lie began to unravel. I felt the walls I’d built around my heart burst open and crumble at my feet. The pain I’d kept close to my chest rushed out, spilling over everything. No one but the baby could see what was happening, the way the house was filling up with the most putrid colours and sensations. The baby cried more, and I’d try to hold it in for the baby, but the closer I got to my mother, the more these energies poured out of me. I did love my mother. My god, I loved her so much. I always had. I just never had anywhere to put that love. What cruel fate it was, that only now, as her time was coming to a close, as my time with her was nearing its end, was I finally able to admit it. I felt like I had wasted so much time.

The day she died came soon after. It looked like it was going to come on peacefully, at first. Everyone was sitting in the living room, watching a movie for the baby — not that the baby was watching. It was some poorly written, babyish cartoon that no one was enjoying. Me and the baby spent most of the movie blowing raspberries at each other, when I heard my mother’s heartbeat slow down. It got slower, then slower, and I knew it was coming. No one else noticed anything was off. Her breath became fainter, and I desperately wanted to tell Theo what was happening, but of course he couldn’t hear me. I knocked the beer out of his hand, but he simply apologised and cleaned it up. I screamed. Then the baby screamed. The sound must have jolted Mom awake, because she suddenly opened her eyes, gasping for air. Chloé called Theo to come back into the living room. Something was wrong with Mom. Theo tried talking to Mom, but she looked right through him. He shook her. Her eyes were wide open, her mouth still searching for air, but she was unresponsive. She couldn’t see him. Chloé called an ambulance. I knew this was it and I had to say my goodbyes. After they took her to the hospital, I would never see her again, like with Dad. At least with Mom, I could say goodbye. I apologised to her. For all the pain we’d been through together, for all the hurt I caused, especially with my death. I told her I forgave her for everything. I prayed that she would have a better afterlife than mine, that she would get to go up to be with the floating orbs, or, in line with her belief system, that she might become an angel. She looked at me and said, “No, love, forgive me. Forgive me.” Theo’s heart jumped when she said that. “Mom, forgive you for what?” he asked. Mom continued, “You have nothing to apologise for, my girl.” She reached out for me, for my hands, then looking down, screamed. “The knife! The knife!” Theo stroked her back, breathing hard, trying to get her to breathe with him. “It’s okay Mom, there’s no knife. Everything is okay. The ambulance will be here soon and we’ll all go to the hospital together, okay?” “Should we just drive her to the hospital ourselves?” Chloé asked. Mom answered, “No, I don’t need to go to the hospital. I need you to get that knife out of her hands. She’s just a child!” She cried. “She’s just a child! My child!” I looked down at my hands. There it was, in my left hand, the knife, still wet with my blood. I screamed and tried to let go, but I couldn’t. I tried to throw it onto the floor, away from me, but it stayed in my palm. The blood was still gushing out of my stomach. Mom understood. “It’s too late.” she said. “It already happened.” Chloé had the baby in one arm, and lifted Mom up with the other. Theo was still kneeling on the floor, overwhelmed and panicking. “Theo,” she said, “Get up, follow me to the car. We’re leaving now.”

Theo and Chloé moved out of the house not long after. It was too hard for them to stay there. I couldn’t blame them. Saying goodbye to the baby was the worst part. I was hoping I’d get to watch her grow up, but they had to start their life on their own terms, without the trauma of the past following them around every corner. I get to watch other families now, and I’ve seen many babies since. They always see me, too. Some parents still aren’t very nice to their kids, and whenever a family like that moves in, I always create trouble for the parents. I’ve gotten pretty good with my abilities. It really freaks them out, and it seems to subconsciously train them against certain behaviours. I’m still working on my technique. But most parents are pretty nice. I’ve gotten to live in many families now, which isn’t a bad way to spend an afterlife, but I’ll never forget mine. And I’ll never forget my first baby, Eva. That’s what Theo and Chloé named her. Eva. They named her after me.