Without Her: A Cthulhumas Alone

Without Her

I want to be careful with the words, because the words are the whole problem.

My sister did not die. I can't tell you she died. What I can tell you is that two weeks before Cthulhumas she left our fog-and-redwood stretch of the Oregon coast for the dark beaches of Ponape — the same ocean, a very long way down it — on the work you do not discuss at the co-op, and that she did not come back, and that it has now been long enough that the sentence has worn a groove. She went to Ponape. Not she died. Not we lost her. Just — without her. That's the tense my family lives in now. The one with no name.

If you are reading this because you are dreading your own Cthulhumas, missing your own person, I am not going to tell you what the other holiday newsletters tell you. I am a personal trainer; my whole job is people who want me to promise them a result I cannot promise, and I have learned to just not lie to them. So I won't lie to you. This is the honest version, and it is harder than the sweet one, and I think you can take it, because you found us, or we found you, and either way you are not the sort who wants to be lied to at Cthulhumas.

The year the gifts made it worse

That first Cthulhumas without her, everyone was so kind that I could have screamed, and some nights I did.

The children were spoiled rotten. Our fellow cultists sent too much — way too much, the good stuff, the stuff you send when you don't have words. The Foundation sent more than would fit in the apartment. And every single package made it worse, because every package was a small announcement of who was missing. You cannot receive that much sympathy without being reminded, item by wrapped item, exactly why you're getting it. I would open a box and feel loved and furious in the same breath. That's allowed, by the way. Nobody tells you that grief can be rude — that you can resent the people being good to you precisely for being good to you, because their goodness keeps saying her name. It's allowed. I'm telling you now so you don't add shame to the pile.

And here is a thing I will say because the sweet newsletters never do: my sister was not a saint, and I refuse to sand her into one just because I can't find her. She ran Cthulhumas like a general and made the rest of us miserable about the garlands. She borrowed my good knife the winter before and never gave it back, and I was still annoyed about the knife, and I am allowed to still be annoyed about the knife, because the alternative is remembering somebody who never existed. We promised to keep the memory. We did not promise to edit it until it deserved stained glass. If I only get to keep the polished version, I don't get to keep her. So I keep the garlands general and the borrowed knife too.

The thing the other faiths don't have to carry

Now here is where being one of us makes it worse instead of better, and I'd rather you hear it from me on the couch than figure it out alone at 3 a.m.

When an ordinary person loses someone, the terrible fact at least holds still: they're gone; now how do I live with that. The person down the street who keeps a normal faith gets to comfort herself with maybe she's somewhere. She gets to not-know in the soft direction.

We don't get the soft direction. We know "somewhere" is real. We keep a whole religion around the fact that dead does not always mean what the biology department says it means — we aren't even certain the word fits the One we wait for. So when my sister didn't come back, I didn't get the clean wall of death to press my hands against. I got a hallway with too many doors. Did she die out there? Did she Change? Is she Gone in one of the ways our people go that isn't dying? If I dreamed her — and I did, one night, clear as the kitchen — was that her reaching, or my own head giving me the thing I'd have sold my teeth for? And if it was her, and the Assembly could try to reach back, and won't — what does that make them?

That's the part the old version of this very page got exactly backwards. It told grieving people to seek His presence, to feel wrapped and held and never alone in the Dread embrace. I need you to understand that this is the one lie I won't pass to you. He is not the embrace. He does not hold you; He does not know you are cold. Whatever comfort is coming this Cthulhumas is not coming from R'lyeh, and a page that tells you otherwise is selling you the exact painted-over feeling this whole faith exists to strip off. The knowing is not a blanket. The knowing is the extra doors.

What the Reader actually said

I told my Reader about the kitchen. About hearing her — the specific weight of her moving around at night, the cabinet she always left open.

I want you to know what the Assembly does with that, because it saved me, and it saved me by refusing to give me what I wanted.

They did not laugh. Not for a second; nobody in that room thought I was silly or broken. And they did not tell me it was her. That's the part I didn't expect. I went in half-hoping they'd certify it — yes, that's contact, she's reaching — and instead the Reader asked me, gently, when I had last slept a full night, and whether I was eating, and how much of the SH!T Vodka was involved in the hearing. Not to dismiss it. Because a person in the deep water of grief is the worst possible instrument for reading a dream, and the Reader knew it, and loved me enough to say so. I wanted one answer to be true so badly that I could not be trusted to tell whether it was. That is not an insult. That is just what grief does to the gauges.

So they did not tell me she was reaching. They also did not tell me she wasn't. They wrote it down, the way they write everything down, and they said we would see if it came again, and they sent me home to sleep. Nobody certified the dream. Nobody denied it. They just kept it — added it to the record, next to her name — and let it stay exactly as unresolved as it actually was. I have come to think that is the most honest thing anyone did for me that whole year.

Klaggtgh, who ate the wrong thing

We have an old story, older than the letters, about two clutch-sisters. Klaggtgh had eaten her whole brood — that's the kind of story it is — and she sat in the ruin of it and could not be reached. Her clutch-mate Meqqua came to her carrying eggs of the very same parentage, the same blood as everything Klaggtgh had lost, and told her plainly: there are still spawn here; you have not lost the line; I am still here and mine are yours. And Klaggtgh, so full of what she'd lost that she had no room left to see what she'd been handed, ate Meqqua and all of Meqqua's brood too, for her voracity was unceasing.

I used to read that as a story about appetite. That year I read it right for the first time. It isn't about hunger. It's about grief that gets so total it devours the very thing that came to save it — the sister still in the room, the blood you have left, the people carrying something of the one you lost right up to your door. Klaggtgh had a Meqqua. She ate her. Because when you are far enough down, the ones reaching for you look like just more of the world that took your person, and it is the easiest thing in the cosmos to swallow them too and call it grief.

I had a Meqqua that year. Several, actually. They sent too many gifts and sat on my couch and did not leave when I was unbearable. I came within a hair of eating every one of them.

The promise that was actually made

Here is the turn, and it's the only comfort I've got, and I think it's the real one because it's the only one that survived the year.

He made no promises. Not to my sister, walking into the water at Ponape; not to me, on the couch; not to you, wherever this finds you. He did not promise return, or rescue, or reunion, or even an answer to the simple question of what tense my sister belongs in. Every other faith's grief page leans on what their god swore to do. Ours can't, because ours swore nothing. If you came here for His promise, I have to send you away empty. There isn't one.

But there is a promise, and it's ours. The first people made it and we've kept it since: we remember. That's the whole vow. Not we reunite the dead, not we explain the missing, not we tell you which door your person went through. Just — we keep the name. And it turns out that when you cannot bury someone, cannot declare them, cannot even settle on a verb, the ability of a room full of people to simply keep her name — to say it, to leave her the garlands she'd have run like a general, to remember the borrowed knife and laugh — is not a small thing. It is, as far as I can tell, the entire thing. It is the one promise anyone kept to me that year, and it was enough, and I did not expect it to be.

What I can honestly tell you

So I'm not going to tell you that you're never alone this Cthulhumas. You might be. Grief knows perfectly well that you can be in a warm room full of people who love you and still be entirely alone in the particular loss that's yours, because it's yours and nobody else can stand exactly where you're standing. That part is true and I won't paint over it.

What I can tell you is the smaller, truer thing. You can be alone in the loss without being abandoned in it. Nobody in that room could take my grief from me. But nobody left, either. Nobody told me my sister was dead. Nobody told me she was alive. Nobody told me the dream was nothing; nobody told me it was something. They just kept her name with me, and set the table, and did the Cthulhumas things she used to do with us, because Cthulhumas comes whether she's here or not, and doing them again in the shape of her absence is how the shape stays hers.

He promised nothing. We promised to remember. This Cthulhumas, if you are without your person, come let us remember yours. We will not tell you where they are. We don't know. We will keep their name beside you until the stars come round, and we will not leave the room.

Iä. Eat something. Sleep tonight. Her name will still be there in the morning, and so will we.