States of Being (Nonfiction)

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One

When I’m too young to understand the meaning of things, I watch a movie called The Entity, which is about a ghost that haunts a woman and takes control of her car when she’s driving and keeps attacking her until ghost catchers get involved, trapping the spirit in ice. When I bring my parents questions about ghosts, they decide no more scary movies and find different things for us kids to watch. Our favorites become 101 Dalmatians, Father of the Bride, and Sister Act—nothing more about monsters or ghosts, but I keep thinking about them anyway.

This part of my inner landscape evolves way before my mom and brother Mark pass away, each with their own tragic tales. Being prey has been ingrained into my tough-girl brain, and though I don’t want to believe in ghosts and deathly monsters, I can’t stop worrying about how they might destroy me. I never say it out loud but cringe when imagining a stroke on my face or a kiss on my lips or a tickle on my feet when I’m sleeping. I cocoon myself in blankets at night. When I learn about vampires, I can’t sleep until my neck and face are cloaked by a polyester comforter with cartoon Disney dogs that my mom bought at K-Mart. Only my nose is bare so I can breathe. Then we watch Willow, a fantasy film by George Lucas about an evil queen bent on killing a prophecy child who’ll be her downfall. Though I don’t think the movie is scary, one night I dream that its wolf-like hounds—the ones who hunt down the special baby from the prophecy—are coming for me.

My dream feels like any other day in my life. I’m at home with my family, playing outside on a beautiful afternoon. It’s all singsong summer, dry grass crunch, crickets chanting to the bright blue sky. The blackberry bushes and pines have been warming up all day, sending their bold smells everywhere.

I’m with my little sister on the swing set that my dad made from a car hoist and tire scraps. Just me and her, side by side. The rusty chains holding the black rubber seats creak as we move back and forth, back and forth. We cut through the heat while my brother Mark is running through the sprinkler with my oldest brother, the chit-chit-chit hiss echoing across the yard.

Then I hear my oldest brother yelling. He’s standing on the deck across the yard, looking my way. Run! he bellows. Get out of there–Run!

I look to the east and see them coming: hounds. Big ones. Galloping in a large pack.

My brothers and mom dash into the house. They’re safe inside where the hounds can’t go. My little sister and I, however, cannot run because we’re on the swing set, still swinging, and we don’t know what to do. We don’t know where to go.

Before we know it, the hounds are upon us.

I climb to the top of the swing set. Foamy jaws snap at my feet, and I don’t remember my sister anymore. I only remember me, my limbs, my throat.

I steady myself and leap—I land on the roof of the house across the yard. I wonder if it’s far enough away.

The hounds see me. Smell me. They know where I am and run toward the house.

I look around. Searching. Hoping.

The hounds jump high, scaling the rooftop, and—

Where can I go?

The force with which the hounds lunge at me stops order in the world. Daggers break the pale, freckled softness of my forearm, and I can’t see anything but mangy gray fur and a mouth of hot breath. All I can hear are snarls.

I’m done for. This is the end, the tornado, the cyclone, the storm taking me to where there’s no coming back. How bad will it hurt? I can’t control my thoughts, the fear, the maw that’s bearing down on me—I’m not ready to die, I don’t want to die!

The pressure changes. A cold draft rushes past my skin. The mouth lets me loose, so I pull back my arm and slip away, free.

I’m panting. Sweating. Hot all over.

The hounds leave the roof and go quiet, retreating to the edge of the yard. I thought they were going to kill me and tear me apart, but they didn’t. They stopped. They’re gone now, and some part of me understands they’ve left for good.

Relief has thinned the air, and I am weightless, purged. Sour but buoyant, like after vomiting. The sun settles onto the horizon as I come down from the roof.

My brothers are outside again. My little sister is fine, and I’m fine too: there’s no more pain, no raw wounds. But out of the corner of my eye, I spy milky scar tissue where the hound bit me. Light tufts of fur edge out from it like mold.

Nicki! my mom yells. Nicki? Come inside!

The hounds are gone, and it’ll get dark soon, but that doesn’t matter. My arm has already begun to change…

My stomach heaves so hard that I wake up.

I vanish into my body and find myself in my bed. I’m trying to remember what’s real, what happened, whether I’ve begun to change into a wolf or if it was just a dream.

I can feel my Disney dog comforter. My arms are my arms again. I don’t see fur or scars; my skin looks normal, and I’m still me—not a raw and primal beast that people will run from, which is the biggest relief I’ve ever felt.

For a while I stay in bed, watching fibers float in the air and glint in the calm, morning light.

Two

It’s nighttime again, but now I’m thirty-four, putting my own kids to bed. The younger one is two years old, and the other is five—they’re not babies anymore but not that big, either.

Stories have been told. Teeth have been brushed. I lay down with them on a tattered mattress that sits directly on the hardwood floor. It’s what we use because, through trial and error, this is the best way for our family to sleep, with no one falling off the bed or waking up during odd hours of the night. The kids don’t sleep without me lying next to them, so I’m here for at least a little while. I wait for them to drift off. My gaze bounces around the room while I take note of the change in my body, the one that started years ago but has intensified in recent months. It’s strange and it scares me.

When I’m lying still, some part of me flexes by itself, like a shoulder or a thigh. It happens again and again, going on until I fall asleep or get up, leaving the room. I don’t know what to make of it and wonder if part of it has to do with my weird arm pain—the repetitive strain injury that I’ve been dealing with since before the kids came. It’s affected both of my arms, rendering tasks like clutching a cell phone or typing on a keyboard painful. The symptoms of repetitive strain injury vary, coming and going like the seasonal migration of a mysterious creature. For a while treatment helps, but when I have a flareup, some of my fingers will twitch. I don’t like that, but I get used to it. When other muscles start doing it though, I don’t know what to make of it all—it’s easy to think the worst.

What I’m wondering about now are other breeds of illness, namely neurological diseases, which are like nightmares, except real. I’ve heard stories of how they can ruin or end a life, like how cancer took my mom’s when I was nine. My brother Mark took his life fifteen years later, which doesn’t make me feel vulnerable in the same way, but the impact has dented me, nonetheless. Danger is everywhere, the dent reminds me. Protect yourself at all costs. I don’t know how to stifle that voice, how to keep it at bay, how to insulate myself from its vigilance, so my mind stays open to the possibility of further calamity. Eventually I find a story about neurological disease in my ancestry. I don’t have much—just some family notes in my genealogy file—but this man’s story has clung to me as if we’d met each other face-to-face, as if he continues speaking to me: Don’t forget me. Don’t forget yourself. Everything could slip through your fingers, and you wouldn’t know the difference.

My great great-grandfather Meindert was born in 1847 in Friesland, which is part of the Netherlands. He lived in a sea town called Molkwerum that had red-roofed houses, and people had small gardens with vegetables and flowers and pastures for sheep—a picturesque European town, the kind I dream about sometimes, feeling their tugs while wondering if they were beautiful. He lived there with his family and ran a business with his wife making coffins: he built the caskets, and she sewed the linings.

Living below sea level meant dealing with a threat that locals called waterwolf—a kind of flooding that happens in reclaimed fenlands. Waterwolf makes the lakes grow bigger and erodes the ground, causing buildings to collapse, and people die in the mess of it. Living in that kind of environment boggles my mind. How do people handle the pressure? I wonder how the strain impacts someone on a base level, how it could’ve helped my great great-grandfather’s business. My understanding is that it did well.

By the late nineteenth century, Molkwerum was dwindling, and not because of the flooding. Dutch people had been dealing with waterwolf for centuries by that point, but because life in the Netherlands was complicated. The economy wasn’t great, farmland was in short supply, and the rigid social structure kept souls like Meindert feeling stuck in jobs they didn’t like. So people left, going to places like America, where Meindert’s brothers had gone. In the end, that’s what Meindert did too: in 1896, he and his family boarded a ship to America, and he never made coffins again.

Meindert and his family did well in Massachusetts, running a small dairy operation and working as a school janitor while his kids grew up. His children then started families of their own. My great great-grandfather lived what some would call the American Dream, owning land, raising a family, getting what he needed. What he wanted. “Having it all.”

But a day came when something shifted: Meindert started acting differently. Out of character. He was a grandpa now, and his behavior became erratic. His memory started to go.

Meindert moved into a family farmhouse with a customized bedroom that was near the kitchen. The room’s door was made of heavy chicken wire so the family could know what he was up to, like when he started rummaging for clothes and blankets to pile onto his bed. He did this because he wanted to light it on fire. The family stopped him when he began looking for matches.

At night, Meindert began leaving the house. He wandered the woods, getting lost. Family and friends went looking for him, searching among the trees, calling his name. Eventually they would find him, but when they tried to bring him back home, he fought them like a beast and refused to go anywhere.

Meindert was a big, strong man. His family didn’t know what to do, seeing as they couldn’t care for him anymore. They brought him to Goffle Hill Sanitarium in New Jersey, and I can only imagine what that must have been like for him and his family. The records I have say he had Alzheimer’s.

The last time Meindert’s daughters saw him, he was in a padded cell, dressed in restraints. The man was confused, feral, and angry. He died in that sanitarium, alone.

Three

I think about making a will. The task has been on my mind for years, because even though my weird arm pain and twitching have taken a turn for the better—it’s amazing how much mineral deficiencies and cortisol can mess with you—I know deep down nothing is to be taken for granted. Life is not risk-free, ailment-free, tragedy-free. The best I can hope for is to meet each step with grace—and, sometimes, with a plan.

The plan becomes important because of the kids, who’re four and seven years old. Young kids with so much life to live, so many needs to meet, and if neither myself nor their dad is around, then what? I don’t want these young minds to fill in the blanks because that’s what I did when illness claimed my mom’s life.

My partner and I hire an estate attorney. We let the will-drafting process take the time it takes, talking about scenarios we hope won’t happen for decades. Others we hope will never happen, though it’s not hard for me to imagine these things and talk about them. Enough for my partner to comment on it.

“It’s weirding me out how easy this is for you,” he says, and I pause, waiting for him to take his time, to catch his breath. I imagine this whole thing isn’t effortless for him: he doesn’t find himself waiting, weirdly hoping for the next chance to step into a nightmare. To test his muster. To wonder how he’ll do in a hellscape when he walks through it. Will he run? Stumble? Will he take each step with strength and…become heroic? I’m guessing he doesn’t ever see himself dead or disappearing, or wondering who’ll be left to watch. I don’t assume he thinks about these things while doing the dishes or driving a car, or while walking to the mailbox. He probably doesn’t think about them while boiling pasta for dinner.

Each time we talk about guardianships or advanced directives though, the kids are out of earshot. We don’t tell them about these things. Not yet.

I’m surprised one day when my older son, who’s seven, asks about burial wishes. He does this sometimes, talking about things before I bring them up—like the time he was five and knew how Mark had died. We’d been honest with him whenever he asked, Who’s that? while looking at photos of my brother. That’s Uncle Mark, I’d say. He died before you were born because he was sick in the way he thought—that was the best age-appropriate description of suicide and depression I could come up with. But one day, my older son explained to me the method Mark chose to end his life, and I was stunned. Bewildered. I asked my partner if he accidentally let it slip, but he hadn’t. Nobody else in our lives would dare lay it out for a five-year-old, but there it was: my older son just knew.

Around the time when we’re making the will, my kids and I are driving home from the swimming pool. We’ve left the parking lot and are on the freeway, passing by radio towers and thick smears of trees. We cross the Clackamas River, and I see, briefly, the point called High Rocks. It’s a swimming spot known for severe injuries from high jumping and jagged boulders. Every now and again someone dies there.

My older son interrupts the dull hum of the car’s high-speed noise. “What do I have to do with your body when you’re dead?”

“You know,” I say, wondering how to answer the question, “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, actually. We’ve made a plan.”

I keep my eyes on the road ahead, holding the steering wheel while I go on. “There are lots of ways to deal with someone’s body after they die. Sometimes people are buried in cemeteries, and sometimes people get cremated—which means burned to ashes.” I pause to turn the blinker on, signaling that I’m changing lanes to exit the freeway, before going on. “I want some kind of natural burial though, or composting or something like that, because then it can be my turn to become food for other creatures after I die.”

He's silent for a beat. “But I don’t know how to do that.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “It’s going to be someone else’s job if you’re still a kid. And if you’re a grownup when it happens, it’ll be written down in the plan, so you’ll know what to do.”

I wait for my kids to ask about the plan since it’s been on my mind. Don’t they want to know where they’ll go if we’re dead? This is an opening, I’m ready to tell them, but they don’t ask. The topic seems less urgent the longer they chatter on about composting and which creatures might decompose my body. Will it be bugs? Mice? Can the roots of a tree take up nutrients from a dead person? I saw an article about that and mentioned it to the kids once. The article had a photo of a giant sack—it looked like burlap—that shrouded the roots of a young tree. Inside the sack, the article explained, lay the decomposing remnants of a human being. But later I will learn that approach is fraught with problems, not unlike a mushroom suit burial, which was how the late American actor Luke Perry was laid to rest. His remains were wrapped in a shroud too—one made of fungi. And, unfortunately, the mushroom suit didn’t work as planned because the body needs to break down before mushrooms can do anything. A fresh corpse is too big a feast for them.

I take note of the green burial types that come my way. Some are interesting. Some are questionable in terms of sustainability, access, and feasibility. Even though my questions linger, I can’t back away because I can’t return to conventional burials—I know about those. I know what we put my mom and Mark in before we lowered them into the earth: they were wrapped in synthetic fibers. Chemicals. Thick, padded caskets. I brought Mark’s clothes to the funeral home, having picked them out myself. It felt good to choose that red shirt, that gray tie. Those pinstripe pants and those shiny, black shoes. It’s the locking up that scares me, the idea of keeping a body in place, stuck in a box. I don’t want to be stowed away like a cursed thing—I want to be part of life. I want it so badly. I want to feel wind on my cheeks and grass under my feet for as long as possible, feel guttural shouts barreling past my tongue in glee.

My kids ask questions that I don’t have good answers for. They want to know if ghosts are real, and I say it depends on who you ask, which is the best I can do, because I don’t want to scare them and can’t prove anything, but I also can’t say no, I don’t believe in that. When they ask what I want to be in my next life, I feel more equipped to give an answer, since multiple lenses are available, like reincarnation and the nutrient cycle. These frameworks say there’s a place for every being, a way for energy to transform. There’s no such thing as the end, not even for my teeth-baring great-great grandfather, who perhaps in his snarling state yearned desperately to feel fearless and free.

What I tell my kids is this: after I die, my body will break down into pieces small enough for other creatures to eat up—you know, bacteria. Soil microbes. The invertebrates. Then bigger creatures will come along and gobble up the smaller ones, and this will go on. It’ll be diffuse, dispersing parts of me across space and time. And at some point—what I hope for, anyway—is that one of those creatures down the road will be a wolf. A wolf who, after a day of roaming far and wide, will need to rest. To sleep. To dream wolf dreams.

Nicki Youngsma is a writer and illustrator, and her service work includes building horticultural education nonprofits and raising young people. Her work has appeared in Unbroken, and she is currently working on a memoir project. Find her at nickiyoungsma.com.