“Come back to me,” Louise whispers to the newborn she holds in her arms. The baby is momentarily silent and still, awash in blue light. Tragedy potentially looms over the scene—has her child died before it had the chance to live? The moment is a bait and switch. The baby cries heartedly as a montage unfolds of the poignant, everyday scenes of life. The bright spots of joy. The blots of sorrow. Then, the child does die that foreshadowed and premature death, in, perhaps, the same hospital, over a decade later.

On the day that the heptapods arrive, Louise operates in a daze that anybody who mourned the loss of a loved one would recognize. People flood the streets and riot, but Louise heads to work as usual. While the world is thrown into panic, Louise, who has already experienced her own existential crisis, is unaffected by news of the alien visitors. In fact, the opportunity that she is presented to study the heptapods’ language jolts her from her inertia.

***

I taught the film Arrival for the first time to an introductory college English class for nonmajors, just three weeks after I laid my mother to eternal rest. The choice of the film was unrelated to my personal circumstances—I had selected it at the beginning of the term for its clever narrative framing device and the way it complemented the course’s theme of encounters, which progressively became more concerned with extraterrestrial contact every time I taught it.

Then again, that is a lie.

(The trauma of fresh grief has a habit of obliterating the memory of earlier pain. And as such, my mother’s passing nullified my experience of contemplating the very real possibility of my own death just two years earlier, as I teetered between the chasm of being and unbeing and stared into the void, which disappointingly didn’t peer back, awaiting the surgery that would save both my life and that of the eighteen-week-old fetus that grew inside me.

The first time I saw Arrival I sobbed my way through the final act twist, unable to stand even as the credits rolled. I hadn’t suffered the loss of a child, but the possibility—that alternate timeline where my baby’s slowing heartbeat never regained
its pace after I awoke from general anesthesia—haunted me. Above all, what haunts me still is the knowledge that though my second child survived to be born into the world, one day, death would claim her back.)

Two weeks into the start of that ill-fated spring semester I got a phone call from my father. My mother had been diagnosed with stage IV bile duct cancer, which has a 5 percent survival rate. Within two months, and after one hurried trip back home to my native California, she died.
(The film is a metaphor for grief, I wish to tell my students abruptly, but I suppress the urge.)

During the difficult nights following my mother’s death, I would clutch my sleeping then-four-year-old tightly to my chest, my mind wandering back to the days when my mother used to hold me just the same way. As a child I was scared to sleep alone, afraid of the monsters that lurked in the shadows. Now as an adult, I realize that the monsters are still there— their forms delineated by the mists of memory, much like how heptapods appear in the swirling haze of their pneumonic chamber—only now, the monsters reside in my mind, ever-present and more real than those imagined, grotesque corporeal forms that hid in the dark corners of my childhood bedroom.

***

I was five when my uncle, my father’s brother and my grandmother’s eldest child, died from a brain aneurism expectedly in his late-twenties. I only have one memory of Uncle David while he was alive—him tossing me high in the air with joyful abandon while my mother urged him to be careful. (My mother would tell me later that, being the father of three sons, Uncle David always secretly longed for a daughter.) Instead, my abiding memories of Uncle David are of the months following his death, in which he appeared as the ghost that haunted my grandmother.

The year that Uncle David died, my parents had opened a new restaurant which required much of their time, and I was frequently entrusted to my grandmother’s care despite her fragile state. (As I would discover for myself, exactly thirty years later, life relentlessly marches on irrespective of your willingness to move with it.)

I remember the daily vigil that my grandmother would hold every afternoon. Whichever game we were playing would cease and my grandmother would retire to the black leather sofa by the bay window. She would bring her knees up to her chest and look out that window, gaze at nothing aside from the recesses of her memory,
produce a worn wallet-sized photo of her dead son, and begin sobbing uncontrollably. My grandmother would mutter a prayer under her breath in a mixture of English, Cantonese, and Shanghainese, that soon would devolve into a curse, her body shaking violently, her tightly curled black hair falling over her reddening face.

I remember feeling uncomfortable watching this deeply personal daily display of despair, but I was transfixed by my wonder and fear. Sometimes I tried to hug her. Some days she would allow me hold her while her tears wet my shoulder, other days she would firmly shake me off her.

Now, during the past year of holding my own vigils of grief—not daily, but still all too frequent—I wonder if my now five-year-old daughter’s abiding memory of her grandmother would be my own displays of indecorous shows of sorrow. Try as I may to conceal my anguish, it would erupt through the cracks in the lacquered veneer.

I resisted my grandmother’s ritual, which provided her a designated time and space to mourn, so every place and any time of the day or night was tinged with sadness. The bedtime stories followed by suppressed sniffles once we extinguish the light. The loud sobs from behind the bathroom door before leaving the house for school and work. Crying while clutching the steering wheel during afternoon pickups—my knuckles whitening to match the white-hot pain searing my insides. (A colleague in my department saw me during one of these fits in the parking lot. Now every time he greets me in the hallway with the typically innocuous “How are you?” his question is inflected with pity and fear.)

Every week is punctuated by these frequent outbursts during routine chaos of family life as I keep ticking along. Tick. Tick. Tick. I often pause to consider myself in the mirror: Are you a clock, a metronome, or a bomb?

Bomb. “Mommy, I’m sorry I dropped my grapefruit. Please don’t cry,” my now five-year-old pleads with me on the morning of the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death. I am bent over cleaning the mess on the floor when a soft wail erupts from the pit of my stomach.

I compose myself instantaneously, with almost clinical precision, like I have multiple times over the past 365 days: “It’s okay, sweetie. Mommy isn’t sad because you dropped your grapefruit. I just miss my mommy.”

“We can go visit her,” she reassures me, “We can ride a jumbo jet to see your mommy.”

I never told her that my mother died. My mother was distant, both physically and emotionally, from her grandchildren, who were just aged four and two when she passed. Her death, and explaining the concept of death to boot, didn’t seem appropriate or necessary to mention at the time. So my eldest daughter lives with a mother who inexplicably wades through a fog of pervasive sorrow.

My grief is an untranslatable language that divides me from all that I loved before. I wish to present the codex to them with this document, as Louise offers up access to the heptapods’ cyclical view of time with her book.

***

Many of my students are perplexed by Louise’s choice to conceive a child that she knows will die young and, furthermore, to keep that knowledge secret from her future husband, who would later leave her once truth is revealed. “But don’t we all make a similar choice?” I respond rhetorically. We know that everything we begin will soon come to an end. We know that everyone we love and hold dear will eventually die. With that knowledge, why do we continue to make the choice to pursue new beginnings or love as though it were truly everlasting? Perhaps, like Louise, we keep that knowledge hidden to allow ourselves to live.

And to speak to that concern about Louise’s secrecy, I know how grief becomes an illicit addiction that you feed when no one is watching. Grief makes you greedy for more stolen hours to give over to your despair.

***

Birth and death. The universal experiences that unite humanity almost verge on the banal. Yet, it is not until you see your newborn emerge from the widening chasm cleaved into or by the female form, or see your loved one reduced to cold immovable clay on the mortuary slab that you realize the profundity of these events. You emerge reborn or undone, but forever changed, like Dante Alighieri walking through the gates of the inferno with only joy or sorrow as your Virgilian guide.

Yet, Louise’s foresight in many ways frees her to surrender to the tumult of life. “If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?” Louise murmurs to the man who would become her husband and the father to her ill-fated child. He answers, not realizing the weight of his words: “Maybe I’d say what I feel more often.” And there it is. Since my mother has died, I have become more forthright and honest with myself and others—or rather, more brash and reckless, as some may
see it. Grief strips you down to your bare essence, and after you have spent so much time walking around naked and exposed, you become resistant to the idea of putting on clothes again.

John Milton said it best that death and life arrive as “two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.” Once we are born, we are already on the pathway that the heptapods term the “death process.” It was through bearing the lives of my daughters, and also, bearing the burden of my mother’s death, that I felt the most primal yearning I have ever felt. As my two little daughters quickened within me in the final months leading to their respective births, I yearned to kiss their little fingers and toes, and lay their little downy heads upon my chest. During those early days of motherhood just the thought of my babies would cause a pang in my breasts, quicken the milk to flow and to seep through my clothes. Now, as a daughter who has lost her mother, I also yearn to return to a time when my body was enveloped fully in the comforting warmth of hers, our hearts pumping the same lifeblood. I now know the longing for the kind of touch that will be forever absent—both the caress of a long-dead mother and that of the maturing children who will never again be viscerally bound to my bosom.

What I had found most difficult to comprehend in the hours, days, weeks, and months following my mother’s death was how that same body through which I entered the world, would molder and decay, be consumed by the crematory fires—bones pulverized and broken— until all that was left was gray dust. She, she who was once everything to me, had become, in the words of William Wordsworth, “a thing that could not feel”— and my entry into world closed forever, dissolved to ash. Like Wordsworth’s Lucy, my mother “lived unknown, and few could know / When [she] ceased to be; / But she is in her grave, and, oh, / The difference to me!”

***

I want so badly for this narrative to end on a note of hope, but what eternity holds for us in the great beyond is uncertain at best, so this will have to suffice. I don’t believe in a Judeo-Christian God, or any god, for that matter. I don’t believe in heaven, hell, or any flavor of afterlife. And, aye, there’s the rub: it is only within that facile, spiritual framework that we are given the hope that we will see the ones we have lost once again.

But I want to believe, which in itself is a form of belief. I long for that feeling of certainty like others pine for a lost love. I remember the last time my mouth was full of reverent prayer and my heart was just as full with the love of God. Those days are
mingled with the memory of my childhood friend, Kim, who was prematurely torn away from me when she died during a routine surgery at the age of fifteen— an age of death that deserves the hackneyed appellation of “tender.” (I told you that the trauma of fresh grief has a habit of obliterating the memory of earlier pain.) I wish I could say that her death prompted my violent rejection of God and religion—that I fled from Him and it like some wounded, abandoned lover—but the truth is far less dramatic. One day there was form to my faith, but then next, there was only void—a Lockean tabula rasa that was subsequently etched with skepticism, rationality, and doubt…

***

So, to get back to my students’ question about how Louise could live with the knowledge that her child will one day die, the answer is simple. Every one of us lives with the knowledge of who we are, who we have been, who we have loved, who we have lost, what we have done, and what has been done to us. Yet, those of us who are lucky enough to survive it all keep on living just the same.

And what sustains me above all is the hope that the love that we feel for others and the memories that we make together are as close to the eternal as we can get in our mortal lives. Wouldn’t it be a nice thought to think that the love we feel and the memories we share go on living unbound and disentangled from our corporeal bodies and our linear experience of time itself? That they pulsate as pure energy woven into the very fabric of existence, to be revisited, to be re-experienced, to be relived again and again? That, perhaps, one day, just a simple change in the way that we perceive time would unite the past and future in the ever-present present? Dust would become flesh once more before it becomes dust again…

***

“Come back to me,” Louise whispers to the newborn she holds in her arms, realizing that her daughter already has.

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