Ashes to Ashes

She was a jaunty young thing, constantly zipping from one opportunity to the next. One day, it was the student government association in high school, the next, it was college. It didn’t matter much in the long run, though.

Education was never a priority in her family, specifically referring to her. Her parents denied it to the heavens, but their time was devoted to something much more pertinent, much more masculine. Her brother, Connor, was of much more importance—he held all the promise in the family in his calloused hands. From valedictorian to star baseball player (s’go Bears!), he was the star of the show. Literally. When she begged Connor to assist with tech in the musical she got the lead in, her parents applauded more when the cast motioned to the tech studio than when she took her bow.

She liked to think this obvious favoritism was not a source of insecurity for her. She liked to think she had thick enough skin to handle her brother’s obliviousness to the inequality. When her brother graduated with honors, their parents threw a grand party and invited their friends and family from near and far. When she graduated college with honors, she got a cupcake and a pat on the back. She had had to hide her cheeks, flushed with resentment, and teary eyes, mumbling a clipped thank you lest she seem ungrateful.

Only when she got married did the kudos come rolling in. Her mother’s smile reached the apples of her cheeks for the first time. Her mother cried at the wedding, hugged her daughter, and whispered in her ear before she retired to the hotel room for her wedding night, “Makes lots of babies for me.”

She pretended that this didn’t sour her attitude for the rest of the night. She pretended to enjoy being loved by her husband. Instead, her hand was splayed across her stomach, wondering if her mother would finally love her when her belly was engorged with child—if pride would finally fill her father’s face when she handed him a box with tiny baby shoes filled with pink and blue wrapping.

When she got pregnant, she was less than surprised. It seemed on par for the course that was her destiny for a mediocre life. Her parents were more enthralled to hear about her pregnancy (much more than when she got accepted into college or graduated—but that was expected). She smiled and rubbed her still-flat belly as her parents fussed over all the changes she would have to make to her life. No caffeine, no alcohol, no fish (even though her favorite dish was sushi). She was to give up all things that made her enjoy life. But it was in exchange for something that would make her life better, that would make her life whole.

But, when she looked in the mirror at night, she couldn’t have felt emptier.

She used to be a high-ranking publicist, but her work was put on hold due to her insufferable morning sickness. Her child wanted to make her life as miserable as possible, to the point that the only thing she could do comfortably was splay out onto her bed and stare up at the ceiling fan. But not for too long or else the spinning would make her nauseous again. Her husband lay next to her in bed, his hand on her dome belly and running a finger down the dark line separating her stomach into two halves. He gasped in fascination when he felt a kick, her skin stretching to accommodate her child’s sudden need to display its physical prowess.

Meanwhile, she felt even more nauseous. The kick wasn’t something to celebrate for her. She pushed down on her child’s leg, telling him to knock it off.

“He’s going to be an athlete, I just know it,” he said, his eyes on her belly and only her belly. When was the last time he looked at her like this?

She looked at her husband and frowned. They hadn’t even found out the sex yet.

She kept promising her coworkers that she’d come back. That she was going to take maternity leave and get straight back to work. However, her parents’ pestering for her to quit her job to stay with the kids (plural, because she would gladly put herself through a few more instances of trauma) caught up to her. She found herself nodding one day in response to their pleas and picked up the phone later that night. Her coworkers seemed to have expected the news already. She let out a wet laugh after she hung up. She dreamt of her job, her coworkers, anything that tied her to the person she used to be.

Her brother was a VP at a bigshot start-up, a new woman on his arm each time he came to family dinner. Their father clapped him on the back. Their mother looked at her son with stars in her eyes, Ursa Major in one and Ursa Minor in the other.

She quit her job. Even with all the free time she had now without playing catch-up with her coworkers, she was still keeping up to date with new releases, nearly salivating at the mouth at the need to do something other than listen to her mother ask for updates on the baby (it would be too much of her to ask how her daughter was doing, of course), plan out a baby shower she would rather die than host, and mentally prepare herself to deliver this baby.

“She’s a big one,” her gynecologist said with a proud smile as if she was delivering the baby herself. “We’ll try for a natural birth as much as possible, though.”

She was 5’1. Her child took up her entire abdomen. People inquired with enthrallment on whether she’d survive the birth, as if the gamble on her life was some juicy gossip to be swapped with strangers. She swallowed down the bile in her throat at the thought of that child’s body coming out of her, and when she looked over at her husband, he had a similar expression on his face.

“It’s a girl?” he asked in a small voice.

“Oh, did you two not want to know?” the gynecologist asked.

“No, we did,” she replied with confusion. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing,” her husband mumbled, waving the topic away.

However, the expression on his face did not change, and he stayed silent the entire car ride home. He white-knuckled the steering wheel, and she wondered if the leather would pop. She waddled inside after her husband, and the second she stepped foot in the living room, their bedroom door slammed. She ran a hand through her hair in frustration at her husband’s antics, but when she brought her hand back in front of her, it held a sizeable lock of her dull brown hair that held no gloss no matter how much light shone on it. She clutched it in a tight fist before tossing it in the trash.

The birth was earth-shattering. It was considered so because her husband swore the ground was rumbling with her throaty grunts. It turned out to be a C-section at the end after many attempts at torturous pushing. She was losing enough blood and was passing out far too many times to justify putting her through that much, even for her gynecologist that made the natural birth work as much as possible. The baby was born and swept away, her husband drifting toward it and leaving his wife comatose and drenched head-to-toe in sweat and blood and snot and vomit, smelling a wonderful combination of piss and shit. It was only natural, unlike her birth, which her mother criticized her for perpetually.

When the nurse came over to hand her child, now free of bits of her intestines and body that were torn away in the miracle of life, she turned her face and shook her head. Both she and the baby had been cleaned up to meet each other. She was wearing a new gown that was free of vomit, and she was now somewhat conscious, her husband having roughly shaken her awake.

“Meet your baby,” the nurse cooed with an excited smile. “Here, hold her.”

“Mm,” was all she replied with and shook her head again, letting it loll to her shoulder as she closed her eyes. “Later.”

When she awoke, she felt a molar loose in her mouth. When she pushed on it with her tongue, it fell free and nearly choked her before she spat it out into her hand. She looked around, spotting her husband rocking with their daughter and the nurses preparing to clear out of the room now that they’ve seen she wasn’t close to death’s door. She gripped the tooth and hid it behind her pillow, a sick, twisted gift for a terrible Tooth Fairy. Except she wasn’t getting anything but anxiety in return.

She loved her daughter. Yes, she did. She had no choice but to love her. She liked seeing somebody who was a perfect combination of her and her husband cry, scream, and occasionally laugh at a bird pecking at the window. She enjoyed seeing her child grow from a pink raisin to a chubby, rosy-cheeked angel who teetered when she stood and laughed when she fell on her butt.

Her daughter’s laughter was the only thing that stopped her decay—or rather, delayed it. It was better that she quit her job. Between juggling taking care of a child and husband, buying presents year-round for holidays and birthdays of long-lost relatives, and congratulating her brother on all his successes, she had no time to do much else. She would grit her teeth as she hugged her brother for going public with his startup and buying a penthouse apartment in New York City with his model girlfriend, but she had already lost three teeth since her daughter’s birth, and if she lost anymore, she’d have to ask her husband to buy her veneers.

She lost another lock of hair each time she had to attend some asinine new mommy Facebook get-together, each time she had to buy a baby shower gift for a woman she barely knew simply because they shared the inescapable title of “mother.” Her scalp had been thinning for ages, but at the ripe age of twenty-six, she had a bald patch at the base of her head.

Her husband noticed one night as he spooned her, and he pressed a finger into it, causing her to whip around in shock.

“What’s going on with your hair?” he asked with a deep frown. “You got cancer or something?”

She started with extensions. However, the extensions fell out along with her hair when she had to give up her favorite hobby, reading, in favor of learning to sew the holes in her daughter’s clothes. Reading had been nearly impossible throughout caring for her daughter, but she had always managed to sneak a word or two in at the end of the night before her eyelids sank in fatigue. Now, with her daughter running around in all directions in preschool, falling and scraping and scratching, there was no time to waste. Her daughter was growing and often would complain about being hungry. At least when her daughter was a baby, she could produce her food without having to go out to the grocery store to buy some. Now that her child was past breastfeeding, the snack aisle at the grocery store had become her second home. She left bits and pieces of herself there accidentally; a tooth between the Clif Bars, another lock of hair next to the Welch’s Fruit Snacks.

Next came the wigs. Her husband sneered at the sight at first, but when he realized that her hair was not going to grow back, he accepted the wigs as opposed to the eyesore that her hair—or lack thereof—had grown to be. One day, after a long PTA meeting to decide whether the kindergarten formal theme would be under the sea or Hollywood, she lifted the wig. The last of her hair fell out onto the bathroom tile from underneath, and the wig fell from her hand along with it.

Her husband climbed into bed one night, her back to him as he turned toward her. His finger traced her spine and rustled the covers as it went underneath them, pulling on her pajama top.

“I think Ruby is getting lonely,” he purred. “Want to give her a brother?”

When she went to the bathroom after her husband had fallen asleep, she spat out her two front teeth.

Her next pregnancy ripped her apart at the seams even more than Ruby did. She was bedridden to the point that the gynecologist had to make a home visit, which she thought was no longer a feasible thing for doctors to do. But she was so incapable of harboring a living thing inside her body that she needed a doctor to tell her that after this child, she was done. She pretended not to see the disappointment in her mother’s eyes, and she held her tongue when she so desperately wanted to say, You only had two children yourself, Mother. Leave me alone.

Her husband was distant, more than usual. He fed her, helped her walk, held her hair back when she vomited, but the cuddles were few and far between. He was an adequate father and husband, but it stopped at adequate. There seemed to be an unspoken wall between them in bed, and he pretended not to hear her sobs into the pillow or notice that she put in dentures every day and took them out every night.

“It’s like I’m married to my grandma,” he’d text his friends, which she only found out after using her husband’s phone to take pictures of their daughter.

“You need to stop being so dramatic and pull yourself together for your husband and children,” her mother would say.

If only she could find the right strings that, when she pulled them, would zip her up tightly and grow her hair and teeth back. However, each string she pulled resulted in the loss of a new tooth or her nose feeling all-too wiggly. Each string was wrong and led her further and further to her demise. If only she could sew herself back up as she did with her daughter’s clothing. But her sewing capabilities stopped at sewing a patch over cotton.

She gave birth to a healthy baby boy, and her husband was ecstatic. He held his son up like in The Lion King, his grin illuminating the entire room. Before she lost consciousness, she looked over to her daughter, who was staring at her father, not her new brother. Her eyes fell upon that proud grin of his, and she could tell what her daughter was thinking. It was yet another cycle of inadequacy, of noticing her father’s pride in anybody other than her. She began to weep, and the nurses took her tears as dewdrops of golden joy, and they wiped them away with their gloved fingers as if they were harvesting them, wanting to keep that joy only a mother could feel toward her child. But what they took home that day, what they wiped on their scrubs was not joy but agony, not happiness but melancholy. It was grief.

When she sneezed for the first time after the birth, she tore her stitches and popped out an eyeball, her intestines spilling into her hands just as her eye bumped into her cheek. The 911 call was calm, collected, cold. She had grown numb a long while ago.

Her husband’s vomit stained the carpet when he arrived home to the violent sight before him, and when she returned from the hospital, it was up to her to try and get the stain out. As she was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the fibers with enough bleach to singe her nostril hairs, her eyeball popped out again, this time snapping free from its cord and plopping into the vomit-and-bleach concoction in the carpet. She blinked, blinked again, then looked up. She could still see with her other eye. Sight was not worth putting that stained eyeball (that was probably bleached to oblivion) back in her skull. She ordered an eyepatch online, hiding away from her husband until it arrived. He didn’t question the patch after he saw it for the first time. He simply turned away and continued bottle-feeding their son (since she couldn’t breastfeed without sobbing), subtly shoving his daughter’s pleas for playtime away with his foot.

Driving with one eye took a while to get used to, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. The PTA moms, with their platinum blonde Dolly Parton blowouts, elegantly manicured nails, bodies sculpted by Dr. Wilson, balked at her new appearance. It was too much to take in the tacky wigs that had to be replaced weekly since her scalp was incompatible with the wig glue, the obvious dentures that caused her to speak with a lisp, and now a glaringly large black eyepatch all at once. She was kindly asked to stop attending the meetings; they cited her continued hard work and the fact that she had just given birth as their reasons, but she could see the fear in their eyes as they broke the news, probably afraid that something else would fall from her face.

And they were right: later that day, as she washed her face in the gas station bathroom on the way home, her nose, which had been wiggly for far too long, finally went through on its silent promise. It unscrewed itself from her face and plopped into her palm, staring up at her tauntingly. She would have cried, but her tear ducts had been singed a long time ago. She hurled it into the garbage can, covering it with paper towels before crashing into the bathroom door and back into her car. She looked in the rearview mirror, catching her children’s eyes. They quickly burst into tears, her daughter screaming, asking over and over where Mommy’s nose went.

“Mommy’s going to look like this from now on,” she told her daughter. “You’ll understand when you get older.”

She felt as if she could breathe better without the buildup of snot and boogers in her nostrils and nose bridge, but the appearance was less than appealing. When her husband saw her for the first time, his surprised expression morphed into one of disgust, his own nose wrinkling, as if he had smelled garbage that had been stewing in the sun for hours.

“God, what happened?” he asked. “Can you get it reattached? Or can you call Dr. Wilson to fix it?”

Her other eye popped out that night.

Her husband purchased thick, black sunglasses so that people—and most importantly, him—wouldn’t have to look at her eyelids sewn shut, protecting the even worse sight of her pitch-black eye sockets. She was lucky that she had gotten used to the layout of their house before going blind and that she had advanced abilities to predict where her children left their toys.

“You should get glass eyes,” her mother said, pressing a smooth orb into her daughter’s palm. “It’ll make it more palatable for people to look at you. By the way, have you given your sister-in-law a baby shower gift yet?”

She sneered. “I don’t recall Connor’s wife getting me anything for my last baby shower.”

“Come on, Jane. Don’t be such a prude.”

She bought the usual fare in baby shower gifts: trendy baby shoes, a bodysuit with turtles on it, and a cute toy. The silence was unbearable when she walked into the party with the gift in hand, her skin crawling under all the eyes that were most definitely staring at her, tearing her apart and criticizing what was left. She excused herself early, setting the gift down after being led to the table by Sabrina, Connor’s beautiful, completely put-together wife. She claimed nausea, but the nausea lie became the truth when people began speculating about baby number three for her.

“I nearly died my last pregnancy,” she stated before slamming the door closed behind her. It was only when she got home that her lips peeled off with the makeup wipes when she removed her lipstick. Her fingers, trembling in their movements, crawled up her jaw and peppered themselves where her mouth used to be. It was smooth, barren, with no opening to be found. She reached out to the mirror, her nails screeching against the glass. She let out a wail, which was muffled by the thick skin covering what should have been her mouth. She drew her fist back and let it spring into the mirror, shards embedding themselves into her skin. It wasn’t as if she needed the mirror anyway. She didn’t need much anymore.

IVs were attached to her arm like leeches, except they were forcing enough nourishment into her to keep her on the brink of life. However, she was the opposite of nourished. She was the picture of '60s heroin chic—a walking corpse that looked as if she belonged in an isolation ward in the bowels of a hospital.

“I mean, at least you got a wife that doesn’t talk,” one of her husband’s coworkers said when they came over to watch a soccer game. “God knows I’d like that once in a while.”

“And she isn’t fat, either,” another said. “I’ve been trying to get mine to lose some weight.”

When she went to hug her husband, she felt his hands grip her forearms and gently push her away.

“Your bones hurt,” he claimed, patting her on the shoulder before brushing past her to envelop their son in his arms instead. She stood there, her arms outstretched until her daughter took her husband’s place. She felt something on her chest move, and she quickly pushed her daughter aside and ran to the bathroom.

Her breast, which used to be supple and heavy in her hand, was now saggy and wrinkled like a raisin, and currently sat in her hand. Her other hand came up to rub the spot where it used to be, which was now smooth without even so much as a nipple to delineate where her chest started and where it stopped. No longer did she have the marker of being a mother. As much as her breasts were saggy, they were an indication of her commitment to feeding her children. No longer did she have the marker of being a woman. As much as her breasts were thin and wrinkled, they were a symbol of her femininity, the last thing she could hold onto and claim she was sexy, worthy of being desired. As if she wasn’t already mourning the loss of her left breast, the right came off soon after, smacking onto the bathroom tile.

When she came out of the bathroom, her arms crossed above her chest to hide the sudden flattening of its surface, it was as if her husband knew what had happened. He sighed, balancing their babbling son on his knee.

“So you won’t consider going to Dr. Wilson for some implants?”

She was wheelchair-bound when her leg fell off after she tripped on her IV stand. It was inevitable that her other leg followed quickly after. It was fascinating how quickly she spiraled into disorder, with body part after body part falling off right after the other. Her fate had been decided the second that first lock of hair detached itself from her scalp. Now, all there was to do was wait along for her demise.

Was this how those with terminal illnesses felt? That impending sense of doom with the knowledge that they would die at any moment, that death would sweep them off their feet? At least those with terminal illnesses have the sense of peace that they contributed nothing to their cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. With her, she could have said no. She could have said no to her parents, could have moved far away and pursued her need for validation in more healthy ways. She should have said no. Perhaps she’d still have her limbs. Perhaps she’d still have intestines that weren’t dust. Perhaps she could see her children again.

“We should consider end-of-life care,” their lawyer told her, pushing a document across the desk. Just the phrase “end-of-life” caused her ear to jump ship, as if her body was wholly rejecting hearing any more about the subject. However, she could still hear; it was only a hole in her head now instead of an ear making it nicer to look at.

“Please sign this to allow your husband and children to use your inheritance,” the lawyer continued. When he noticed that there was no possible way for her to sign the document, he handed the pen over to her husband. “If you nod your head, you allow your husband permission to sign this document for you.”

She turned to face her husband, who was presumably on her right side. I want everything to go to the children, she said in her head. But she knew it would take far too long to try and tell that to the lawyer. So, as her final show of submissiveness, of passive acceptance, she nodded. On her final nod, her head separated from her neck and thumped onto the floor.

It only took a few seconds for her to process what had happened and what was going to happen before her consciousness escaped her. She felt a hand on her shoulder (metaphysical or otherwise), spindly fingers gripping her melting flesh. She was finally happy to say ‘yes,’ to give her permission to do something. She agreed wholeheartedly, following Death happily into the abyss and disappearing on her own free will, the first act of independence in her forty-one years of life.

Left behind in her wake of self-liberation was a pile of ashes in the lawyer’s chair, her head having decayed into dust. Her husband brushed her ashes into a dustpan, tipped them into a decorative urn, and placed her on display in the attic, a corner reserved for his late wife. His new wife never would have seen it.

Inscribed on the urn:

Jane Milgram

Dutiful wife, selfless mother, and docile daughter.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.