The missing pumpkin

on the thinning of the veil

October was my due date. Three years ago, now.

Samhain.

The days the dead are near.

There is a ghost life that follows the life I am living.

I’ve risen early this morning, writing with the intention to post immediately, not something I’ve ever done before. Our house is on a hill and I look out to the mist weaving through the reds, oranges, browns and greens of the trees. A cat sleeps close by. My family sleep above me.

Today I am taking these moments for myself. To feel a connection with what’s beyond the veil. As I type this, I must admit to you that I am not superstitious or religious in any way. And yet, and yet. There is a purpose in this mist.

My child and I carved pumpkins the other day. One small, one big. Mama and baba. Then my child asks for a third, the largest pumpkin, to be papa pumpkin for their stepdad. Three pumpkins glow in the fireplace. Among the uncarved gourds I nabbed for 99c each in Lidl, there is a small and perfect pumpkin. Like an illustration from a children’s book. I look at it and imagine eyes aglow, tucked in beside its family.

My child asks about Halloween. Why? There is no greater way to highlight your own ignorance than having to explain the world to a child.

At a writing workshop I was leading the other evening, a participant read a beautiful piece about fairy forts which prompted a discussion around the superstitions of old that have been lost. What was remarked upon was how quickly that loss has happened. In the space of a generation, hundreds of years of passed down culture has all but disappeared. I've written about this before, both in Milk and my work in progress. How superstitions and fear protected the landscape. Without fear, people seem ruthless in the damage they'll incur. In the space of a generation ring forts have been bulldozed because the fear of the fairies has all but vanished. In theory, we as a society know more now than we ever did, but we have thrown away generations of knowledge with this perceived intellectual leap, and what exactly have we replaced it with?

This time of year has changed since I was a child. My first year trick or treating in Mayo, my neighbour brought me and her children to various houses in the townland, what I didn't expect was that we'd stop in each one for a chat. An elderly man asked us to sing a song. My memory is hazy, I was only five, but I know now I was seeing the last years of an old Halloween.

As we grow ever more connected by the internet, our worlds seem to be becoming smaller. We stay inside, on phones, and don't build the same in person connections. The hunger for community is palpable among so many I know, myself included.

A blackthorn tree against a grey Mayo sky.

What is forgotten. Samhain was a tradition that kept us close to the dead. A structuring of fear, giving people the illusion of control, that there was something in their actions that could protect them, that could keep death both close and at bay.

Growing up atheist, I often felt an absence. Part of being human —not that it is unique to humans, crows, elephants, and many other animals exhibit signs of grief — is the understanding of death. I’m inclined towards the gothic, though I recoil from horror movies and fear itself, I indulge in the mist among autumn leaves, raven coughing overhead, staring wistfully across the sea. All that sort of melodramatic teenage stuff, I love it. There’s something in the act of longing itself that feels primal. The world and our role in it is too big for a person to understand in all its complexities. Living alongside the unknown is inevitable. We create stories to make sense of the chaos. Whether those stories are god, ghosts, or the mythologizing of our own lives.

Oh, comfort! Oh, agony! Oh, comforting agony!

There is a ghost life that follows the life I am living. One where I have two children, my child has a sibling. The loss of a pregnancy did not stop when the bleeding did. The grief ricochets. Sometimes when I see my child, five now, playing or running just ahead on the beach, I see this three-year-old running alongside. This child that never was but could have been. 

Recently, I had a small procedure in hospital, and I felt it happening. The pull through the years. Whenever I visit the hospital, it’s the same. Like time is collapsing in on itself. The doctors. The sticky blue linoleum. The orb like lights in the tiled ceiling.

I think of the time when my body was a graveyard. The hope of a baby dissolved into product of conception.

To lose a wanted child. Before it was a child at all. To lose the possibility of something, the thwarting of intentions. The complicated loss, of potential, of the plan of the life I was going to live.

My second child never existed. I lost the pregnancy in the first trimester. It was a missed miscarriage, my body unwilling to let go. The process took place in the hospital, gory and painful and all too similar to birth.

As it finished, I asked is that it, like, the baby?

It’s not a baby!

No, I know, I mean, what would have been a baby?

The doctor dismissed me. I think she was trying to reassure me.

No no, this was never going to be a baby.

I asked anther midwife to have the ‘tissue’ tested so I could find out if it was the foetus, and she said yes if we find anything, but that didn’t happen.

My marriage ended not long after the miscarriage, and with it the hope of a sibling for my child.

I never followed up with the hospital about what happened to the tissue, it would have just been medical waste. I’m not a spiritual person, so I told myself that didn’t matter. My grief was the same as the grief of a breakup when you’re grieving the future that never was. But, now, with a child who would not get a sibling, it wasn’t my grief alone.

Knowing my child, I know what the pregnancy could have been: a whole person.

Knowing my child, how could I possibly compare that ethereal potential to them, a real physical child with a whole personality?

And now I am thinking all those questions about when a foetus becomes a baby. When a baby becomes a person. Like the doctor said, it was never going to be a baby.

One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage.

A wedding does not make a marriage any more than conception makes a toddler.

October was my due date. Three years ago now. When will this stop?

When my child goes to college, will I be thinking of the teenager that isn’t hugging him goodbye? Will he feel his sibling’s absence as I age?

What is the point of this grief except to anchor me to some unreality that never was and never could have been?

There are no right answers. Nothing is right, it just is.

There is a ghost life that follows the life I am living. One where my children sit around me on the sofa, watching cartoons. There could still be three pumpkins, one mama, two babas. In the ghost life, things may not have worked out the way they have in other areas of my life. In the ghost life, I never finished my first book, didn’t have the energy to seek out an agent, was too caught up in single motherhood to reclaim the confidence needed to pursue writing as a career. In the ghost life, I may have not yet rediscovered the woman in myself, the animal joy of my body that longs for things that are good for me. I may well be much lonelier.

The cartoon Bluey is a big hit in our house. Among the adults as much as the child. When we watch it, I’m thinking constantly of the sibling bond in the show. The children in it are four and six. That’s the age gap my children would have had. But they don’t, my children, one being alive, one being non-existent. There are other discrepancies. The children on Bluey are girls and Australian. They’re also dogs and fictional.

We’re on the sofa, my child and I, watching this when my partner comes home from a night away for work. My child is gleeful to show him the papa pumpkin, the one we made just for him. It’s the goofiest face of the three.

Titles lose their meaning in our family. I am not a wife. He is not a husband. He is not dad. My son is not ‘ours’. When we’re somewhere unfamiliar, we get mistaken for a married couple and their child. I thrill at this; it makes me feel like we are real. Yet, the ambiguity of our legitimacy doesn’t change the solidity of our unit. The feeling of completion when it’s just the three of us, watching Bluey, cats flung around on the soft furnishings. Mama, papa, baba pumpkins.

We don’t live in suspended time, waiting for things to be. We just are.

Last night we took to the streets of our village. Us three and some friends. Orange glow of streetlamps through leaves turning from green to yellow to orange to brown. We knocked on the doors of people we don’t know. I had to repeat yes, we live just over there, oh, not long, a few years at every house.

At home, my child asks about Halloween. Why?

I tell my son about the traditions of Halloween as I remember it, not from a century ago or more, but from twenty years ago when I was small. I tell him about black bin bags and plastic masks so thin they’d inevitably crack and cut your face. I tell him about a trick or treating in the countryside by car, and hoping at least one house said they had no sweets so that we’d pretend to ourselves we would egg it. I tell him about dunking my face in a bowl of flour and searching for coins with my teeth, trying to avoid the globules of other children’s spit. I don’t tell him how I longed for a sibling to share it all with. I tell him about the veil, the idea of being close to a world we can’t see, the celebration of the dark half of the year. We talk about apples and nuts, storytelling and visiting, spirits and turnips. Then we put LED candles in our pumpkins and bob for apples in a plastic bowl decorated with spider webs.

We keep a connection to what is past, even in our now.

When I feel the need for that connection, a seeking for the supernatural I don’t truly believe in, I take to nature. In the bogs of Mayo I find a silence that I’ve never found elsewhere. I feel the centuries beneath my feet, the brevity of it all, and let myself breathe into the mist.

It is ok to peek beyond the veil. What lies there? The dead, those we used to love, the versions of ourselves we thought we didn’t want to be? Alternative universes, lives, an afterlife, a spirit world. All the same, in their way, like a dream in the first seconds of wakefulness — an unknowable sense of the intangible just out of sight.

All the polyester ghosts in the world can’t hold a candle to the feeling of being completely alone on the bog.

This morning, I won’t have time to ramble alone. Already the cats have demanded I break writing this to feed them. Still, I take a moment to step outside and feel for a nip in the air, the closeness of the November sky, the turf smoke unfurling from our neighbour’s chimney. I think about the parallel life that could be happening in this same garden, a little pumpkin that never was, just beyond a veil.

If I could collapse time and rearrange it, rearrange it into what was not, our now would be the thing which isn’t. Our now would not exist at all. I would not know it, but knowing it as I do now, I would grieve it.

And now, it is winter. The pumpkins glow in the half-light. Already, they’re starting to smell of rot. I close my eyes and listen to the gurgle of pipes, the cat’s purr, the creaks above me as my family starts to wake.