Natalie Hampton on Grief
In second grade my family went to Disney World with Make-A-Wish and stayed in a little village of dying kids. A group of teenage girls volunteered to paint our nails at La-Ti-Da Spa in the Castle of Miracles so they could embellish their graduation robes with blue and white community service cords. They talked about their plans for college: taking a year off for a mission trip, borrowing money from estranged parents to pay for New York, heading to junior college with plans to transfer. Maybe they didn’t consider most of the kids whose delicate nails they filed and painted with bedazzled jewels wouldn’t make it to college. Maybe they didn’t want to.
With Make-A-Wish, fast passes cut us to the front of lines. People stared as my brother rolled by. Others watched out of the corners of their eyes instead. The question hung heavy: What was wrong? When I looked at him, I asked the same question. I asked how the heat of the park made him feel; I asked what he thought of the trip. I asked myself how he always felt. But he couldn’t answer.
First park, first ride: A Cat in the Hat roller coaster in Seuss Landing. Years before, the movie had clawed white scars in my memory: a grown man clad in fur, whiskers jutting from weathered cheeks, purple jelly smeared across the children’s furniture.
It took five minutes for my parents and the ride operator to strap my brother into the chair, ensuring the nylon straps weren’t so loose he would slam against the back and weren’t so tight that it squeezed his skin red. Three sharp buzzes sounded, and the lights dimmed, and the cart bumped along its track. Within moments, that morning’s sickeningly sweet cotton candy rose in my throat, and I threw up in my mouth. I felt gnarled fingers knotting intestines, cold sweat trickling through warm air on goosebumped skin, and black spots of vertigo seeping through vision. Between turns and hills, my parents whispered of motion sickness and medicine, and I thought of the scene when the kids rode their unconscious nanny like a cart through their deformed house of bent chairs on walls and fires blooming out of suspended toilets. At least they didn’t vomit.
For the rest of the trip, I held my brother’s hand, skipped the lines, and stepped aside as we got to the front of the rides, feeling breakfast rising. My brother only went on the tame rides, so we sat together and waited, and I wondered if the same motion sickness grabbed him.
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The first time a seizure stole my brother, we called the ambulance and prayed. I cried at first because my parents did and I felt I should, and then I couldn’t stop the tears, even when the other’s eyes dried. In my head, I scripted a list of goodbyes, but I didn’t know the proper pattern of words, and the list was too short and too shallow—I could tell him I loved him and I’d miss him, but I couldn’t capture it. It was incomplete. It wasn’t right.
Research suggests that motion sickness and partial seizures may be triggered by the same electric waves from the brain. Motion sickness is a typical ailment: sensory overload, sudden nausea, spinning room, but you recover, move on, nothing more than a blip. Seizure effects linger. Thoughts fuzz and become beads on a bracelet growing harder and harder to string. Headaches tear through your temples. Sleep summons, but when you close your eyes, you can’t.
By his final year, seizures were a standard of his life. His breath caught, his body fell rigid, and we counted the seconds trickling into minutes until time resumed for him, but I feared one day his clock would stop too long. I wish he hadn’t been robbed of speech by then. I wish I could have told him that I too felt suspended in that constant state of motion sickness, of electric waves from the brain. I wish I could have told him all we had in common.
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When I was younger, I dreamed of exploring the universe. I would be the first contact with alien life, bringing them under human control; I would be the first step onto Martian dust, claiming the planet for America, claiming it as a natural extension of mankind and all the other rhetoric I inhaled.
60% to 80% of space travelers experience motion sickness. Before promethazine was introduced, the incapacitating nausea led to a 10% reduction in efficiency.
Now, my childhood vision of exploration rings of historical colonization and cruel subjugation. Now, I know I would vomit on the takeoff. Now, I’m more content to watch the stars from afar and craft my own constellations without swimming through the silver liquid streams.
Except sometimes I want to feel my brother’s seizures. I want my senses overloaded. I want to feel motion sick. I can’t board a rocket, and so, I run.
I run until I lose my own body, until I am lost like him, until my head spins and I wonder if on the next step, my foot won’t hit pavement, and I’ll float away like that flying house from Up and my heart could be the old man inside. Most days, I run on an empty stomach. (Why? To help with cramps; I have no appetite; I want to be skinnier. I don’t know.) It makes me dizzy. I do it anyway.
In a block, my breathing hastens (in half if I forget my inhalers); in a mile, my legs burn, but I keep running. Plastic shoes melt on frying-pan pavement in Southern Summers, shin splints spike down the sides of my calves, and I pass by the same group of middle school girls in Lululemon that judge my old shirts and shorts, but if I’m dizzy enough, I notice nothing.
My family wasn’t built for running. My mom collects injuries like trophies as proof of her former hard work: plantar fasciitis, strained hamstring, aching back. My dad walks marathons in miles to 80s music and history podcasts but never picks up the pace. For my brother, walking was a rarity turned impossibility with age. When I run, I feel I need to down extra miles like a jug of soda until I feel sick to compensate for the rest of my family.
I run until my vision blurs, until I cannot make out the lyrics of whatever break-up Taylor Swift is lamenting this time in my headphones, until I forget what street I’m on and can’t decipher the sign anyway.
Then I run a little more until I feel truly motion sick, and I sit down and stretch—pull and tug at muscles to loosen them—and I wonder what it would feel to cut my muscles right in half until I couldn’t move at all. Until I too was bound in a wheelchair.
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The sensory conflict theory explains motion sickness as when the body’s three main sensory inputs send mixed signals the brain cannot handle. When I think of my brother, I still feel the mixed signals. The world, the ashes, the funeral, the eulogy all proclaim he is lost. But he cannot be because how does a star blink out of existence? No—he was meant to shine and last longer, even if doctors said he wasn’t. They said he was lucky to make it to seventeen.
We have four Netflix profiles under our account: my parents’, my sister’s, mine, and his. Two years and no one has used his. Once a week, I click on his profile to see the Continue Watching bar, forever locked between scenes of Shrek, the red never to gain another pixel on the remaining grey bar. I see the recommended movies: all that the algorithm thinks he would enjoy but won’t be able to verify.
We still call it his room. Not the guest room it has been repurposed as, not the game room we almost made it: Jake’s room. Is it worse to call it Jake’s room like he is still here, or to pretend it’s any other room like he never was?
Whenever I think of him, it takes a moment to switch to past tense. In English, I reflexively say Jake is and have to correct myself to Jake was. In Spanish, when I deliberately consider the translation of every word, it’s easier to remember: Mi hermano era. And when my teacher corrects it to Mi hermano es, I let him. The transition between tenses is bumpy, and I feel the gnarled fingers knotting intestines, cold sweat trickling through warm air on goosebumped skin, and black spots of vertigo seeping through vision. I feel the electric waves from my brain and I feel his seizures and I feel like him. I am back in Seuss Landing, but this time, I cannot hold his hand and avoid the line.