The Smallest Thing That Survives Everything: child loss, grief, and the failure of fairness

There is a creature so small you cannot see it with the naked eye that has survived every catastrophe this planet has ever produced. It has survived being frozen, boiled, irradiated, launched into the vacuum of space. Scientists have put it through conditions that should be incompatible with life and it persists anyway, because it has a mechanism no other creature on earth possesses. When the world becomes unsurvivable, it pulls all the water from its body, curls inward, and becomes something that is not quite living and not quite dead. It waits. And when conditions change, when the water comes back, it reconstitutes itself and continues. Surviving is not a decision it makes willfully. It is just the only thing that has happened to it so far. What I cannot wrap my head around is the tardigrade has no say in where it ends up. It goes wherever the water takes it. It can withstand anything and control nothing. Which shore it washes up on is entirely luck. I want to tell you what it is to survive everything and have no say in what the surviving delivers you to. I want to tell you what it is to look around at where you have landed and understand that this, all of this, was never in your hands.

Here is what nobody tells you about luck. It is not a reward. It is not distributed according to effort or intelligence or how much you have already suffered or how hard you are willing to work. It does not check your record before it decides. It does not look at what you have already lost and conclude that you have had enough. People want to believe it works that way because the alternative is too much to face. The alternative is that it is just water. Moving where it moves. Taking you where it takes you. I have worked until my body forgot what rest felt like. I have loved people through diagnoses that had no good endings. I have filled out paperwork and driven to appointments and sat in waiting rooms and made phone calls and shown up, kept showing up, in the particular way that a person shows up when showing up is the only thing left to do. I have done everything right and had it taken anyway. And I have watched people do very little and have everything handed to them and I have never found an explanation for it and I have looked. There is no bottom to that specific kind of unfair. Luck is a word I want to burn down.

By the time I was four I had already found the encyclopedias. I loved them because nothing in them was made up. The world was already strange enough. We had a full set and I carried them room to room, one at a time, nose buried, walking into walls probably. Leather bound, glossy pages, some with pictures, and when you closed one the gold on the edges caught and glinted. I would read about the earth and that would make me wonder about the ocean and that would make me wonder about the creatures in it and that would make me wonder about how they survived and that would make me wonder about survival itself and what it costs and who decides and by then I was somewhere else entirely from where I started and maybe that was the whole point. And maybe the wondering never stops. My grandfather understood this about me before I did. He was the kind of man who did not need to say much to make you feel like the most important person in the room. He had a way about him. Tall, dark, larger than life, the kind of man who looked serious until he laughed and when he laughed the whole room followed. He would watch me walk through the house not looking where I was going and laugh and say always with her nose in a book and the way he said it made me feel like being exactly who I was had always been exactly right. He is gone now. I wish he was here. I wish I could go back. I did not know then that you do not get to keep things just because you love them. That has nothing to do with it.

Grief came for me more than once. More than twice. It kept coming back and each time I was somehow still there on the other side of it and I still do not know what to make of that, that I kept surviving it and surviving it and surviving it when surviving was the last thing I would have chosen if anyone had thought to ask me. There are people who have not lost a child. Who have not lost two. Who have not stood where I have stood. I do not begrudge them. I have never begrudged them. I just want to know what determined the difference. What the criteria was. Whether anyone was paying attention when the water started moving and I was in it. Whether it was timing. Whether it was chance. Whether it was just the current deciding, the way currents decide, without asking, without considering, without any awareness of what they are taking or where they are leaving you. I have asked that question for years. The tardigrade does not get to ask it at all. The silence is the same either way. The tardigrade does not decide where it ends up. Neither did I. I want to be very clear about that. I did not decide any of this.

Maybe nobody told you that grief has no schedule. That it does not care what year it is or how long it has been or how much work you have done on yourself. Maybe nobody told you that the people who have not been here will never fully understand and that is not their fault and it is also not yours. Maybe nobody told you that you will keep loving them. That the love does not go anywhere just because they did. That loving them does not stop. It just has nowhere to go. Maybe nobody told you that chance put you here. That timing brought you to this specific grief and not someone else. That it was never about what you could handle. He should have lived. He should be here right now and I should not know what this is and I should not know how a person survives it and keeps going and wakes up the next day and the day after that and still somehow finds a reason and I do know all of those things and I would give every single thing I know to unknow them, to go back to before, to be someone who does not know any of this. Who looked at my life and thought yes, her, she can take this. Who made that decision. Whether anyone made it at all or whether it was just chance, just timing, just the current moving through and taking what it took and leaving me here with all of this. By what logic did any of this make sense. Why him. Why me. Why any of this.

I used to think luck was something that happened to other people. I know now that is exactly right. It does not go where it is needed and it does not avoid those who are already broken and it does not course correct when it has taken too much. Some people fall into it. The right time. The right place. The door opens and they walk through it and they never had to knock. And some people are the tardigrade. Indestructible and entirely at the mercy of the elements, surviving everything and having no say in where the surviving leaves them. I have survived things that should have finished me. I am still here. I did not choose any of the shores I have washed up on. Not the grief and not the loss and not the life that looks like this instead of something else. The water moved and I was in it and I am still in it and I am still moving and I still do not know where I am going. I never did. That was never the part that was up to me. I have been the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time my entire life. And I have also been loved. And I have also loved. And I do not know what to do with both of those things being true at the same time but they are.