WHALE SONG by Catalina Bode
4 AM
I am not there to see it but I know that this is how my mother dies: hours earlier she watched a red cardinal from the window, fluttering branch to branch in the March dogwood. There is no green, no blossoms. She sits up in the bed hospice has brought to our house; she walks around the room in a frantic panic; the lining of her stomach is dissolving. It is dissolving. She lies back down, her stomach floats to her heart, consumes it, one by one parts of the body stop working, and then there is the final breath.
TAHLEQUAH
Off the Pacific coast, Tahlequah carried her child on her back over the course of seventeen days for one thousand miles. I wonder why on the seventeenth she decided to let her go. Let the small, dead thing sink to the ocean floor. A falling ecosystem of future life.
The scientists who study this orca pod were sad for many reasons. Their population is dwindling. There are no more Chinook salmon – not enough, anyway. There have been no successful births in years. The scientists worried Tahlequah would starve. Worried they would lose her, too. Another killer whale from the same pod, Scarlett, was sick. Together, Lummi tribal leaders and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists left land for sea and poured medicine-filled-salmon into the ocean. Scarlett did not survive the next month.
I wonder at how we sapiens cling. How my mother kept medicinal beetles in the living room cupboard to mix into her smoothies. How my father still keeps her socks in her drawers even after all these years. How carried weight doesn’t lessen. How everything I write is an iteration of this.
HOME REMEDIES
My mother gave us spoons of olive oil because she didn’t want us to catch a cold during our trip to Colombia. When it stormed outside and we three got nervous, she made us chamomile tea and agua panela. She gave us crackers when we couldn’t eat anything else. Our house filled with the scent of caramelized onion, garlic, and honey whenever we had a bad cough. She warded off mosquitos in the park by basting me in lemon juice, kept prune juice in the fridge for my sister’s impossible poops. Half of the home remedies I believed; the other half left me sitting in citrus stick.
NEEDLES
My father was sent into the Pacific to gather seaweed and colorful skeletons from the ocean floor. Others were sent to the redwoods. They brought their findings to the lab. Their professors told them to look, but no one knew what they were looking for.
Paclitaxel comes from the Pacific yew. For years, researchers stripped the bark until they realized they could alter the tree’s needles to create the same chemotherapy drug. When my father went to school in California, he did not know he was one of the many gathering the chemistry that would make my mother shed her eyelashes and the hairs on her arms. In his studio without heat, he did not imagine the one-bedroom house and two children, another ocean crossing, a two-bedroom apartment, a one-story house and three daughters. He did not imagine that in that house, in that town, the only place he has ever lived for more than five years, he would watch doctors pump his research into the catheter above my mother’s heart, watch her bushy eyebrows disappear, watch her skin thin and her collarbone protrude, watch her body swim in the blue of the living room couch.
BEETLES
A species native to Asia lived in the depths of cornfields, in neon strip malls, in my living room cupboard, in a plastic container with banana pieces and oats to keep them nourished. They say the beetles cure cancer, arthritis, asthma, Parkinson’s, HIV. I do not know who “they” are, but I know my mother believed them. A friend in Colombia shipped them along with her favorite fruit and some purple juice rich in antioxidants. How this passed Customs, I’m not sure. She ate the beetles like sprinkles in her smoothies and croutons in her soup. I did not ask about the beetles until many years later. In a research frenzy, I read an article arguing that the practice of beetle consumption shows how far we have fallen that people now believe in magic beetles.
One night when I felt in the mood for a sad movie, I watched the Dallas Buyer’s Club, a dramatized biopic about Don Woodroof’s search for treatment after being diagnosed with AIDS. When the credits began rolling, I wanted to know what had been real – what actually happened. I wondered whether Peptide T, an experimental medication Woodroof advocated for, really worked. I read abstracts from medical studies on Peptide T and DAPTA (a modified Peptide T) but did not know how to contextualize neuroprotection or dendritic arborization. I do not trust myself to summarize anything medical, but from what I could glean, the DAPTA study had two measurements for cognitive impairment; there was no significant difference under one system of measurement but notable difference for the other. I didn’t know what to make of this fact. The study concluded by calling for further studies. Reading abstract after abstract, I found myself asking – why does this matter to me? What am I looking for?
In a Washington Post article, an AIDS activist and a medical historian fact-check Dallas Buyer’s Club. The activist argues that Peptide T is a useless therapy but that the film implied otherwise, that it helped Ron Woodroof. Maybe help is where we get stuck. Maybe it matters who defines help; maybe how we define help is the difference between real and true. Some things we cannot measure.
When I researched medical studies about the beetles in our cupboards, every study included the words cytotoxic and genotoxic in its title. I looked up these words over and over, and I could spit back an explanation, but I could not understand how or why anyone would take these beetles into their body – they are poisonous. Then again, so is chemotherapy.
Maybe, for so long, I have not understood what is magic.
GLITTER
The first book to make me cry was a Helen Keller biography. I cried when Anne Sullivan died and again when Keller died. Someone born in 1880 would not live to 2004, but eight-year-old me did not understand that a life is not a story that goes on forever.
The second book to make me cry was Cynthia Kadohota’s Kira-Kira. Mrs. P told my father that I was not challenging myself, so that day, we went to the bookstore and I picked the highest book on the shelf, figuring taller means harder. Kirakira in Japanese means glittering. Katie and Lynn, the two sisters the novel follows, use the word to describe tissues floating in the wind, the sea, blue skies, and people’s eyes. Everything is magic. When Katie loses her sister, the family keeps fingernail trimmings, a lock of hair, Lynn’s diary. They build a mantle and keep it for days. Relics of sainthood. In the final pages, they visit the ocean for the first time. Lynn loved the ocean though she never saw it. They can hear her voice in the waves, calling kira-kira, kira-kira.
DRAWERS
My father has not opened her drawers. But my sisters, aunt, and I have. Over the years, we have taken rings and earrings and thick sweaters. When I visited one weekend, I found one of her sweaters in my closet. I wore it the day I left. My father made a comment, and I asked whether it was okay that I take it with me. He told me that my aunt put it in a donation pile, but he took it out. He told me that he bought the sweater for my mother for Christmas when we still lived in the Netherlands. Told me how the whole boutique was filled with the same kind of sweater, all hand knit from one village in Peru.
We have emptied the drawers of bright colors and shine – we have worn, stained, and lost things – but the drawers still hold what we do not carry with us: the prayer pamphlets, the underwear, the socks.
PRAYER
For years, she lived on the ocean, fell asleep to whale lullabies and the lull of a rocking boat. In the middle of Bermuda, acoustic biologist Katy Payne realized that humpback whales are composers, too. Each song is made up of six to eight themes; in each theme, a melodic phrase repeats. The whales share these songs, singing the same song over and over. After months and years of listening, Payne began noticing changes. One whale added a new note; another whale sang a variation. The songs were evolving. Whales were learning from each other. Over time, the whole pod sang a new song. The songs that tethered them before were made collective memory. Even after thirty-one years of analyzing whale recordings, Payne still wonders at the immensity of energy that goes into creating these complex sounds.
When I think whale song, I think of my mother’s weathered San Antonio prayer card with its golden trim and creased corner. I think rosary beads between the fingers, the memorized whispers. I think of the music my mother reminisced over, the CDs my aunt ordered that last month, the song my aunt sang at the wake, the sounds of home, the home she could not return to. I wonder how to measure a moan, a murmur. By their width, their residue, their resounding echo?
WEB
My web browser is all whale stories. I click the hyperlinked article within the article that tells me of another death. Page after page, I digest these deaths. Three layers deep into the next one, I ask myself whether I want to do this again. I do. I’m taken to another page. They are all the same story, but I feel them anew each time.
I do not tire of this sadness. I choose the cancer movie; I read the book knowing it will not end happily; I listen to that sad song on repeat, the one I can count on making me cry. I reach for endless avenues of grief. I want to feel it for myself but know that this time it’s not real. I want to feel it and know it’s not mine, yet know it is still very much mine.
I do not know if I am looking for more than sad. Looking for more than spaces in which to cry. Maybe, I am looking for warmth, too. I am looking at how the world followed Tahlequah’s 1,000‑mile journey. How mothers who lost a child wrote in response to what they were seeing in the news. It was not just the researchers who felt the immensity of the loss; others, too, knew such love. Scientists and fisheries and Lummi leaders all worked together in hopes of saving sick Scarlett.
Maybe loss, too, bears gifts.
PULSE
She felt the air throb. Each time Katy Payne passed the elephant habitat at the Portland zoo, the air pulsed. We know the trumpet sounds we were taught as children, but there are elephant calls the human ear cannot register. Payne followed the elephants to the savannah, studied the golden grass like she did the sea. Most of the elephant sounds called families to gather. Elephant families are made of three generations of women. Payne calls them women. Grandmother. Aunties. Cousins.
When we received the diagnosis, everyone who could came. My sisters and I slept in one room, our mattresses squished together. My aunts, cousins, second cousins, Abuela, and Godmother slept in the living room, the bedroom my younger sister and I typically shared, the half-finished rooms in the basement. After school, I would arrive home to a sweltering kitchen and a game of Rummikub at the table.
My aunts took turns caring for my mother. One aunt stayed until her visa ran out. Another aunt stayed nine months until her son experienced an episode of psychosis. The third aunt stayed nine years, stayed through the shroud that veiled our house, through the growing pains, through her promise.
VOICEMAIL
I call the home phone number. The robot tone tells me no one is available. I try again and the robot tone tells me no one is available. The third time a voice recording tells me they will call me back as soon as possible. I wonder if I have accidentally called my neighbor, but when I look back at the number I dialed, I find that it is the same phone number I have memorized since the first grade. And then I realize it was not my neighbor’s voicemail, but hers, the one my mother recorded years ago.
When this happens to my father, he is calling my aunt to let her know he is on his way home from work. The stoplight is red and he pulls out his work phone. He should have called as soon as he left the office but only remembers when he is five minutes from home. The phone rings and rings until he hears the first click of the voicemail. As the light turns green, he catches her voice. For the first time in three months, she is there, on the other end. His eyes blur. He cannot see the street, makes his way to the gas station parking lot by memory.
MOAN
In a forest, one elephant calf dies. Over a hundred unrelated elephants passed by the little thing slumped on the ground, but one adolescent male tried lifting the calf over 57 times. He returned to the body five times. I have to interpret it as a human, Payne answers when the interviewer asks her why an unrelated adolescent male approached the dead calf so persistently. Not everything can be explained in evolutionary terms. Perhaps elephants are capable of compassion. When Payne is asked if she is crossing a line, if she has blurred the lines between animal and human, she tells the interviewer that she does not know whether she is crossing anything, or whether that line has been too firmly drawn.
When Payne returned to a zoo, the matriarch elephant that once lived there is now dead; she is survived by her granddaughter. As an experiment, Payne played a recording of the grandmother’s voice. Pandemonium erupted. The elephants in the habitat stomped and roared – memory manifested in the physical.
LETTERS
The first time I read Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, I did not believe her when she wrote that grief doesn’t fade, that grief scabs, that it opens again, that it hurts in new ways. I told myself, But I am fine. We are fine.
The first time I was really far from home, I began researching familial grief for a novel. I was living in Asturias and had not seen my family in months, would not see them for many more. I Whatsapped my father, my sister, my aunts, and family friends and wrote down everything they said at the kitchen table in my piso, catching glimpses of my piece of mountain from the window. I asked them questions I had been too scared to ask before this project gave me reasons. Each phone call hurt in a new way. I went to bed screaming, the way I did that first night. The many first nights after.
I do not know if I know how to write beyond this. I wonder if this is my blue period, if I will ever finish writing this. Maybe there are many iterations of this and that makes it okay if I am always here. Or perhaps it is not the iteration, but simply the need for reiterating. Maybe this is the one I sing over and over, the song that sits in the bones.
To say this prayer – burn this candle – perform this ritual – create this salt or honey jar –is to have something to do when it seems that nothing can be done. – Esmé Weijun Wang
This is how we cling, tie, and tether.
WHALE FALL
When a whale falls to the ocean floor it sits in the snow of decay, in darkness and crushing heaviness. Here, new life swarms. Ecological succession has four stages. First, animals come for the soft tissues of the carcass. The whale is consumed, stripped to the bone. In the third stage of ecological succession, bacteria live off the pockets of fat inside the bones. This can go on for a hundred years, a lifetime. It is only a shell of a body, yet there is always more that life can take – there is always a deeper kind of empty. The last stage is called the Reef Stage. A whale’s ribcage turns to custard fuzz, like pollen dusting the earth in the spring. But I like to imagine a blooming carcass of coral, rose bushes, and shimmering geraniums.
WORKS CONSULTED
“August 11, 2018 – J35 Update.” Center For Whale Research, Aug. 2018.
Bullinger, Jake. “The Lummi Nation Has a Simple Idea to Save Orcas: Get More Chinook in the Water.” Bitterroot, 19 July 2019.
Crespo, Rosana, et al. “Cytotoxic and Genotoxic Effects of Defence Secretion of Ulomoides Dermestoides on A549 Cells.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Elsevier, 29 Apr. 2011.
Goodkin, Karl, et al. “Cerebrospinal and Peripheral Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Load in a Multisite, Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial of D‑Ala1‑Peptide T‑Amide for HIV-1‑Associated Cognitive-Motor Impairment.” Journal of Neurovirology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, June 2006.
Heseltine, P N, et al. “Randomized Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Trial of Peptide T for HIV-Associated Cognitive Impairment.” Archives of Neurology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Jan. 1998.
“In the Presence of Elephants and Whales.” On Being with Krista Tippett from American Public Media, 1 February 2007.
Kadohata, Cynthia. Kira-Kira. Atheneum Books, 2005.
Kwong, Emily. “What Happens After A Whale Dies?” NPR, 7 Nov. 2019.
Mapes, Lynda V. “After 17 Days and 1,000 Miles, Mother Orca Tahlequah Drops Dead Calf, Frolics with Pod.” The Seattle Times, The Seattle Times Company, 13 May 2019.
Matthews, Dylan. “What ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ Got Wrong about the AIDS Crisis.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 28 Apr. 2019.
Mendoza, Dary L, and Stephanie Saavedra. “Chemical Composition and Anti-irritant Capacity of Whole Body Extracts of Ulomoides Demestoides (Coleoptera, Tenebbrioidae).” Universidad De Antioquia, Apr. 2013.
Moffett, Matt. “Argentine Rx: Take 70 Beetles And Call Me in the Morning.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 6 Aug. 2003.
Selk, Avi. “Update: Orca Abandons Body of Her Dead Calf after a Heartbreaking, Weeks-Long Journey.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 1 Apr. 2019.
Wang, Esmé Weijun. The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays. Graywolf Press, 2019.
Ward, Jesmyn. Men We Reaped: A Memoir. Bloomsbury,“Whale Song” is Catalina Bode’s debut publication.