Babies, islands, muertos, molecule soup.

The babies are right.

Día de los Muertos ended last night. I woke up and lit the candles on my ofrenda anyway. I always hate taking it down. I don’t want to stop feeling like the people I miss are visiting.

Friday night at a parade about death, a friend explained to me that until 6-9 months, babies do not have a sense of self. They don’t understand that we are each separate people—that they are their own person. I started reading about it, and all of the information is framed: “The babies don't know the truth, yet."

But probably the babies are right and we are all wrong. What if it’s more like:

Around 6-9 months, humans forget that we are all one and part of each other and become confused, thinking we are all separate beings.

Reading about this reminded me of the Muriel Rukeyser poem, “Islands.”

O for God’s sake
they are connected
underneath

They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs
The bathers think
islands are separate like them

I’ve seen a few people talking on IG lately, in urging others to act for the protection of the children dying in Gaza, about how once you have a baby, all the world’s children are your children. Parents may understand more intimately how helpless children are, but if the babies are right, it doesn’t actually hinge on having children.

One thing is true though; when you have a child, you immediately understand that if that child dies before you, you will never be OK ever again. This is something I thought I already knew. I grew up with another girl my age, Jessie—a hybrid step sister-best friend figure, the daughter of my dad’s longtime girlfriend. She fell through a warehouse rooftop and died when I was 17 and I watched her mother deteriorate until she killed herself 2 years later. The darkness of her mother’s pain had touched me then, and I thought I really saw it, but since my daughter popped out, it has a whole new dimension.

Despite having many dreams that felt unquestionably like visits from Jessie, I didn’t believe in an afterlife. I was a science-mostly-only girl until about two years when ago a series of ghost incidents that began with calling a pet psychic/medium shattered my whole belief system.

I called the medium to help me deal with a dog I’d adopted who wouldn’t stop peeing on my couch. She brokered a deal with him for me—if he stopped peeing on the couch for 3 weeks, I would buy him a fountain. (He did stop peeing on the couch for 3 weeks, I bought him the fountain, and he recommenced peeing on the couch). Then she said he also wanted goggles. (We also got him the goggles).

THEN she said, “I don’t usually do this but there’s a girl here who really wants to talk to you,” and proceeded to describe Jessie in detail, down to the bracelets she was wearing. Jessie just wanted me to know she was looking out for me. I saw a ghost a few weeks after that and then had an unintentional exorcism a few days later but those are stories for another time.

The point is, I don’t know what I believe about ghosts anymore except that dead or alive, we’re all just one big soup of continuous molecules with one continuous energy flowing through it. I will think about this to soothe my grief as I dismantle my ofrenda today and return its items to the ofrenda drawer. And I will think about all of the grieving parents and people in the world who do not have the luxury to grieve in safety in front of a carefully arranged altar.

When I think about Gaza, I think about how if I couldn’t protect my daughter, if I couldn’t feed her, if she died, I would splinter into a million pieces and never be whole again. I think about how I will have to explain to her some day that this happened. I think about what kind of framework I can build for her to spare her the festering, useless shame and guilt I feel as a Jew. And about how I can teach her to use her energy in more productive ways to help protect the world’s most vulnerable people.

I spent a week with Netanyahu’s brother once. I was determined to understand rightwing ideology in Israel. One main takeaway was that the concept of “nation” is empty. Rightwing ideology in Israel is based on the idea that the Jews are a nation of people, so I asked him probably 37 times what a nation was, but he was never able to explain it. I would say it’s an imaginary line drawn in molecule soup.

Somewhere between 44 and 180 thousand Palestinians are now dead because of imaginary lines drawn in molecule soup.

Molecule soup, I will tell her.

O for God’s sake, they are connected underneath!