Author’s Note for “Death Spa”

“The Death Spa” was born in the death of another story. Previously, I kept picturing a widow dealing with the death of her husband and trying to recreate different iterations of him. It was very Frankenstein. I was originally concerned with the unnatural ways we try to hold on to life, refusing to grieve and accept hard truths. How impossible it feels to imagine our lives without particular persons, places, things, ideas that seem fundamental to who we are and how we function. And yet the struggle to accept this doesn’t stop life from happening. Though cliché, it’s true that death is a part of life. There is something about being able to mentally prepare, rather than to be taken by surprise when it happens. When death is sudden, it feels like betrayal, a flood of pain we feel all at once, to the point it’s desensitizing. Reality becomes even more disjointed. But when death happens over a certain period of time, it can help everyone grieve while the person is alive. To plan, reflect, do in the time they have left. While thinking my way through this, the next story came alive: “The Death Spa.” In order to imagine a more holistic way to approach death, I created a surrealistic state of existence, where man and nature lived in harmony and embraced the circle of life between them. In the same way that visits to the aquarium or nature hikes are therapeutic, the death spa was meant to offer that peace.

I’m struck by how much a person’s death impacts those who are still living. How much of the ceremony is more for the living than the dead and doesn’t consider impacts on the environment but on human emotion—again, a desire to preserve the deceased as much as possible. The living require ceremony to process their grief and other emotions. But none of it—the funeral, coffin, formaldehyde—stop the reality of our bodies eventually returning to dust. We aren’t less loved because we’re cremated or when there’s not a thoroughfare of people to pay their respects. The more meaningful respect comes from the transition between life and death, being treated with dignity and respect and touch. For the last bit of existence to be peaceful and in a trusted community. I’m not sure if we’ll get to this point in reality, but it was good to envision a space where this could take place. Every invention starts as some thread of the imagination.

All of this has to do with the worldbuilding, but I had to consider the characters walking around this world. For the last few years, I’ve been interested in artists, their psychologies, processes, desires, and failures. One thing that can often feel like failure is leaving the art behind. Or not doing anything with it. This is true not just for artists but for anyone with creative sensibilities and goals. If we find identity in the work, it’s easy to feel like nothing, or incomplete, without it, similar to the death of a loved one. It’s one thing to see death at a distance, with others, when death isn’t seen or accepted as a real force in the person’s life yet. But when it actually happens to us, our own mortality truly creeps in. When death happens, we often find perspective we didn’t have before. All the distractions from what really matters fall away.

The narrator experiences all of this in multiple ways, as an artist, wife, mother, and massage therapist. Her dreams of creating art are still alive, and yet she feels herself slipping further away from that as time goes on. How common this is. For life to get in the way. For creatives to choose and create other responsibilities over their art. This includes forces that are both in our control and out of it. For many, creating just becomes a nice daydream to escape to, to imagine we still have the impulse or ability. Or perhaps to imagine that we can impact others in a way that’s unique to our vision or talents. The narrator did indeed envision a different life for herself, one where her art would’ve taken her somewhere else, and she has to grieve the fact that it may not happen. The loss she experiences highlights her shortcomings, the struggle to be content in the life she’s living. The struggle to not treat her family as a consolation prize, to be a good wife and mother.

The latter feels like a loaded term. There is an urgency to motherhood. A way in which it can become all-consuming with a child wanting every moment of attention, to never be put down, demand that you look at them. They see their mother only as an extension of themselves. Boundaries can seem like cruelty at first, yet need to happen. It’s easy to write about coddling or monstrous mothers, but what of the ambivalent mothers? I remember submitting an early draft of “The Death Spa” in a workshop full of women. All except one were married with kids. Their feedback seemed to be fed by their instinct of what a mother should be. They described the narrator as cold and detached, which is true to an extent, but also realistic. I’ve noticed there’s often a code among mothers where they assume that they are all fiercely protective, nurturing, supportive of their children, and will sacrifice anything for them, but that’s simply not the case. I’m reminded of characters who had complicated, compromising relationships between motherhood, marriage, and/or art. Kiira in Flesh & Bone, Joan in Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife, Zora from Disappearing Acts, Vivi in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Stephanie Land in Maid. Many people struggle as parents for a variety of reasons. It can be unpredictable. Some may take longer to see themselves as parents or to feel that sense of connection and obligation to kids. My mother often remarks that she didn’t feel like she was my mother until I was a few years old. Many have given up their children, even though they brought them into this world and are legally responsible for them. Having kids doesn’t always change someone, but just highlights what’s already on the inside of them, for better or worse.

There are a lot of hard truths around facing a dying world and dead expectations. The story within the story surrounding the humans and wolf children imitates that. The walls often of our own creation that we crash up against. The slow and often painful journey to arrive at who we are now and what’s available to us. Life is a cycle, meaning it’s always moving through phases. Life comes after death, giving birth to the next phase. I’d like to believe the narrator will make room to create, to forgive, release, and become for herself, her family, and any iterations of her work.