HOSPITALS ARE WELL LIT. Uncomfortably well lit. Flooded with sallow, merciless light: unnatural, fluorescent. Recessed troffers in the ceiling, cradling thick bars of sizzling white. They are places where light feels like invasion rather than grace, where it offers harsh illumination, unsparing but necessary: the flip of a light switch, vitals taken in the middle of the night, the glaring bulbs of the operating room. Their harsh light throws the conflicting needs of their citizens into sharp relief: bodies that need to work and bodies that need to rest.
Maybe the lighting feels particularly bright in my mind’s eye because I think of hospitals as places of ruthless visibility, where privacy is gone and the boundaries of the body become porous, where we see more than we’d like—about our bodies and their frailty, about where these bodies are always, ultimately, headed.
AT THE AGE OF THREE, my daughter became obsessed with the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter: the story of a young maiden kidnapped by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his dark underworld. It’s also the story of her mother, the goddess of the harvest, who mourns Persephone’s absence so keenly that she plunges the whole world into winter.
Every night before bed, this was the story my daughter requested. She would lie under the covers, holding her giraffe water bottle with one hand and sucking on two fingers of the other. Sometimes she took her fingers out of her mouth to point at the illustrations and ask questions: Why is Persephone bent over in her dark cloak? Is Persephone cold? Does she miss her momma? She was particularly interested in the book’s first and last illustrations, which showed the entrance to the underworld: at first, a gaping hole opening for Hades’s chariot to carry Persephone underground, and then, at the end, the same hole opening for Persephone to emerge so that she and her mother can embrace again.
My daughter was full of questions about this threshold: Why didn’t Hades and Persephone fall off the chariot, if they were driving straight down? Was his tush showing under his white dress? Does her momma pull her back up? She wanted to know: why are the bottoms of our trees sticking into the top of their world? She was interested in borders, the places where the underworld touched the world of grass and sky above.
Eventually, Persephone is reunited with her mother. But the story doesn’t close with resolution but duality. Persephone eats six pomegranate seeds in the underworld, so she will always return. She will move back and forth between two worlds: one aboveground, one below. With her mother, and without her. Because my daughter’s father and I were divorced, and she slept two nights a week at his apartment, I suspected that the myth was one way she made sense of splitting her life between two homes. Each week, her life held the rhythms of separation and return. Perhaps it felt most comfortable to encounter this story from the cozy cloister of bed, when we were tucked together under the covers, her little toes pressed against my thigh.
AS A MOTHER, I think the duality of Persephone’s fate speaks to the ways we can never fully “have” our children, just as our
