Why I Wrote Whale Fall
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. “Where’s my carrot grandma?” I would enthusiastically shout as I ran across her lawn and into the house. Magically she would present me with a freshly peeled carrot, and what followed was her weekly challenge. “How fast can you run this week?” 4 year old me would gleefully snap to attention and bound off like a lightning bolt around the house as she took out her stopwatch. “18 seconds?!” she shouted in astonishment, cheering for me as I crossed the “finish line” that arbitrarily was always the front porch. My childhood was filled with these small challenges, masterfully my grandmother encouraged healthy eating and exercise despite her quiet disdain for her own well-being.
MY FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH DEPRESSION — THE KID
It was a family secret at the time, and I was much too young to understand, but my grandmother suffered from chronic depression. Every Friday afternoon was the singular highlight of the week for her, and for me. She spent almost every waking hour with me during those visits, which ended up being much longer than your average grandparent visit. You see, she also had severe insomnia, which was a red flag for depression that my young eyes weren’t trained to pick up on. I would always arrive in the late afternoon when my mom finished work, and it seemed reasonable to spend the next 12–14 hours cooking, and dancing, and reading until I usually fell asleep on the couch next to her watching Mets games.
Saturday mornings I would wake up around eight in the morning, in my tiny bed, upstairs, surrounded by my posse of stuffed animals. I carefully got up, quietly walked downstairs and was always greeted by a breakfast spread that included:
- Puffed Rice
- A small saucer of milk (which had only been out for around 45 minutes because my grandma went to bed around 7:30am.)
- A selection of comic strips from that morning’s newspaper
- Followup questions about whatever we had read/discussed the night before
If you’re following along, my grandmother challenged me to read, retain, and think critically 48 months after I was born. This was probably the greatest singular gift she could have given me, the ability to read before I set foot in school. To her, reading was the most critical thing in the world. She was a fastidious reader, completing multiple novels over a single weekend and retaining almost every detail. I still don’t have that kind of memory, but my appetite for reading has never subsided. I remember walking into preschool and seeing a group of children stumbling over the word “blue” or “Zebra” and thinking to myself, “How long is it going to take before I can talk to my new friends about the underground railroad?” My grandma was always passionate about civil rights, this was one of her favorite topics — the value of human life. She was a deeply religious Catholic, and I could probably tell you more about the pope than about Barney.
I lost my grandmother when I was a junior in college. It was a crisp, dark, New Jersey fall morning when my mother called me to break the bad news. Coincidently it was minutes before I stepped into my Modern American History final, the topic, “The Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960's”.
I know… right?
MY BIG MISTAKE — THE SCIENTIST
My college trajectory became much more tumultuous after that day. I dropped Political Science as my Major and switched to Biology, a field that had always captivated me personally, and wasn’t something I discussed with my grandma too much. Two years later I marched across the graduation stage on a cold, rainy January morning and almost immediately into a clean room. Toward the end, my grandmother was falling apart in many ways but what ultimately did her in was cancer, so I decided to do immunological research on personalized cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. Even now, as I write this blog these connecting dots seem to so naturally connect with one another, and that is one of the reasons I wrote Whale Fall - as a reflective exercise into my own relationship with grief.
After working at a handful of laboratories, I decided that solitary research within concentric and increasingly more sterile environments wasn’t the best for my mental well-being. Looking back, I realize that this short-lived career was probably my unconscious way of isolating myself from the chaos of reality while feeling like I’m making a meaningful contribution to society. I needed a change, and my sincere passion for science and critical thinking lent itself well in educational contexts, so I volunteered at the Liberty Science Center on weekends. This was the biggest “mistake” I ever made, because I not only loved the chaotic environment of the science center, I specifically fell in love with the Aha! Moments I was able to inspire in large groups of children. While volunteering at the science center I was asked to roam the floors in a white lab coat and perform live experiments on the fly, this pilot program was called “Pocket Science.”
I’ve been talking a lot about my grandmother, but my grandfather is also a hero of mine. He lived a hard life and rather than turn his animosity inwards he channeled that passion into a love for magic! Yes, that’s right, my grandfather was a magician and a clown. My earliest memories of him were in his garage slumped over an electronics bench where he would devise unique electronic and slight of hand magic tricks that left groups of people in awe. He could pull cards from thin air and created an entire act from scratch where he was a “magic clown” named Carlini (his name was Carl — my middle name). He would stand several feet away from a basket that he placed provocatively at the feet of the audience. As he played his “magic flute,” an electronic snake would emerge from the basket with a card that one of the audience members selected minutes before. The crowd cheered, and I was his magic assistant. This experience made me very comfortable performing similar “tricks” in front of the audiences at the Science Center. I could explain how “cool” plutonic solids were while simultaneously making a dodecahedron using only balloons. I loved it.
MR. BAJOR — THE EDUCATOR
After a few months of volunteering, I decided to take education more seriously. So I quit my job at the laboratory and used my savings to fund the training and certifications I would need to engage with middle and high school classrooms. A year later I stepped into the school for the first time as an educator, it was a 6th grade class of rambunctious students in Elizabeth NJ. The previous teacher, my mentor, had to step out of the classroom to have invasive surgery done and she trusted me enough to finish instruction for the year. This was a turning point in my life, I loved building castles with 31 or so 12-year-olds and reading to them. We did algebra, meditated, wrote plays, and invented things based on their imagination.
It wasn’t always fun and games though, I quickly learned that these students led complex lives and from time to time a student would confide in me enough to tell me what was really going on in their lives. Abuse, depression, neglect, and trauma accented their stories, in ways that I felt when I was their age but could only now see. Sometimes we laughed, and other times we cried. Lunch breaks went out the window and instead I invited students to tell me what was on their mind. I saw this time as an opportunity to get to know my students and let my students get to know me in a way that would later make things like assessments and group projects seem trivial. My students usually excelled in their studies after having space to express themselves and this gave my instruction a nuance that allowed me to cut through any classroom management issues that generally tripped up my colleagues. Every now and then a veteran teacher would come and ask me, “how do you keep so and so under control?” to which I would usually reply, “I listen to so and so, did you know his/her mother passed away over Thanksgiving break?” “Oh my god, no! Did you get a note from his/her counselor?” “No, I asked him/her if they needed to talk, and they did.”
After a few years of teaching, I was given the opportunity to volunteer for an organization called “Comfort Zone Camp.” Which is a weekend camp intended to provide children who have experienced a loss, a chance to just be a kid. This mission immediately jumped out at me, and I signed up. A friend who works as a social worker recommended it, and she’s something of a cheerleader for the organization so without hesitation I packed my things and got ready for camp.
That weekend was beautiful and transformational for me. Not because it was “sad,” but because it was so… happy. One short weekend revealed to me, a deep, neglected thread in my own life. I listened to these brave, mature children at camp open up and bear their hearts in between ropes courses and trust falls. Going into the experience, I figured I could be some kind of adult shoulder to cry on, but what ended up happening was the reverse. I was floored.
Years later I still reflected on that transformational camp experience and decided that I had become a master deceiver of myself, that I kept my mind busy at the expense of my heart. I dug my teeth deep into difficult and complex challenges because it distracted me from more profound challenges raging within my own psyche. Every now and again I would watch a movie, read a book, or listen to a story and my thin veneer of stoicism would rupture like a balloon dodecahedron. I needed to tell people about this, there was no way I was alone in this regard. So I decided to write Whale Fall.
WHERE THE BOOK FITS IN
Originally, Whale Fall was intended to merely tell the story of a whale who posthumously provided relief to countless others in the dark, bleak depths of the North Atlantic Ocean. Mind you, I’m a biologist by trade, so I love telling these kinds of stories in a way that both highlights something beautiful about nature and metaphorically reveals something about ourselves. But, what I quickly realized was that this was my story. Each chapter focuses on a different stage of grief and does so through the struggles of an animal — an eel, a crab, a shrimp, and a clam. The chapters are only a few pages long, but each page speaks to a different permutation of the emotion they embody. In Chapter 3, Queen crab isn’t just an angry, mean crab — she’s also a symbol for how anger after a loss can mature and evolve into paranoia, rage, and isolation.
The book took me a little over a year to finish, all 48 pages have been carefully written, rewritten, edited, thrown out altogether, re-rewritten, etc. What was initially intended to be a relatively straight-forward project became an obsession. I hope that this story resonates with readers of all ages because grief and loss aren’t reserved for those who are ready for it. I lost my grandmother 8 years ago this fall, and it still feels like it happened yesterday. Whale Fall embodies a conversation I didn’t realize I started on that somber autumn morning, and only now am I engaged. Let’s have that conversation together, I’m ready to listen, and you aren’t alone.
Thank you so much for reading my very first blog post for Whale Fall! This is an ongoing journey and I would like to bring as many people as possible along for the ride. So, if you would like to follow along with this journey, or know someone who would — please like and share this article as wide as possible. I want every person going through what I’ve gone through to know they’re in good company.
♥ RB
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