Ripple
At dawn or dusk along any number of lakes and rivers around the world, the water’s surface is pinged and dotted by a horde of mayflies. They hover there, moving up and down and left and right, circling, swooping, embracing to the hum of their own wings. It’s easy to think, watching them ripple between earth and sky without any sense of their own mortality, that they could understand life’s secrets.
What does it mean to exist?
Walking along the shore of a nearby lake, my hand on my belly, I wonder this.
The mayflies, though, do not. For one thing, they haven’t time. Some varieties live for a month and others for just a few days. The adult female form of the dolania americana, in fact, live for less than five minutes.
On my way home from that lake, I sit in my car at a turn signal, fiddling with the radio dial, checking my phone, and in that span of seconds, a creature has been born, tasted the air, flung herself into the wind, gaped at the setting sun, the smell of water and soil, how it feels to touch and be touched and give birth—all while in flight—and then died. I take my foot off the brake. I turn down a street I don’t know the name of.
Since turning four, my son’s nightly reading list consists mostly of nonfiction. One book he repeatedly requests is called How? Inside, we learn how long animals live on average in captivity. The rabbit: two years. The chicken: twelve. The dog and cat: thirteen and fourteen. The horse and lion: twenty-three. The elephant: sixty years.
In captivity, I think. On average.
I notice the book, a hand-me-down from my husband’s childhood, was published in 1985. I wonder: How have these numbers changed? I think about Pyewocket, the cat my parents rescued a decade before I was born, how at fifteen years old she stopped cleaning her long black fur—it matting and tangling along her thighs—and curled up under the window in my west-facing room and quietly surrendered. From my own bed, I watched her move between sleep and death.
What did it mean to her—this place? Those seasons?
My son’s book says that on average, whales live in captivity for fifty-five years. But—in captivity. I have heard of the bowhead, an often solitary whale, which has the longest lifespan of any living mammal on Earth. They are stocky, shadowy creatures, marked by an enormous mouth full of nine-foot baleen plates and by a massive triangular skull used to break through up to two feet of ice. They reside entirely in Arctic and sub-Arctic waters, and despite their valuable blubber and bones, despite being slow swimmers, their species has survived centuries of commercial hunting, survived the ice, survived the scale of being the biggest and most graceful animal in their line of sight. Some bowheads have been found with ivory spears still lodged in their flesh from failed attempts by whalers two centuries ago. One lived to be at least 211 years old.
In 1900, the average human lifespan was forty-seven years.
According to the book I read to my son, this number had increased to seventy-two.
In the three decades since the book’s publication, I find, this number has risen to seventy-nine, or eighty-one years for American women—me. The source I’m referencing does not say anything about captivity.
I imagine living two lifetimes. Instead of being one type of teenager, I choose to be another. Instead of going to college, I backpack through Australia. Instead of marrying, I find a remote island in Puget Sound and become a lighthouse caretaker, dedicating myself to the tides and the study of marine invertebrates. I read the books I never got around to reading.
When Pyewocket died, I was five. From that moment to this one—swimming lessons to first kiss to annual tax appointments—I will live that same set of seconds and minutes and hours again, just from different vantage points, if I’m average.
If I’m not average—well. Less time to read? More time to read? How do I determine the value of my remaining days? How do I decide on the parceling?
In 1997, Jeanne Calment, a French woman who enjoyed a robust youth and is quoted as having a particular love for chocolate, died in Arles, France, at 122 years of age. Her life is the longest human one ever recorded.
When I was twenty-two, I practiced teaching English during the day and rollerbladed with friends at night and rented my first solo apartment and kissed a number of men until one of them became the man I would marry. At the end of my twenty-second year, I knew bodily what it was to have the present moment be the only moment that mattered: in love. Which is to say I knew nothing of decades, nothing of the weight of all the moments I would later commit to until death, how impossible the resurrection of love would in some moments feel. Twenty-two was simultaneously the beginning and ending of each choice I made and might have otherwise made.
When Jeanne Calment was 100, what was she planning for? She had already experienced twoworld warsandthe deaths of her husband, her only child, and her only grandchild. As she looked out the window at dusk, what did she see of the rest of her life?
My maternal grandfather, a laundromat owner and volunteer firefighter whom I never met, died of a respiratory diseaseat sixty-five. My paternal grandfather, who loved golfing and strumming country songs on his guitar, died of pneumonia at eighty-two. My maternal grandmother, the funniest woman I knew, who once—the story goes—threw raw eggs against the basement wall in the midst of a roaring winter party just to see if the yolk would freeze mid-slide (it did)—died of dementia and Parkinson’s disease at ninety-two. Recently we celebrated my paternal grandmother’s ninetieth birthday; she still travels to warmer places in winter, grows a garden full of raspberries, and completes a nightly crossword puzzle. Her mother, a Czechoslovakian farm wife, died of a stroke at ninety.
I slid into this world on the same day of the same month that both of these last two women were born. When I turned thirteen, my grandmother gave me a thin gold necklace, adorned with a dangling opal pendant. Before it was hers, it had been her mother’s. As I accepted the gift, I envisioned first the smoothness of my grandmother’s teenage face, and next the hue of my great-grandmother’s cheeks when she felt the fingers of my great-grandfather clasping the chain at the base of her neck.
For more than 8,000 days since it first rested on my chest, this small opal—flecks of green and blue and pink snapping and jumping when held to the tipping light, much like those mayflies—has linked my existence to theirs.
And I think, when I press the stone against my skin, that I will live a long time.
Geneticists say that, in regard to lifespan, it is highly likely the human race has reached our ceiling. Besides outliers like Calment, we will never grow older than 115.
But some disagree. In support of the growing number of influential thinkers who believe, with the right technology, that we can as a species live longer, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are investing billions in longevity or “healthspan” research. One prominent researcher is Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist who studies strategies for engineered negligible senescence—the condition or process of deterioration with age—and he has argued in books and at conferences across the world that aging, like dementia or cancer, is a treatable disease. That we can—through advanced science and altered attitudes about the benefits of a longer lifespan—cure ourselves, and if not stop the aging process, then significantly slow it down. In 2008, he controversially claimed that “the first human [who would] live 1,000 years was probably already alive.”
What if it’s me?
My skin is supple and soft. When I pinch it, little hillocks arise, and at my finger’s release, they go back to flat. I imagine myself, 998 years old, skin like coconut flakes, staring watery-eyed and knowing into the winds of a millennium.
What is age when compared to forever?
In Japan, a man named Shin Kubota has committed his career to studying jellyfish, not only because he loves them (he does), but also because he believes a particular species, the Turritopsis dohrnii, holds the secret to eternal life. Through a process called transdifferentiation, when put under significant stress or certain death, this jellyfish transforms all of its existing cells into its youngest polyp state, where it is then able to asexually reproduce, breeding hundreds of cloned offspring, effectively starting its life over.
The immortal jellyfish, they call it.
“[It] is the most miraculous species in the entire animal kingdom,” Kubota said in a 2012 New York Times Magazine article. “Once we determine how the jellyfish rejuvenates itself, we should achieve very great things. My opinion is that we will evolve and become immortal ourselves.”
The waters around the world where these jellyfish swim, the blues and the greens and the black currents of night—is any of it still the same water as a million years ago? If 60 percent of my body is water, if we begin as water—if it is to water we return—I suspect the existence of a recycled life: the water that makes up my body made up other bodies before me. It circulates.
And what does that mean, actually—to live? To exist? Isn’t it true that those two states of being are not the same?
I have many questions.
While our son sleeps, my husband and I talk through the dark hours. He tells me about glancing out his office window, seeing the wind move through the still bare branches of the early spring trees. He says that in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon that day, he felt moved observing that side-to-side motion, somehow stirred. And this brings me back to the mayflies. To moments of existence, no matter how fleeting, where life is abundant simply because it is life.
Where it is not a matter of interrogation.
“I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night air,” Walt Whitman wrote, after fleeing an astronomy lecture full of proofs and charts and measurements, “and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
If I’m average, in about seven days from now—2,016 sets of five minutes—I will close my eyes, I will focus my breath on a repeating image that came to me with my first born—a ripple of water contracting and expanding—and I will deliver my daughter into an infant or ancient world, depending on how she comes to see it, how she chooses to experience it—short or long, proof or puzzle.
How she inhabits her one wild and precious life.
I’ve been told that already she holds inside her seven-pound wiggling body all the eggs she will ever have, all the lives she is capable of bringing into being. All the choices and possibilities are already there, ripples on the water flowing out.
Ripple was previously published in Lumina.
Emily Brisse’s essays have appeared in publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction’s True Story, Ninth Letter, and december magazine. Her work has been shortlisted for the Curt Johnson Prose Award, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and awarded a Minnesota Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. She teaches high school English in Minneapolis.
