Exploring Life Through Death: A Review of Double Negative
To say that Claudia Putnam’s Double Negative is about the death of her son dismisses that the bulk of the book’s focus is on life. She explores the nature of life in general while remembering her son’s life and the small space between its beginning and its end. But Putnam does not flinch from the reality of his death. “Jacob died of a broken heart. He died in agony. He drowned in fluid backed up in his lungs.” Putnam’s clear and muscular prose echoes the lyrical concision of her poetry.
It has been observed that the deeper we go into the personal—the inner workings of our psyche—the more universal our story becomes. As Putnam explores her grief in this chapbook, she bares the inner workings of her mind, her struggles with bipolar disorder, and her still-living son’s depression as he was growing up. I should say here that I have never lost a child. This is not through any great achievement on my part. All three of my children have had near misses. As in Putnam’s family, mental illness is one of the genetic gifts imparted from one or both sides of our family. I find some solace in the knowledge that among those inheritances braided into the chain of our DNA are strength, resilience, and creativity—endowments that so far have sustained us. In Double Negative, I walked beside Putnam as she strives to make sense of something that is impossible to understand and found myself identifying at a level I would not have expected.
Jacob’s “broken heart” is a metaphor for what Putnam sees as a kind of betrayal. She could not keep her infant alive. She could not keep him warm. Putnam writes, “In every grief memoir written by a mother you will find this: the obsession with the lost child’s terrific cold.” She could not guide him to fulfillment of the potential she sensed when he was in utero because his broken heart was also literal. Thirty years ago, Jacob was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. His left ventricle had not fully developed. At that time, the only medical option would have doomed him to a lifetime of painful surgeries, “heroic” efforts that may not have saved his life. Instead, his parents chose to love him every moment of his natural life, a decision they knew would result in his very early death. It was a choice between two terrible realities, a double negative: “Negative against negative and despite the mathematical and grammatical laws, no positive outcomes.”
Putnam dives fearlessly into the fullness of grief with her eyes wide open. She shares her dreams both literally and figuratively for Jacob and her later son, Julian, explaining that they were so different in the womb that she imagined her second may have been a girl. Julian is sensitive, a musician who loves beauty and visibly cringes when he sees its destruction, someone “with an affinity with both his feminine and masculine sides.” Jacob, on the other hand, felt to her like a “prophet . . . someone with a hard energy, driven.” With every ounce of strength in his tiny body, he raged against his failing organs, fixing his parents with precociously focused eyes. “All parents think their kids are special,” she says, “but I assure you, he really was.”
The decision that Putnam and her husband made, to allow Jacob to die, began her lifelong study of the meaning of life and death. She questions her decision and her motives. What is a soul? Where does it come from? She explores the science of near- or after-death experiences, of rituals that may have more meaning for those passing than those left behind. Putnam shares experiences that could be interpreted as a grieving mother’s grasp for connection with her dead child. Is it better, she wonders, to be open to something that may not exist or to deny its possibility and miss a message from Jacob in the afterlife?
Putnam explores infinity, explaining that it stretches in both negative and positive directions on the number line. “If there’s a beforehere, and I’m convinced of that, an afterhere seems possible.” Her son always was and always will be. He never was not. “Surely our short time on earth, that narrow area on the graph between negative and positive infinity, can’t be something to cling to. Three days, thirty years, three hundred years—these lifespans are the same in the face of eternity.”
There are horrors in these musings. Putnam considers black holes, where time slows and bends as it nears the event horizon. While their son’s death lasted only for a moment, she imagines that single moment, the excruciating pain of drowning in his own blood, may have stretched out for an eternity for Jacob.
Putnam was in her early twenties when Jacob died. She and her husband had not experienced death before. They didn’t have a faith community in place to ritualize or contextualize the experience. There were times when I wondered if navigating this ocean of grief alone may have been a strange blessing. It allowed Putnam to explore the depths of her grief through her own uniquely brilliant mind, to search for her own meaning without the centuries of accumulated attempts to explain the unexplainable or the religious doctrines that may ultimately trivialize death, as if a certain prayer or ritual could magically heal a mortal wound.
If, in this lifetime, we all must come to terms with death, then Putnam’s journey belongs to us all.