I roamed with my pack of school friends, usually filthy from morning to night, and every second evening we were given a bath. The bathroom was a sparse empty stone room with open drains in the floor and a tap to one side.
—Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
How I Bathed My Father
I don’t remember the first time, or the last. Much of the final weeks of his life registers only as images. A stark tub, glinting tile. Light. Hospice chair in a white bath. My father’s body curling forward, like the early stage of a frond – the name for which, I have learned since, is fiddlehead. He coiled like a fiddlehead. Chin tucked, hands hidden beneath naked thighs. Early onset late stage: a body dying at thirty-nine. I was thirteen.
I’m forty-one now, and I pass my fingers under the fronds of maidenhair in the garden. Their tendrils unwinding in the rocky soil of the Hudson Valley. I used to think my preoccupation with ferns began years ago, when I first visited the fern room at Chicago’s Garfield Conservatory. Feathered palms of tall cycads winged in the light. One of the earth’s most ancient plants, to an eye trained on high plains, looked something like a tropical palm. Some of the cycads were over three-hundred years old. Water slapped stone. A sound like clapping echoed under a sky of paned glass. The air thick, sultry. Textures of green undulated from the walls. The space was designed to reimagine the lagoons of prehistoric Chicago. To step into the fern room was an invitation to walk back in time.
At the conservatory, you were encouraged to lift the fronds of the more audacious ferns and seek out those under dark canopy. To turn the feathery pinnae and find rows of round spore-releasing beads called sori. Species distinction begins here, but I was struck by the fabric of the fern, its soft structure. Gentle in my hand. Such tenderness for a species that survived the ice age.
I thought this was my initiation into ferns. Only later, only now, do I wonder if my fixation began much earlier, the humid air of the conservatory opening my skin as memory disguised. Finger-like blades spread from their stone outcroppings. The warmth in my throat like the air above a steaming bath.
When water raced down my father’s head, he unfurled, his eyes turned to the canned light above him: I’ve written about this before. The first time was the most terrifying. Could I face the memory of my father’s bare body. Listen to water hit the tub’s ceramic floor. See my father’s blood in brown ribbons at the drain. Find my own hands again on his soft back.
My sister was there, too. She, younger than I, reached into the water’s gush with a small plastic container. It was she who washed our father’s hair.
“Seeing,” John Berger writes, “comes before words.”
Remembering the images, it turned out, was not the worst part. It was overcoming the resistance to the memory, confronting the pre-language pain so that I could conjure what I had seen as a child. For almost three decades, I flinched at the knowledge of bathing my father, throttled by fear that I would remember the moment with the same despair in which I first experienced it.
His disease had transformed him into a patient. What had his nakedness made me?
A child bends at the lip of a tub, her arms stretch toward a grown man’s bare back. Another child reaches for the flow of water. The man’s body slumps in a steel-legged chair. Water does not fill the tub but drains. The setting stark. The children’s clothed bodies press against the side of the tub’s exterior as they lean to wash the man, a task which, as evidenced by the stretching, reaching, and awkward angles of their bodies, physically strains them. Even in his demure posture, the man is taller than the girls.
We are not used to seeing children this way. The family roles are inverted: the adult is naked, the children dressed. The girls wear shorts, cotton shirts. Casual domesticity, late 20th century. Summer. The largesse of the bathroom exacerbates the economic comfort and absence of other adults, particularly of a mother. As memoirist, I can tell you where she is, but that would divert from the image which presents the more uncomfortable fact: no one in this picture expects another adult to appear. The girls focus on the task at hand, not over their shoulders. A woman’s razor and bottles of floral-scented shampoo and conditioner line the tub, but there is no anticipation that their user will intervene. In this image of the nuclear family, no help is on the way. The role of caretaker has fallen to the daughters, and along with the responsibility, its normalization. Illness has changed the children into nurses, the man’s wet slick skin altered their clothing into home health aide uniforms.
Yet, the transformation is incomplete. This liminality destabilizes the image, making it ambiguous, uncomfortable. The children are nurses yet still children. The man’s hanging head suggests mourning or shame. The smallness of the girls is inescapable – their short fingers in his hair. He is their patient but also their father.
The image is not only an image, but also a memory. My memory.
My father is nude, in the sense that my words have put him on display, clothing him in his nakedness. Perhaps this is what I’m attempting to do each time I write about bathing this man: give him a disguise, even if his costume is his dying body. Perhaps I am trying to dress him.
But he is also naked, as I cannot forget the nude man is my father. Was my father. And I never called him father. I called him Dad. He called me Kate.
In the course of re-reading this, I can, in a glance, go from being the woman who wrote these sentences to the woman who lived them.
Yet, the image returns to me, full of possibility: two girls bathe a sick man.
I soothed myself back then, bending at the tub, by imagining one day I would be older and thus far removed. I could try to forget bathing my father. The shower curtain pulled open – close it. Never speak of this. I used to have a process where I counted ahead by years, projecting into the future, a means of a cathartic distancing – Someday this moment will be a year ago, then two years ago, then ten. I saw myself stepping along the linear timeline of my life, the movement an amnesiac.
Twenty-seven years pass and I am in the Städel Museum standing before the empty white bed in Degas’s painting “The Nurse.” We are invited to look through a doorway toward a woman cloaked in brown. The contour of her brow lit perhaps by a window. She seems to warm or hug herself; her limbs are concealed in the folds of a blanket. The moment anticipates a before or after: perhaps she awaits her patient, or she has just finished. A vortex of bright orange strokes appears at the corner of the doorway.
In my notebook, I comment on the archetype of the nurse. The transitional orange space by the bed doubles as a point of transformation: across the span of a life, one will shift from patient to nurse to patient again.
When I gave birth to my son, I labored twenty-four hours, the low intensifying ache making me think of my father. I wondered how it would be to feel such pain knowing it would end not with life, but death. I was crying when my nurse, making her routine check, adjusted the pillow under my shoulders and said, “This is not a trauma.”
She, Sonia, had reached the end of her shift when my contractions finally condensed to give up my child.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Sonia. “It has to be you.” She stayed.
Grasping my hand, her voice at my ear, she told me to channel every sound, every sensation, into a path centered down my body. Push and count backwards from ten. When my son’s body met air, he was passed along a chain of hands that ended with the same hands that helped my father dress for his last living days. And the hands that hold this pen touched the warm skin of his back. They pry the fiddlehead. They wrapped a towel around his shoulders. They write this sentence. They reached for the first touch of my son’s body. They turn the handles of the faucet and stop the streaming water.
How I Bathed My Sisters
We crowded the tub, our kid bodies. Someone’s bent knees pressed against my back. My knees folded against my chest.
Turns at bowing our heads beneath the miracle of rivers from the American West streaming down our necks. Sloshing water with the jostling past one another. Wet hair hanging in curtains across our backs. Who bathes whom? I am the oldest of three daughters. My role is to pay attention. To bathe my sisters is to keep them alive. I will remember the sound of our mother’s knuckles on the pine bathroom door like four hard stones striking in unison. The sound of summer thunder beyond the bathroom window purred. The water like waves in a storm as we each stood, cloudy with our skin, dirt, oil. An echo of embryonic fluid. Our bodies pink, chilled by the air.
Let me be specific: there is one of my sisters, whose name begins with K, shaking water from her limbs. There is another sister, whose name also begins with K, flush-cheeked. Here I am, Kate: seven-years-old, fighting a comb through my hair. Here, my sisters’ grand plea for the brush.
There is a hundred-year plan for the remaining water in Lubbock, Texas, where we are from. The place is too dry for ferns, which need moisture to reproduce. The region’s natural sources dried up a long time ago, and now the rivers and reservoirs from which the water comes will eventually demise. Sooner than we thought, we will be asking, remember the water we bathed in? Remember how it came rushing, almost painfully, into these hands?
How I Bathed a Lover
A yellow house surrounded by three-thousand acres of cotton. Support bars in the shower for the woman who died in the house before I moved in. Sulfur in the steam from well water. Droplets gathering on Michael’s eyelashes. Wet kiss. We wash our smell from one another. I trade places under the showerhead. He takes hold of my hips. The stability bar convenient, necessary. Water lands on the back of my neck, the weight of it. Streams at the corners of my mouth.
I met my friend Dave behind an enormous fern on the porch of William Faulkner’s house. The only thing visible was the medallion of one of his brown brogues.
I fucked a man once at William Faulkner’s house, another friend once told me. My story of the fern encounter is not as salacious. I and the poet, for of course Dave was one, sat on one of William Faulkner’s couches, leaving only to refill our wine glasses, and talked about our fathers. Or rather, being fatherless. A few years later, when introducing him to the son I had with Michael, I asked Dave about his first memory.
“Trying to escape my crib,” he said. Over the course of the same conversation, my baby sucking on a toy ring, Dave told me about the time when, after he’d finished mowing the lawn at his home in Cleveland, he walked inside and smelled his father. His father had, by that point, been deceased many years. The scent of his father stunned Dave before he realized it was his own body he smelled.
Writing about this now, I texted him, asking if he felt grief.
“It was something stranger,” he wrote. “Both profoundly strange in realizing I was smelling me but also like a bit of presence. Not quite a visitation, but a remnant or a residue.”
How I Bathed Myself
Years of habit, this singular private act. Yet, almost no images.
Hands in running water, palms filled with soap. Glance of thigh. Nipple. Darkness of eyelids. Privacy. Absolute privacy. Now towel. Now rush. Now mirror. But where is a full memory of bathing my body?
Perhaps this privacy was a gift. The solace of inattention.
“A woman is almost continually accompanied by an image of herself,” John Berger writes. “From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” Berger is speaking specifically about women’s bodies represented in visual art. When I read these lines in his Ways of Seeing, I felt the constraint that comes with this unrelenting objectification.
Perhaps the bath had become a space where I’d unconsciously found refuge from watching myself. Taking its sanctuary for granted would be inherent to the catharsis. My friends Kim and Vicki, when reading a draft of this essay, remarked that there could be some relief at enjoying the space of a bath with no accompanying image of myself, a fair point. But a part of me didn’t feel relief. Had I been so conditioned by watching my body being watched that I could not see, or did not bother to see, myself unless someone else was looking?
The absence of the image filled me with a strange grief. Perhaps even this grief was an internalization of objectification. This possibility troubled me, too.
In Berger’s critique, the one looking, the protagonist, is a man. But this role can be appropriated. In her poem “Object/Subject 2: Looker,” poet Kathryn Cowles describes the skill particular to people who are used to watching themselves being watched: “you walk down a street and see / not the street ahead but yourself / walking down the street.”
Neck deep in writing this essay, a part of me wanted to seize agency, to intervene, in my own scene of bathing. To act upon the present in a way that I cannot act upon the past. I made a plan. I would create images of how I bathed my body.
I ask my partner Michael to photograph me bathing. The process, I reasoned, could be an explicit acknowledgement of the woman’s accompanied image of herself. An externalization of the internalized two-placed vision Kathryn Cowles describes: “Girls watch people watch them and so/can picture themselves from away / two-placed. / This is a kind of art.”
Having Michael photograph me, I anticipated, would perhaps not feel so different from when I am walking down the street, or sitting in a coffee shop, or living my life in view. But I would appropriate the role of the one seeing.
I marked five places from which Michael would take photographs in our small upstairs bathroom. Once the shoot began, we would not speak.
As evidenced by this planning, I felt the need to control the process. Part of the necessity was born of the focus the project demanded. But my desire for control also emerged from a quaking, emotional response I experienced at the prospect of the photoshoot. The sensations were physical, a trembling and muscular clench that could produce the risk of guttural and inexplicable tears. These physical responses, expressions of fear, excitement, grief, perhaps shame, intrigued me most. The effects were acute, but I couldn’t uproot cause.
So, choreography, preparation. Blue duct tape for blocking the bathroom in five places.
Afterward: Days loomed with a catalog of images on my phone. I didn’t look at them but for a scandalizing flash of thumbnails that appeared when I opened my photos app to fetch something like the screenshot of the department printer code.
In anticipation of studying the photos, emotion housed physically as the threat of a good cry. I had before myself this task: an attempt to see my body as an image. To let the image surprise me. Perhaps with a memory. Perhaps with a form. Could the images become meaningful?
The project I could articulate; the source of grief remained hidden.
I am surprised by what I notice first: the bright blue spots of tape on the bathroom floor. One on the closed toilet lid. A synthetic, acerbic, interrupting blue comically artificial amidst the stone grays of the bathroom. The tape is loud in the muted space, calling attention to each of the five blocked spots. These markings mar the photos – and I am delighted by their blemishing effect. Adhesive reveals the seams, shows the staging and planning. The blue tape is a reminder that the woman in the images is both subject and protagonist. I asked for these photos, and I directed the shoot.
The sputtering water looks beautiful; in this way, the image matches my memory of it. For I was struck upon entering the bath by the chain of light falling from the faucet.
In what will become my favorite image, there is no clear subject. The faucet appears in the left third, a fragment of knees and face in the right third, light and bathroom tile in the center with no invitation to focus, to narrate. The water blurred by motion. The woman is absorbed in watching the water, in the heat of the bath. Her face has become relaxed.
Warm skin tones against the cool hues of a hard tub; curved lines of back and hair in contrast to the sharp angles of blue tiles. In some photos, her shadow appears on the wall: a woman’s accompanying image.
The images are wonderfully banal. I am reminded of what John Berger describes as the “marvelous simplicity” of the bare body: these arms, breasts, folds in the stomach, slope of shoulders, hands running a loofah over thighs and ribs. A good useful form.
One photo stands out from the rest. In it, I lean forward at my hips, legs crossed. Left hand pressed to the space around my eyes. I remember feeling, at this moment, muscles softening, heat soothing skin, body’s pleasure in the water, and simultaneously the intensity created by watching myself being watched by the camera, the presence of Michael, the premise of my project. I recalled bathing with my sisters. The crowded tub. All the physical sensations combined with feeling exposed and psychologically vulnerable found some release in my briefly crying. But in the photograph, only my hand expresses the complexity. My fingers spread across the spaces surrounding my eyes and temples and press. Although there are photos which contain more overt nudity, it is this photo which brings to mind Berger’s “naked is the self exposed.”
I suppose someone could potentially misrecognize this image as portraying my discomfort with the project. Or perhaps it might appear as documentation of an emotionally charged moment. But what compels me is that this image is the result of a process that produced the conditions which invited the emotions it captured. What I am seeing is a woman engaging in the work of seeing herself. I see in the muscles of her hand a response to this seeing – her fingers hold her head; her eyes are shut; her hands will write what her eyes will see later. Fingers press at places of tension and relief.
A consistent shape emerges: knees folded to chest. Head in a slight bow as if reading. This steadying posture. It is the pose in which I bathed with my sisters. A row of folded bodies in the tub. Folded girls. In the photos of my body, hands cup knees. I see in the images of my knees folded against my chest a kind of embrace. I am holding my body.
I think again of Degas’s “The Nurse.” She is waiting for her next patient; the fragment of a clean white bed rests in the foreground of the painting. Degas’s work with ambiguity is more prevalent in his pastels and monotypes. In “Bather Stepping into a Tub,” for instance, an undressed woman lunges into a large copper basin, mid-step, awkward, her back turned to us, her head hunched, as though startled or deeply absorbed in her task. The pastel, beautiful in its warm hues, is also unsettling. It refuses traditional conventions of the nude – the bather does not turn coquettishly to greet the viewer. Degas obscures the identity and class station of the bather; the piece is thus vexed with 19th Century anxieties about female sexual promiscuity and porous boundaries of deviance. “The viewer was unable to tell who exactly the depicted woman was,” writes art historian Eunice Lipton, “And, therefore, who he was.” But the narrative in Degas’s “The Nurse” is much clearer. The bed is made, and her next patient is you.
I see now what my memory has not yet seen: the temporary station of holding my body. I tell Michael that I think the grief I’d felt was anticipatory. “Or an acknowledgement,” he says, “of the presence of something you have now that you will not have.”
The non-event of having a body.
The writing has outpaced the remembering.
I have written my way ahead, before it is time to remember what it was like to bathe my own body.
How I Bathed My Son
A whale swallows him. His pink body fills the gray marine mammal imitation. Biblical Jonah, wayward prophet, so unhappy with his calling he attempted to flee it only to be gulped by a whale and from the dwelling of the beast’s gut, repent and accept his fate.
The Moby Smart Sling 3-Stage Tub is made of 100% polypropylene plastic. The trade-marked sling is smart not because it’s automated but because it’s marketed as ergonomic. With your hands, you can lock the sling into two different positions: higher and lower. In this way, the Moby Tub promises to “grow with baby,” through 3 stages: newborn, infant, sitter. The implication is obviously extended use, more for your money, and a gesture toward lightening the guilt – because the guilt does accumulate with the accumulation of plastic baby junk called essentials right at the data point where you’ve decided it’s okay to bring life onto this climate-doomed planet.
The Moby Tub sat on my bathroom floor, a block of rubber, the shape of a whale if I had drawn it. A foot without toes. My baby suspended in the mesh hammock, as though swallowed headfirst, smiling up at me. Belly an island.
He skipped from Stage 1, newborn, to Stage 3, sitter, not out of any precocious developmental leap but because the smart sling’s “higher” setting was a total pain in the ass to buckle in place. And the resulting ergonomics slid my son into a ball, his nose too close to the water.
I almost wrote: the Moby Smart Sling 3-Stage Tub stayed the same size as my son grew, which is factually true. But the tub appeared to shrink, an aesthetic counter-fact to its trademark promise to grow with my child. Obviously, there’s been no false advertising, just standard issue manufacturing grift. The tub appears to become smaller as my child’s legs expand into shapes that would make a baker weep. Water contours his eyelashes. See: head of red curls, white teeth. At the end of the bath, I wrap him in a towel and hold him until he’s dry. His head tucked under my chin. Below us, the tepid water in the gray whale reflects a square of light.
The Moby Tub will live three afterlives. First in memory, second in the landfill, third in the ocean, a kind of terrible ironic homecoming. After I donate it, the tub, passing through a few more families, will likely end up in a dump, where it will transfigure in a process called embrittlement. Exposed to weather, UV rays, and thermal damage, the whale tub will fragment from its macro-plastic form to micro, as though the appearance of shrinking had portended this outcome all along. It will follow something like 110,000 tons of plastic particles in an annual passage to coastal waters, where the Moby Tub will infiltrate the ecosystem of the remainder of its referents, baby humpback whales then, someday, experience a kind of inverted reincarnation toxifying the bloodstream of living creatures.
I was curious if the term embrittlement was unique to plastics. It turns out that it is. The word’s earliest usages appear at the turn of the 20th century in association with mining and manufacturing. To embrittle means to literally render brittle. Given its connotations with extraction and commodity, the definition has a direct implication: to become commercially valueless.
I can predict, with scientific backing, the fate of my son’s tub. I wanted to write here: I cannot predict the fate of my son’s life, but of course, I can. “We are born knowing our endings,” writes poet Victoria Chang. And we are born, I’ll add, resisting that ending, to the point of almost forgetting what we know.
But I know that it is better to be soft. My son, warming at my chest, already understands this. Perhaps he does yet not know that he knows it, his gentle body wrapped in a towel. Maybe, like my friend Dave, he will encounter the memory of this knowledge. Walk, one afternoon, into its visage.
My child is four-years-old now, I forty-one. He still likes to be held after a bath. We sit on the closed toilet next to the bathroom window. The window overlooks a garden where ferns persist in the shade of trees. I ask my son if he wants to get dressed. He is dry, but he says, “A few more minutes.”
Kathleen Blackburn (she/her) is the author of the memoir Loose of Earth (the University of Texas Press, 2024). Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Texas Observer, swamppink, Gulf Coast, Guernica and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and PhD from University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor at SUNY New Paltz.
