The Pomegranate, Dissected. Your Own Broke-Open Heart.

Persephone, down below, is thirsty. Hungry. There was a bustle and a frothing and a taking of everything from her body but now there is nothing. Nothing. Nothing there. There was a sound when she was discarded here. It was her body hitting stone. The Underworld Keepers have taken from her everything she owns. She knows she is alone.

But where is this Underworld? This below-place to which Hades has pulled her?

Is it the afterworld, the land of souls? It is, we have been told. And yet is it just that, if someone breathing and full of life can go and once there remain at least a remnant of themselves?

Is it simply the down-below of the Earth? Beneath the worms and seeds and flower roots, where only grubs and fungi go? Where it’s damp and dank and the suffocation is all the more confusing because it smells fecund?

Or it is womblike? Has she been plunged, somehow, into the iron-rich blood of Mammalia, into the stream of the biological imperative, and into the center of the cellular thrum that is the body?

Or is it traveling alone in a sandstorm, a wide-open expanse of bone and windblow.

I don’t know. When I went to the Underworld (heralded by the doctor who told me: Yes, it is cancer), the dungeon into which I was flung felt, I don’t know, traditional, really. It was a stone-cold floor, damp and riveted with cold sweat, and I lay on it, naked, shivering. I watched the bugs crawl down the wall.

I can imagine that if I, like Persephone, would have seen, had been offered, a pomegranate seed, I might have focused all my strength upon it. My one eye might have met its eye, and we would have stared each other down.

Maybe my tongue would have eventually found its way out of my mouth, poking toward it like a lizard’s, moving slow-fast across the air until it found it, snapped it up like a toad with a fly, and pulled it into my mouth.

But I wasn’t where any pomegranates were being offered. I was in a stark white hospital room, beneath a labyrinth of tubes.

I remember when my mother first introduced me to the pomegranate. She was a young, beautiful hippie girl. We were sitting somewhere in the sun. Our little apartment kitchen table, or the little patch of shared space grass beyond the building’s front steps.

She first gave it to me to feel. I remember she remarked on the leathery skin, the color, its fibrous umbilical cord. I could see that she was pleased. The joy of new motherhood—introducing your little person to the surprise delights of the world, all its small magics. Then she said, I wonder what it looks like inside? She, the magician, I the audience member brought up (special, so special) to join her on stage.

I shrugged. She had me close my eyes. Then with a pocketknife, she pierced the skin, dragged it down the seam, and once it was split down the middle she pulled it apart with her hands.

Like the conch on the record player that, when blown into, produced a forlorn sound, this was a completely natural item that made me feel so glad to be here, on the earth, in a body, the very form with which it is best to experience them.

Plump ruby pods. In catacombs. Mounded and presented and the perfect combination of entrapped and begging to be wiggled free.

She handed me a section. I toothed a ruby out. Moved it onto my tongue. Pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth and held the button there. Rubbed my tongue along the membrane, sensation but no flavor, just the barest scent of root.

And then, a bite. It star-rayed across my mouth. It’s vinegar berry tartness a confusion, a near delight. It tasted, even then, like the desert to me. It’s a uterus in an ancient woman, a 700-year-old wife finally granted a baby, the making of whom requires from the land every single pond and river, every single drop of blood.

A pomegranate tricks you. It lets you think you are in charge. But you are not eating it. It is feeding you. There is a difference. And it is also providing you a resonance. A connection to all who came before you.

When Demeter lost Persephone to Hades and his Underworld, she rent her garments, she tore her hair. She shut down the whole goddamn ecosystem. There will be, she proclaimed, no life in the above world if my daughter is no longer here.

My mother did that. When she learned her daughter might die.

And while everyone else would say to me, I’m sure you’re going to make it, You’ll beat this thing, You look great, You’re strong, my mother looked at me, over and over, and also on the phone, and sighed and said, I don’t know if you’re going to make it. I don’t know. I just don’t know. (Did I mention she’s psychic, and had, months before I was diagnosed, looked at me and said: There is something wrong with you. It’s in your stomach.)

I was sick in the hospital. So sick. Stock still sick. Here’s why. I had gotten a port put into my chest to make it easier to do chemotherapy. But the tube from the port had poked my lung, which had promptly and unceremoniously collapsed, which caused me to have to be intubated and to lay 100 percent completely still on my back.

I, like Persephone, am not a fan of sleep.

So even though the nurses shot me through with morphine, and gave me Ambien to boot, I stayed wide awake, immobilized, all night.

I felt like I wanted to die.

I felt like I might die.

I felt like maybe I already was dead and yet not quite.

I knew, because I had two children, and a husband, and a father and a mother, that I could not die, if at all possible.

but I didn’t feel alive.

I felt suspended. Entombed. I felt like a worm stuck on a biology student’s cardboard with a pin.

All I was able to move was one single finger, which I used to press repeat on a youtube piece by Kishori Amonkar, the famous mid-century singer of Indian ragas. A singer I had long loved, but who now, in my state of utter despair, became my pomegranate seed. She sang to me. I drank from her.

Persephone. Something catches her eye. A glint, the moon silvered light on a kernel of the ruby fruit. She is so hungry, so thirsty, so mute.

She takes it on her tongue and, like the raga, she is moved. There is something else alive in this godforsaken place. Something lovely, if you can believe that. A lifeline.

How has this found her here? It’s as though it were made for her, was sent to her, from the beyond, to remind her who she is. To remind us who we are.

Which is, at the moment, stuck in bodies. And sometimes forced to go into the Underworld. We don’t want to go. But we have to.

The story goes that because Persephone tasted of a single pomegranate seed when she was down below, she became beholden to Hades and his Underworld. I guess the idea is that had she resisted this one pleasure she could have perhaps gotten away forever. But wouldn’t that have meant her death, not her return to life? Because to return to life once you’ve been to the Underworld is to always know it’s there.

And to know what you discovered there. That even there you are still you, can still know the momentary sensory connection of a tart plump seed on the tongue, or of a song vibrating its way through your ears and down your windpipe, into your lungs and heart.

A human life: What we have been through. What wastelands of loss we come to know. And yet, also, what we have cut open, tasted, pulled apart. How these balance one another out. The pomegranate, dissected. Your own broke-open heart.