Fitness: How the Climate Killed My Children

A wildfire rages out of control in Australia's Orroral Valley, January 2020. Nick-D, Wikimedia Commons

My grandfather shot himself in the head with a handgun. He’d been an addict for years: booze, cigarettes, and, finally pills, but it was the cancer sticks that got him. Lung cancer you can’t come back from. Emphysema. The former was terminal, and the latter made him miserable. He took matters into his own hands.

He had five grandchildren. I’m the only one he mentioned in his suicide note. I’m the only remaining male Osmundson. I have a sister.

“Make sure Joseph,” he wrote, “carries on the family name.”

I only met him twice, and the first time I was too young to remember. Still, I can picture his face and cheap leisure suit, see him folding his final note into three, placing it in an envelope, placing that envelope on a desk, then walking to his bedroom, putting the gun to his head. There was no blood on the letter he wrote to his son, and, through his son, my father, to me.

I first dreamed of my own pregnant body at nine. I saw it, side on, in a mirror. Picture me as I saw myself in my sleep: I was a nine-year-old kid stretched vertically by age, and out at my belly by the thing I held inside. I saw myself at eight-and-a-half months, stopping midway up the stairs to catch my breath, hungry for everything, but especially pickles and ice cream together.

I was a little cisgender boy.

My mother taught Lamaze classes. They started shortly after work hours, and my dad couldn’t make it home from work for a seamless child hand-off. By then, my sister had her after-school program. Too poor for a baby sitter, I had to accompanied my mom. I was her teacher’s assistant, a job I thought real, and that I thought conferred some amount of importance and authority.

Pregnant people came to the class, and—over the weeks—their bellies grew. Women came mostly with their husbands, but we used the word “partner,” which didn’t mean anything about the relationship of the two people. A pregnant person’s partner might be a lover or sister or friend.

When their partners couldn’t make it, I played the part. I sat on the floor in the overheated portable classroom in the hospital parking lot. A good partner, I breathed along with the pregnant people, making sure they didn’t speed up too much, holding their breath steady.

“Just focus on the pattern of the breath,” my mom said gently, moving around the room, the only body standing, the rest of us couples on mats on the floor.

“Hee hee hee hoooooooeeeeeee,” I said to a woman, with a woman, rubbing her back in slow, counter-clockwise circles.

“You’re doing so good,” I said, my pre-pubescent voice genderless, high.

“Breathe out now, one, two, threeeeeeeeeee.”

The exercise over, I squeezed her hand one final time, signaling the completion of something. In my waking hours, I knew my body wouldn’t go through this change. I knew myself incapable of incubating a human life this way.

If I couldn’t be pregnant, I could be the next