Ngaio
Hard Puzzles Salutation
Ngaio was calm the way Christa the death doula was calm. Unhurried. Certain.
Your child is dead. You can put the kettle on now.
Christa’s final guidance for us: call KORU and ask for Ngaio. She’s a deathcare practitioner.
A what?
Ngaio Davis founded KORU Cremation, Burial, Ceremony as an alternative to corporate funeral practices — a sacred death-care facility rooted in her Māori heritage, carrying forward the rituals her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother had practiced.
Not the American way of death.
As a layman that day, it took me a minute to clock that we were in a funeral home — and Ngaio was a funeral director.
Within minutes of arriving, Ngaio asked if we would like to participate in the first ritual: to wash and clothe Cooper’s body in preparation for cremation.
All three of us — Susan, Mackenzie, and me — in unison:
You’re allowed to do that?
Ngaio: Yes.
We didn’t know you could wash your own dead.
We thought bodies disappeared into professional hands, became untouchable by family. We thought that was the way. The only way.
We didn’t know you could go with your person’s body to the crematorium, have a cremation ceremony — even push the button to close the crematory retort to fire the flame.
Ngaio showed us the old way. Her grandmothers’ way.
Without a word, the three of us looked at one another. We all knew the same thing: if one of us were in the morgue on the cooling board, Cooper would be here. With Ngaio. Planning this ritual.
He would wash and clothe Mackenzie’s body. He would wash and clothe his mother’s body. He would wash and clothe mine.
He would not delegate the final tending.
Not bravery. A willingness.
We drove away without answering.
But I think maybe all three of us already knew. And I wonder if Ngaio did too.
Two questions remained.
The first — the one Susan and I would offer to Mackenzie before anyone said yes out loud — was whether she wanted to perform this ritual alone.
A mother’s primal instinct. A father’s will.
Set aside.
For Cooper’s partner. For Mackenzie. For our daughter-in-spirit.
The second question sat underneath the first.
From the RCMP and the U.S. Consulate we knew:
The car was in “horrific” condition.
The first responders were “shaken”.
They barely recognized what was left as a car.
No one had said what condition Cooper’s body was in.
We drove away from KORU not knowing what we were walking toward.
Coda — May 26, 2026
Four weeks ago in the “Week Before He Died” coda, I named where I was. Falling asleep hoping not to wake up.
Not actively ideating — just tired in the way grief makes you tired when May comes around and the body knows what the body has known every May since 2022.
I told Bunn and Feeds. A signal flag hoisted up the pole, half-mast.
Mackenzie wrote back. The body keeps the score, she said.
I told Susan. I told Michael and Anna. Max and Leah. My dad. My sister. The text to Bunn and Feeds went out in full — no platitudes — and I asked the people who love me to know where I was, before I went any further into it.
That was the first practice. Not going dark on them as I went dark.
I got my blood drawn to investigate that bug bite from South Carolina’s Hunting Island. Turns out, the dark traveler was not, in fact, a tick.
I sat with the question of whether this was clinical depression — something a doctor could prescribe me out of. It wasn’t. I’m not on anything. I’m not in a program.
A son of mine is dead. I’m his father. May still comes around. That’s not a diagnosis. That’s a fact.
Turns out the American Psychiatric Association has a name for what I had this past month. Prolonged Grief Disorder. PGD.
They added it to the DSM — Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. DSM-5-TR in March 2022. The same month Cooper started running out of months.
To qualify, the death must have occurred at least twelve months ago. You must experience “intense longing or yearning for the deceased person” or “preoccupation with thoughts or memories of the lost person.”
The grief response must “exceed what is socially or culturally expected.” And it must cause “clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”
Reader, four years out from the violent death of my twenty-nine-year-old son, I yearn for him. I am preoccupied with thoughts and memories of him.
My grief response apparently exceeds what is socially or culturally expected in our dominant western culture.
And yeah — for more than a month, I was functionally impaired.
I guess I have PGD.
Cool beans — and fuck that.
Megan Devine wrote a book called It’s OK That You’re Not OK. We three found it within months of Coop’s death — and I keep returning to it.
Her grief premise is the opposite of the DSM’s. Whatever you’re feeling, now or in the future, is completely and utterly OK and normal. Whatever it is.
Grief isn’t a disorder. It’s love’s twin.
As best I could in May, I kept practicing.
Not emotions to manage. Not pathologies to medicate. Practices to carry.
I let grief’s rip current take me out to sea. Didn’t fight it. Didn’t pretend it wasn’t happening. Didn’t self-medicate.
A death doula I’d come to know had taught me years ago: don’t swim against the rip. You’ll drown, big guy.
So I let it sweep me out.
And then, at some point, I started swimming parallel to the beach.
Not against the current. Across it. The way you actually get out of a rip.
Some of the new neuroscience papers are arguing the body-keeps-the-score metaphor doesn’t hold up the way the bestseller suggested. The body isn’t a hard drive. Trauma isn’t lodged in muscle fiber like a splinter.
Sure. Maybe.
Tell that to my body, sleep-state, amygdala in May. Tell that to Mackenzie. Tell that to Susan.
The three of us have been living in three bodies for four years. Whatever the papers settle on, our bodies will keep doing what bodies do in May. Whatever it’s called.
I’m out of the rip.
(For now.)
Today.
Hard Puzzles: Kettle (edited)
Hard Puzzles: Longhouse
Hard Puzzles: Night Zero
Hard Puzzles: The Week Before He Died
Hard Puzzles: Wet Dreams and Periods
Hard Puzzles: Uplowsin