Longfin Inshore Squid: An Excerpt of The Mourner’s Bestiary

Longfin Inshore Squid
(Doryteuthis pealeii)

  
Dex and I were alone, 12 miles out to sea, nor’easter rolling in over the Gulf of Maine, in the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem. Dex was nine and I was 43 and I was supposed to be dead. On the night of the storm, we went to the Monhegan Island dock and met a boy who had just fished a small squid from the harbor waters. The boy had the squid in a bucket, waiting to send her back to sea once he was done staring at her. He scooped her from the seawater and held her out to us. She was a longfin squid, newly moved north to those warming waters. A small female subadult, she pulsated in his hand, nearly translucent, silvery white, red eyes, iridescent, her inner workings revealed—a slender bag of hydrostatic wonder and life, so different from us.

I was a single mother, diagnosed young with an incurable genetic kidney disease that killed most of my family before they reached 50. I was told I wouldn’t even make that. I didn’t know if Dex had inherited what I’d grown up calling the Caffall Curse. I was raised by the expendable ill alongside threatened sea creatures in collapsing oceans—tender beings caught in extinction. My whole family was like them, brave and chaotic, poisoned by things outside of their control. I inherited that as much as the disease. Deciding to have Dex, the last of our line, was an act of faith in our futures and bodies, in the world itself; but that faith was costing me.

On the drive to the island, we listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland. My traveling companion is nine years old/he is the child of my first marriage, we sang, the words completely true, as we drove Route 1, Southern Maine retreating, the Midcoast and the ferry ahead. We stood on the bow of the mail boat, wet from the swells on Muscongus Bay, watching a harbor porpoise pod and diving storm petrels. We saw, rising like a whale back, Monhegan, which all winter we called simply “The Island,” a narrow strip of land—three-quarters of a mile wide, one and three-quarters of a mile long, with almost 400 acres of protected wildlands—home to the tide pools and the shipwreck, home to our wonder and dread.

From the dock, we walked the dirt road over the hill, our feet kicking up the same dust as the other tourists. One of three pickup trucks that were allowed on the island delivered our bags to the hotel room. “Can we walk to Lobster Cove?” Dex asked as we changed to drier clothes. The next day we’d move to a cottage, the first one we’d ever rented there, the first time we’d been able to stay more than a few days. I’d worked extra jobs and extra hours to pay for it. I’d paid in advance before the work dried up and planned the research trip for months.

“I think so,” I said. “I’m pretty tired, kiddo.”

“We always go the first night.”

“You’re right, we do.”

“And then we can go to the dock, and then get a pizza.”

“Okay. But bring your slicker. The forecast says rain. Maybe a big storm.”

“I love it here when it storms.”

We took the road from our hotel up the hill to the trail to Lobster Cove, where a narrow single-track snaked from the domestic peace of cottages, down into a tunnel of young trees, emerging into a wide-open vista at the top of a bluff. From the bluff, the land below stretched out in magic-hour light, a broad apron of meadows meeting the sea. The rocky beach of Lobster Cove was full of high tide, black with gathered seaweed, stinking of salinity and marine rot. Beyond the inlet was the open ocean, unobstructed all the way to Spain. The rocky shoreline was bordered by scrub pine and laced with footpaths, a gray tumble of outcrops topped with the orange, oxidized metal of the wreck of the D. T. Sheridan, its broad lozenge of hull perched like a sentinel. We walked through it—labyrinth, prayer, memory—scrambling down to the tide pools. The tide was coming in; waves rolled up, pouring themselves into the pools, pulsing along their borders of sea wrack, dulse, and Irish moss.

“Don’t go too close, those waves are big.”

“I won’t.” Dex put his feet in the water.

“Careful of the barnacles.” I sat down on a boulder near the pool.

“I know, Mom.”

I was exhausted, my back sore, my ankle swollen with edema from the drive. The warmth of the rocks came through the seat of my jeans, warmed my skin, my bones, the new heaviness of my body. I fell asleep, waking as my chin hit my chest.

There was collapse in our family, my divorce still an open wound. There was collapse in the water; out beyond the harbor, the Gulf warmed in its benthic depths, losing animals, losing balance. There was collapse in me, invisible to the naked eye as the losses of the ocean. My illness was, by that afternoon at the tide pools, a generational project that went back for at least 150 years in my family. I was born in a flooding body, on a flooding planet, in a flooding family—a mourner, a drowner.

It took my father dying to convince me I could want something so dangerous—a child of my own, another one of us, the broken.

Polycystic kidney disease, PKD, the genetic illness I’d inherited, is a mutation—most commonly expressed in adulthood, though existing in a juvenile form—that causes fluid-filled cysts to multiply in the kidneys until they grow and swell, overwhelming all healthy tissue. Afflicted kidneys look as if they are sculpted out of rosy bubble wrap and can be enormous; the largest set of PKD kidneys ever recorded reached a total weight of 77 pounds. The illness can be painful, or it can be quiet. It can bring storms of brain aneurysms, killing the patient before they know they are sick, or start kidney failure so slow that their family is witness to a steady decline. There are forms of PKD—one of the most common genetic illnesses in the world—that linger, hesitating to express themselves in a carrier until that person’s 70s. But for most patients, the disease is invisible until it isn’t, waiting until a person is childbearing age to begin to flood the body, too much water, too many chemicals in the blood, slowly and relentlessly, a rising sea under the skin.

I have a friend who shares my disease. When she was diagnosed, her nephrologist told her each cyst operates as its own ecosystem, a tide pool—with specific pathogens and bacteria, unfiltered toxic sludge from the blood making each bubble its own world. Each body with PKD is its own ecosystem of water and consequences. Genetic illness echoes back and forth along the lines of time, along cells, along strands of DNA—a powerful whirlpool that can pull you down.

The nephrologist who diagnosed me told me only that I’d die young. My family, four generations into the disease, had given up on survival. I gave up on a safe future, became a single musician living in Chicago, spending my hours in bars with sticky floors covered in cigarette butts, watching music, ecstatic with the sound vibrating my ribs, chasing after feeling and transcendence in the body-high of late nights and voices braiding into my skin and leaving me breathless and less alone. I wanted my body to be something else—a channel for that feeling, an instrument of good until I couldn’t use it anymore. But even as I sang in rooms full of people, I hid from what had brought me there, language and song obscuring all the loss. Once I got a job with health insurance, I went to a nephrologist for the first time since I was diagnosed.

“Do you want kids?” Dr. K said.

“Yeah. I think I want kids. Eventually.”

“I know how to end PKD in one generation.” Dr. K smiled, raising one eyebrow.

“You do?”

“People like you should never have children.”

My father’s siblings had all made the decision not to have biological children, wanting the curse to end with them. My father thought he was free of the disease when I was born, the plague missing our house, learning only the next year that he had it too. My parents never had any more kids. I know people who wrestle with the question of whether or not to make new generations as the planet warms and collapses. The activists who work around ideas of reproduction and climate are clear—the fact that we ask ourselves whether it is safe to have children in the crisis of environmental collapse is the problem itself. We are told that our individual sacrifices are the last chance to end collapse. The Caffalls told themselves, as that nephrologist told me, that our individual sacrifices were the last chance to end generations of mourning. These are lies.

It is easy to tell people that their existence, need, joy, vulnerability, humanity is the driver of collapse. It is harder for the world to change to protect vulnerable lives, human and nonhuman. It takes believing that a life like mine matters, or the life of a plankter or a littleneck clam. It took my father dying to convince me I could want something so dangerous—a child of my own, another one of us, the broken. I married badly to make it happen. I put my health at risk.

“I think there are fewer periwinkles,” Dex said, holding up the shell of a snail for me to see.

“Any urchins this year?”

“Not yet. I’m going to see more snails.” He bent back over the pool.

Babylonian clay tablets exist that record in great detail the diseases of the kidney, some of which might be PKD. There is familiarity in the language of the neo-Assyrian doctor who wrote, “If a man suffers… and it strikes his kidney… that man is being pursued by the hand of a ghost.” Early clinicians of PKD called the cysts the teardrops of the kidneys—a mourner’s disease from the start.

“Come here, Mom, see these snails I found.” Dex beckoned me closer. I stood up and walked toward him.

Squatting next to the water, I touched the pile he’d collected, many beginning the long walk back to the pools from the dry rock where they suddenly found themselves. “That’s a lot.”

“But not as many as before.”

I was a mourner that night, kin to the broken ocean since birth, the daughter of a drowning man and a water scientist, one of a line of family obsessed with the sea and its creatures, mother to the same. We think we know mourning because we know grief. We think we know grief because we have been taught that it is a linear walk of five stages. But neither grief, the private cost of loss, nor mourning, its public cousin of practice and connection, are reducible to five stages, walked through in a straight line and completed. It is instead a spiral, where we come back to each stage again and again.

On the way to the island, as I drove us from Lake Michigan to Monhegan, Dex begged to hear his favorite audiobook, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, over and over again—Captain Nemo and his Nautilus on the car speakers. Mobilis in mobili, goes the bad Latin of Nemo’s motto—supposedly moving in a moving element, but more closely, moving in a moving thing, mobile in mobile. Like mourning, always moving, like water, changing all the time.

Dex handed me a snail in a pink-and-yellow swirling shell, and I wondered how I could hold on to all the stories of my body. The submarine in the novel was named for a Pacific Ocean mollusk, a creature swimming backward, seeing always where it started. The chambers of a nautilus are each built on the last, their structure a spiral order. That chambering was ancient, deep in the fossil record as a body plan—a survival plan. Mourning my well body, I was in the stages of grief. I wanted to walk each step in that promised straight line, walling them off as I went. But the whirlpool I had entered wasn’t a simple walk of five steps, completed and contained, but that spiral that brings the mourner through the stages over a lifetime.

The waters around us that night held squid—messengers of emotion, messengers of time running out.

I stared at Dex and his snails and the warming water. He was focused on fish just as I had been at his age. We’re making a bestiary, I thought, a list of fish that will teach me how to live.

When first popular in medieval Europe, bestiaries were moral teaching tools, spiritual instruction superimposed over the bodies of animals. They became the earliest encyclopedias, the first natural history manuals, explaining animals to people and people to themselves. They were safaris, truths, fictions, scriptural, folkloric. The unicorn was Christ, she was chastity. The whale was a mountain, an island, the enormity and surprise of the devil. I knew, sitting there on the hard rocks of the island, exhausted, in pain and isolated, that I needed the stories of water animals to understand the loss in my family and in the families of creatures in the water around us. What is the life of that snail, I wondered, beginning the first entry in my head.

“I should help these guys back into the pool,” Dex said.

“Want a hand?”

“Okay.”

“We can check on them again when we come back tomorrow,” I said. “Let’s go to the dock before it gets dark.”

We climbed back up the hill, passed the dainty green-and-white sign nailed to a tree stump that said Town with an arrow pointing up, passed brambles of blackberries twined around the limbs of serviceberry and young ash. Somewhere, on the lawn of a wealthy homeowner, someone was mowing, and the smell of cut grass merged with the oncoming rain and the acrid clean salt, a smell my mother trained me to search for on car trips.

“Roll down your window,” she’d yell to the back seat of the station wagon, “there’s a salt marsh!” Or “You can smell the tide,” she’d say as we came to the Long Island Sound. The Sound was her water, the place where my grandmother, Mac, had tried to teach me to swim, the place where I’d first seen what it would take to swim through the rising sea. I was afraid I hadn’t learned to swim through those waters, in my body or the world. I was afraid I hadn’t taught Dex to swim them either.

I could see Dex’s bare feet on the path ahead, the bob of his long hair as he jumped from rock to rock. The year was wet, and the dirt around the stones in the path was muddy, the rocks slick.

“It’s all the same,” Dex said. “Like we left it last year.”

But it wasn’t like last year. Work had dried up. We were on Medicaid. Friends sent me cash cards to pay for groceries. I fed Dex before myself. I scrambled for work to take with me to the island. On the drive out, I skipped seeing my mother. Her love for me swung between grand gestures of care and the abyss of neglect, between bravery and fear, punctuated by emotional heavy weather I learned to avoid. It felt like Dex’s father, Jonah, had a radar for years when I was low. But there was something worse—I was getting sick.

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive to Maine alone?” my friend Amanda asked.

“No,” I admitted.

“And straight there? That’s 20 hours.”

“I know, but I can’t afford a hotel to stop. And Dex…”

“Dex needs Monhegan?”

“Yeah.”

“Fair.”

“And so do I. It’s already paid for. And I have research to do.”

“But the pain is worse, right?”

“Yeah. But that’s probably just stress.”

“When did you see your nephrologist last?”

“I don’t know. My old doctor doesn’t take Medicaid.”

“Will you do it when you get back?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

Twilight was coming, and I remembered there was no doctor on the island, no emergency response boat. The village and its 60 year-round residents ringed the narrow working harbor cosseted by its sister island, treeless Manana. The village was car-free, apart from a few working trucks, bisected by dirt roads. The marsh and meadow at the center were the source of the island’s limited fresh water—a deep basin of green surrounded by clapboard houses, those houses giving way to wilderness, one of the nation’s oldest private land conservancies, the highest cliffs in Maine, the lighthouse. Helicopters landed on Lighthouse Hill in case of medical emergency, but only in good weather. Monhegan’s green hills and glowing sea were a risky place to come. I tried not to know that in my body. Instead, I reminded myself that this island and this sea did not belong to me. I was not a resident. I was a pilgrim.

Advancing clouds hid the sunset. We crossed through the village, over the hill to the dock where we’d landed that afternoon. When ferries leave for the mainland, passengers throw bouquets of wildflowers from the stern to ensure a safe return; their friends leap from the dock into the freezing Atlantic, so cold you forget it is warming, to seal the bargain. When we got there, the boy and the squid were alone on the wooden dock in the twilight, in that liminal place where journeys end and begin.

His longfin squid was not under threat in a warming world; warmth made them thrive. They were abundant enough to provide a potentially stable food fishery. They were the stars of important medical research. Humans and modern cephalopods share a common ancestor and a key innovation. Ancient cephalopods pioneered the neuron, that single genetic adaptation that allows creatures to think and feel. Human and squid neurons share structural features, including how they translate impulses in the brain into action. Neurons have three parts—the cell body, the dendrites, and the axon. The axon connects the impulses of the dendrites, through the cell body, to its destination. When the neuron tells you to run from danger, it is the axon that delivers the news to your feet. Longfin inshore squid have one of the largest neural axons relative to body size of any creature. While a single impossibly slim human axon cannot be removed from the brain for study, the squid axon can be removed and placed under a microscope to track how electrical impulses move. Discoveries from the study of longfin axons have been awarded Nobel prizes, making possible research that may lead to cures for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Without the longfin inshore squid, we would not understand how messages of emotion flow through the human body. The waters around us that night held squid—messengers of emotion, messengers of time running out.

Jonah was expecting a call that night, interrupting my time alone with Dex. Our divorce was high conflict. It had been an act of hope for me to have Dex. Jonah knew about the risks of my disease going into the marriage and the pregnancy. I thought he’d protect us both from the damage of PKD, married or not. After we split, furious, he battled me fiercely over the one thing I feared losing the most: time.

My phone pinged. I pulled it out of my pocket.

Eiren?! It is call time! Jonah wrote.

Standing on the dock, I felt sweat on the back of my neck, a prickle of electricity itching against my necklace, fear pulsing down my axons to flood my body. My heart raced in a wave of vertigo and nausea, picturing Jonah waiting by his phone in Chicago, early for the arranged time, angry with me as he always was.

Where are you!?! Jonah wrote.

“We have to go call Daddy,” I told Dex as I watched our cell coverage wink out, turning us toward the hotel and better reception.

“Thank you for sharing your squid,” Dex said to the boy, who threw his head to the side in a curt farewell, buzz cut standing on end in the wind, and shrugged a Yankee shrug as he tossed the animal back into the harbor. We climbed from the dock, crested the hill to see the island below us. A low fog spread over the marsh, the invasive purple loosestrife and cattails dulled in the twilight. It began to rain, dark came down, the late July night turning cool like autumn. Dex dawdled in the air, the ocean smell, the twilight. I rushed our steps, exhausted, sick, the phone a lead weight in my pocket.

It was so dark in that boat, and so loud, that we were of the sea, not on it.

We turned down the hill and under the ancient apple tree at the island’s central crossroad. Everything was in my head—another text message coming in, dizziness, sweat creeping toward my hairline. In the oncoming dark, I tripped on a rock, twisted my ankle, and hit the ground hard, chest first.

I sat up. Dex stood next to me, blinking in the rain. A pair of tourists stopped and looked over at us. “I’m fine!” I sang as consciousness left.

Later, Dex would tell me as he lay next to me in a hospital bed, “Mom, you were foaming at the mouth.”

Unconscious, I had a vision of my body spinning in circles in a car crash, the vertigo overwhelming. I was surrounded by a ring of protection, the faces of the dead singing the Shaker hymn my father had taught me while we walked on the shore of the Long Island Sound when I was nine, ’Tis a gift to come down where you are to be, and when you have found the place just right, you will be in the valley of love and delight.

“Oh,” I said to the faces, and the ring of family dissolved into a circle of strangers, wind speeding the clouds over us, rain in my mouth. Dex was far on the edge of the people, The Boy Who Is Where Others Are Not, who’d searched out bees alone in the playground’s privet hedge.

“You okay?” A woman’s voice.

I swiveled my rag doll head around to find her. As a child, I couldn’t sleep. To help me, my mother would play a game. I’d lie on the floor in the twilight while she gently shook each of my limbs until they softened, singing, My name is Flopsy Flora/a dolly full of rags, while I tried to relax under her touch, My arms go flop, and my legs do plop, tried to give in to the black vertigo of sleep, and my head just wigs and wags, tried to rely on the promise that she would keep me safe, a promise I knew wasn’t real. She was so beautiful then, before the years of walking dying rivers, before the years of caring for my bohemian father and his flooding body and his reckless choices.

“You okay? You with us?” the stranger asked. She had brown hair, a rain hood pulled up over it. “The emergency team is here. Do you know what happened to you?”

“No.”

“Does anyone else?”

“I’m alone.”

“Do you have a seizure disorder? Those people saw, said it was a seizure?”

“No. I have kidney disease.”

“Okay. Well, with a suspected seizure we have to get you off island.”

“I’m alone,” I said again. I couldn’t understand what had happened. My body had failed. I’d been waiting for it to fail—waiting since I was diagnosed at 22, through my father’s death, through having Dex, through the divorce and now it had. I looked at the stranger with the dark eyes, and I couldn’t begin to explain. “We’re alone, and I have kidney disease and my kid can’t be away from me.”

She blinked at the fear in my voice. “Which one is he?”

I pointed to him, standing isolated in the rain. “We can’t be separated, ” I said. “Can’t.”

“I got it.” She was solemn, a deep well of feeling passed between us. Maybe she was a mother too. “The helicopter can’t come—the nor’easter. Fifteen-foot seas. The Coast Guard is sending a cutter.”

And the sentence held in it all the fear I’d been trying to avoid, a fear that traveled from my brain, through axons sending messages of terror to my limbs, my heart.

There was more that came after that sentence. There was an aftermath. There was diagnosis and discovery. But first, there was the machinery of crisis. The woman sent a young man to our hotel for some things. Later I would learn that she was Jen, a lobsterman’s wife, walking her children to school at the one-room Monhegan schoolhouse in the sleeting winters and the rough, bright spring. She was a researcher in college and graduate school, studying the marine ecosystem of the Gulf, and came to Monhegan to work on a project, met the lobsterman, fell in love, shifted her life to the village and the water, and lived there, volunteering for the fire department and for the first-aid team. The Coast Guard arrived. Jen walked us over the hill. She held Dex’s hand, she held mine. At the dock, she told me the Coast Guard didn’t want to let Dex in the boat with me. She said, “I told them he went, or you didn’t.”

I gripped her hand tighter. I didn’t know if Dex heard any of it.

“I’ll see you when you come back,” she said. “You’re going to come back.”

We were on the dock where the journey started. They took us to the cutter. They put us into dry suits. Dex’s didn’t fit. They strapped us into a windowless hold with seats and stretchers and a sink. We were deep inside the water.

“Feeling okay?” one of the Coast Guardsmen asked me. The other man, six feet tall and stooped, his face pink and blotchy, threw up in the sink.

Later, I would describe him to a young man on the island. He would reply, “I know that guy. He’s from Iowa.”

But, in the belly of the boat, the first Coast Guardsman leaned over me and said, “It’ll be bumpy. Hang on.”

It was so dark in that boat, and so loud, that we were of the sea, not on it. I followed the seizure—down into the spiraling whirlpool of my body, the warming ocean and its creatures, my childhood with a chronically ill parent, my parenthood as a chronically ill mother, down into the Gulf of Maine and back to the Long Island Sound. I am following it still.

Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician based in Chicago. Her writing on loss and nature, oceans and extinction has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and the anthology Elementals: Volume IV Fire, published in 2024 from The Center for Humans and Nature. She received the 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and residencies at the Banff Centre, Millay Colony, MacDowell Colony (waitlisted), Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Row House Publishing published her first book and memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, in 2024, and her novel, All the Water in the World, was published by St. Martin’s Press in early 2025. 

Header photo by Stuart Monk, courtesy Shutterstock.