Eyelash Mites and the Miraculous: A Review of Sign Here If You Exist and Other Essays

“There is life, it seems, after death—but it may only be here on Earth,” Jill Sisson Quinn writes in this ecologically luminous, spiritually haunting collection. The ache for an afterlife, even when faith in God or religion has been lost, is a theme she returns to over and over, its reappearance throughout different essays functioning as a sort of reincarnation itself.

Sign Here If You Exist and Other Essays by Jill Sisson Quinn. Mad Creek Books, 2020. 184 pages. $19.95.

With a Master’s in both Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, it is Quinn’s detailed attentiveness to the natural world which prevents her scientific mind from shedding this belief in life after death. Nature’s seemingly endless symbols for resurrection—from flowers that spring back to life to more obscure occurrences like “the freezing and thawing of wood frogs”—represent for Quinn the power of metaphor; these illustrations for rebirth, she says with an amusing hint of resentment, are constantly “playing on the human mind’s ability to compare unlike things in its search for truth.”

To “compare unlike things” is also the aim of these braided essays, and Quinn expertly weaves together the scientific with the sublime, the miniscule with the miraculous. In each essay, she focuses her naturalist’s eye on an obscure subject—parasite ichneumon wasps, or the mating process of salamanders—while pairing these scientific observations with deeply personal explorations of the nature of faith, home, and adoptive parenthood. In “Trespassers,” one of the most fascinating essays in the collection, Quinn explores in shocking detail the miniscule microbes that live on and within the human body, using this research about our macrobiotic inhabitants to illuminate questions about the role of adoptive parents in shaping a child’s life. In the masterful “Enskyment,” she returns to themes of faith and doubt through the lens of a thoroughly researched, surprisingly poignant meditation on vultures.

Infertility and adoptive parenthood emerge as significant themes midway through this collection. While the choice to organize the book chronologically mirrors the way a person’s obsessions can shift over time—questions of nature versus nurture, of genetics and inheritance, wholly dominate the book’s second half—the structure might have benefitted from mirroring the braided essay form instead, weaving these pieces on what it means to create a family throughout rather than gathering them all together at the end.

Despite their repetitions, though, these four final essays exploring the adoption process are among the collection’s strongest. In the powerful penultimate essay “Begetting,” Quinn’s accidental misidentification of a salamander’s eggs leads her to an insightful examination of logical fallacies, specifically the irrational fears adoptive parents can have about a child’s inherited traits. As an adoptive mother myself, throughout this book I sometimes felt uncomfortable with Quinn’s recurring fixation on genetics. Particularly in “Trespassers,” the otherwise wonderful essay about microbes, she articulates an unsettling desire to imprint herself on her child that is both brutally honest and problematic.

But in “Begetting,” Quinn not only turns a more critical eye on her own assumptions and anxieties, she also seems to experience a profound shift in perspective with the sudden arrival of her son. After fretting about the questionnaire that requires her and her husband to check boxes for which “kind of child they would like to parent”—a disturbing and morally confusing process for many adoptive parents—and parsing countless research studies to untangle the difference between correlations and causations in child development, ultimately, she lands on a beautifully simple sentence that renders all else irrelevant. “But it didn’t matter: this little boy is marvelous.”

For a book intent on illuminating the intricacies of the non-human world, from eyelash mites to endangered wolves, from blue-spotted salamanders to the landscape of the Great Lakes, it’s striking that these moments when Quinn turns her attention to people are often the most breathtaking. Her transformation into a parent at the end of this collection gains additional poignancy when considered in light of the collection’s opening essay, which offers a very human portrait of Quinn’s devoutly Christian mother. In a memorable scene that is both hilarious and heartbreaking, Quinn’s mother inadvertently pushes her young daughter along the path of disbelief by responding to a note addressed to God. “Sign here if you exist,” the young Quinn writes, hiding the note in her dresser drawer for God to find, and when she receives a response, she immediately recognizes the curvy handwriting:

Perhaps I would have believed it was God who’d answered if my mother would simply have done what the letter requested. Instead she wrote me a note about love and faith, probably a series of x’s and o’s, like she put in our valentines. She was, and is, a believer; she would not forge his name.

The tenderness of this memory—the way her mother’s sincere attempt to encourage faith accidentally leads to Quinn’s agnosticism—resounds throughout the collection, reminding us that belief systems, like humans, are complicated, unwieldy, and closely intertwined with the world around us. In fact, Quinn’s own inability to rid herself of a faith in the afterlife has less to do with theology and more to do with flesh-and-blood humanity: “Contrary to what I once believed, it is easy to let go of God,” she says, but it “will not be so easy to let go of your deceased mother, who stands in her kitchen slicing potatoes and roast, who hacks ice from the sidewalk with shovels.”

Indeed, it is nearly impossible to believe in the mortality of people we love, even though the closer attention we pay to human bodies and the earth we inhabit, the more aware we are of impermanence, of the promise of death that lurks at the edge of every hug, every conversation, every gorgeous line of prose. From preemptively mourning for a mother who will eventually die to longing for a child who will eventually be born, this collection is haunted not by questions of God’s existence or non-existence, but by a desperate hope that—despite scientific evidence that seems to suggest otherwise—human relationships will somehow continue to exist, even after we do not.