death and breadsticks

I am in Eugene, Oregon, and my grandpa is dying.

Well, let me be more specific: I am in Eugene, Oregon, because my grandpa is dying.

Point A is dependent on Point B. I cannot imagine being in Eugene, Oregon for a reason beyond my grandparents, unless I took a sudden interest in strip malls or collegiate football. Since I have no specific fondness for Mattress Firms, nor the spectacle of young bodies breaking against one another in a stadium full of grown bodies roaring their approval, there is a causal relationship between where I have brought my body and where my grandfather’s body is quitting in pieces.

So I am here, in Eugene, Oregon, and more specifically, I am in the backseat of the family car, idling at the entrance to the trailer park where my grandparents live. Although we have been visiting this trailer park for almost twenty years, my parents still panic-search for the correct gate code as we pull up. Every visit, there is the same trailer park, with the same gate, with the same code, and every visit, we all feign shock at the thought of anything prolonging the final moments of our journey. Sometimes this fumbling ritual makes me giggle from the backseat, and sometimes it makes me want to climb into the driver’s seat and accelerate with enough force to crash through the metal bars of the entrance. It depends on how tightly my parents are clenching the steering wheel by the time we arrive.

Nobody in my family calls this place a trailer park, as if saying this label out loud is some kind of value judgment rather than a statement of fact. I suppose we could also call it a gated community. Some truths are more true than others.

I have not always been interested in staying alive, which feels shameful to admit at the deathbed of my grandfather, but shameful things can also be honest.

Years ago, I found a handwritten note from a time I wanted to die. The note wasn’t nearly as melodramatic as I remembered it. “I have always known love, but the pain is so much bigger, and that is nobody’s fault, maybe not even mine” sounds desperate (maybe even grateful!) but not melodramatic. Even today, I keep insisting on memorializing that version of me as histrionic or hateful. Vilifying myself feels a little easier than facing the truth that once, without invitation, a tremendous pain moved into my body and kicked everything else out. It kicked out sunrises, extra strength Tylenol, everything that blooms, ripe fruit, first kisses, literal and metaphorical butterflies, deep breathing, laundry days, and almost every stubborn barnacle of hope clinging to my insides.

I found my own suicide note and my first thought was, “Nobody else can read this,” as if the shame of wanting to die outweighed the miracle of staying alive.

I think I am freer now than both the note-finder and the note-writer. The shame and the pain still exist but I am learning to speak to them in gentler tones. So what I’m saying is I can teach you how to greet death at a gate whose code you can never quite find, no matter how many journeys end at that particular entrance.

I am in this trailer park, because my grandpa is dying, and this is a causal relationship. Another example of a causal relationship: My grandfather’s skin is yellow because his individual pieces are dying faster than his whole.

The fact of his yellow-ness is something I have been prepared for and as I put my eyes on his yellow head and yellow eyes and yellow legs and yellow hands I am understanding that seeing someone you love in the wrong color is not something you can ever be prepared for. The word jaundice does not capture the feeling of watching my grandpa fade into sepia-tones while the rest of us continue living in color. I am watching him turn into a memory. His edges are curling up.

I stop myself from making a joke about how I came into the world jaundiced and he’s leaving the world jaundiced and I don’t stop myself because it’s inappropriate, I stop myself because I can’t quite tell where the joke is. By the time I go to greet my grandparents in their adjoined recliners, I have erased all the not-joke jokes about race and organ failure from my brain until my face is a smooth, balmy lake surface. Hi Grampy, I love you Grammy, come on in, the water’s fine. My grandpa looks up at me and he does not say hello, or I love you, or let out the small chuckle that has always meant, “I’m so happy you are here,” but instead says, “I am so itchy.” He repeats this until he is crying and rubbing his arms as though something is biting just under the surface.

Before you do the work of drawing parameters around my grief, please — I’ve already done it for you! I have bound and gagged my own emotional reactions for so long, they barely make muffled screams from the corner anymore. I know my grief is allowed to be a quiet melancholy but it is not allowed to howl or wail. Ninety-one-year-old bodies quit in pieces, and I am not allowed to call this a betrayal.

I have only lost one other grandparent and she was so furious at her body for betraying her that I truly believed she might be the first eighty-five-year-old to ever die. My grandma Kyoko raged against her breaking body, which, of course, broke her faster. Every liberty she clung to eventually knocked her to the ground. I would hate for you to think I’m speaking metaphorically here. She resented dependence so fiercely she would rather bleed on the bathroom floor than ring the nurse assigned to help her pee at night. And if you’ll allow me to switch back to the metaphorical, I need no further proof that I am my grandmother’s granddaughter than this stubborn bloodshed.

My grandma Kyoko refused to meet death on the floor. Instead, she took advantage of every legislative privilege this state has to offer. She made arrangements to die with dignity. She hand-picked the date she wanted to die and specially requested a bottle of Dom Pérignon to celebrate. The rest of the memory I’m sharing here is not one I witnessed, it’s one I am borrowing, because I hide from these moments: She ran toward her last and greatest liberty with such speed, they had to convince her to wait the ten extra minutes it took for her firstborn son to get through traffic to say his final goodbye. She’s always hated waiting on other people.

So what I’m saying is my grandma can teach you how to RSVP for your death. You do not have to play the doting host, preparing your home for a visit at any hour. You can be the guest of honor. You can show up at death’s doorstep with a bottle of champagne and a fistful of balloons, two hours before the party is supposed to start, because you’ve never been one to be kept waiting.

My grandpa is crying and rubbing his arms and generally refusing to follow the sentimental reunion dialogue I had scripted on the five-hour drive here. I don’t know what to do other than kneel at the foot of his foamy brown recliner, and rub his arms right alongside him, and whisper, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay.”

Two doses of children’s Benadryl later, my grandpa has stopped itching and we are gathered around the dining room table playing cards. People say all humor contains an element of surprise so maybe it is the shock of death that has us all keeling over with laughter. My grandma calls my brother the name of two different cousins and an uncle before sighing and settling on, “Oh, whatever your name is.” We double over and slap the table and howl. My grandpa cheats when he adds up his score and my mom says, “You’re just going to use your cancer as an excuse to win!” and he says, “Well, why not?” We throw our heads back and grab the arm of whoever’s in the next seat over. We laugh because of the cards we’ve been dealt, because the score card tells the same story it has always told, because the trash talk is so loving, because we’ve missed each other so much, because it would be so, so quiet in here if we stopped.

After all these rounds of Rummy, we crave something hot and salty. Somebody suggests Olive Garden and my grandpa smiles a sad little smile before agreeing, “Some soup might be nice.” I think of the type of laughs my friends and I have shared over Olive Garden as a symbol of middle-class mediocrity, and they suddenly seem like the type of mean, hollow jokes that mean, hollow people make. My friends and I laughed at those jokes like snobbery would get us closer to recognizing real taste and experiencing real love. I nod enthusiastically at my grandpa, and think one of my first honest thoughts of the weekend: Nothing on earth sounds better right now than a mouth full of cottony breadsticks.

My mother and I get in the car to pick up the food, because we are both oldest daughters, and this is what oldest daughters do. We will pick up chicken parm from the Olive Garden off the beltway just as surely as we’ll take care of the dirty dishes after the shared meal.

My mother is driving and looking straight ahead when she says, “I haven’t cried yet. I know it will come, but I haven’t cried yet.” I am also keeping my eyes on the road as I consider the silence that grows between us. Although the moment calls for it, and although I have a degree in Counseling Psychology, and although I am someone who cries at book dedications and Super Bowl commercials and viral videos of ducklings crossing the street, this is the one place my tears have never fallen freely. Here, in this car, with this shared blood, I cannot make room for my grief. So instead of grabbing her hand and saying, “It will come,” I turn to my window and say, “While I was looking through grandma’s book case, I found a paperback romance novel.” We look at each other then, taking a break from watching the long stretch of night ahead of us, and a grin flirts with the corners of my mother’s mouth. “What was it called?” She is accepting my invitation to leave the silent space. I make my exit, gladly. “I can’t remember, because I threw it back on the bookshelf after I flipped open to a random page and something was stiffening in someone’s hand…”

I watch the surprise land on my mother’s face. She leans over the steering wheel and lets out the longest, loudest laugh I’ve ever heard her make.

Fall of my senior year of high school, my mother learned of the unexpected death of her youngest sister through her Facebook newsfeed. I remember it was fall of my senior year because I was on the Homecoming Court and my grandparents are the type of grandparents to travel across state lines to show up for things like that, which is how it came to be that they were playing Scrabble together in my living room, completely oblivious to the premature death of their youngest child.

The rest of the memory I’m sharing here is not one I witnessed, it’s one I am borrowing, because I hide from these moments: My mother sat across from her parents, gathered their hands in her own, and cracked their world open. She looked into their eyes and said the words no parents are ever ready to hear and no children are prepared to say. Not even oldest daughters. Whenever she tells this story, she says in a low voice,“I will never forget the sound your grandpa made after I told him.” She always shivers after saying this.

I did not know my aunt well. Our family tree has gnarled roots and one of those knots choked the life out of our relationship well before I was born. I know she was harmed deeply, irrevocably, by a stranger. I know our family does not share a language that makes it easy to talk honestly about harm we have caused or endured. Because of that harm, and the silence that followed, I know she made a habit of harming herself in a way that elicited judgment far more than it invited sympathy.

So I guess what I’m saying is my aunt can teach you how to greet death as a surprise. You may have been stunned by cruelty’s potency during your time on earth, but you can steal the punchline. If shock is the language of humor, she can show you how to have the last laugh.

My mother and I make a hero’s return to the not-trailer-park trailer park, carrying brown paper bags laden with noodles and soft, flavorless gnocchi. Before the meal, there is a prayer, because there is a prayer before every meal at my grandparents’ house. When my immediate family and I forget to act like this is the ritual at our house too, my grandparents do not chide, or admonish, or even clear a throat; they simply bow their heads for their own moment of silent communion. It is not a punishment but it stings like one. Today my grandpa is dying, so all of us remember to clasp our hands and bow our heads. I ask to recite the family prayer we all know by heart, not because I favor it, but because I do not think I can handle anything more specific. My grandpa does not hear my request. He begins, “Father God,” which is not how our family prayer starts. I close my eyes so tightly, I see purple.

I am holding my grandpa’s leathery hand to my left and my grandma’s pillowy hand to my right when his voice cracks. He is weeping into our breadsticks, and he is praying, “I am ready to go. I am ready to go home, Lord.” He prays openly about death and dying and to my growing horror, I think I can make out the stifled sobs of my other family members. My only reprieve is my grandma’s firm grip. The prayer, mercifully, ends. My grandma gives my hand the long squeeze she always saves for the end of every prayer, the squeeze that keeps me searching for the spot next to her at every meal.

My grandma is filling the silence with a breezy tone that does not match the weight and texture of the air in this room. While my grandpa recovers from his rendition of the book of Lamentations, she is enumerating the Lord’s miracles: divine healings, miraculous recoveries, clean scans. My grandma is the last person in the room to accept that death is coming. It is too painful to face her denial, so instead, I am twirling my linguine and picturing an army of ailing loved ones in all the wrong colors. Yellow grandpas with pancreatic cancer, ruby red cousins with heart conditions, pink best friends with vertigo. I smile at my plate of bland pasta, picturing my grandma’s White Jesus sweeping through the dying crowd with a divine color corrector.

All of us are quiet as we eat, and all of us are sneaking glances at my grandpa’s plate to see how much food he can stomach. I fight an audible sigh of relief as he finishes his soup, a plate of rigatoni, and a slice of coconut cream pie saved for dessert.

In the brief lull after forks have been laid down, my grandma starts bussing our plates until we all loudly protest. I begin stacking dishes and gathering up used napkins while the men in my family move to the living room. The hot sink water burns my knuckles, cracked and wasted in winter’s second act, as I plunge the dishes in suds. This type of rehearsed domesticity feels like a costume that doesn’t quite fit me. While I get up to make my grandpa tea, I think about atonement. While I unload the dishwasher, I hope I play the part of Good Granddaughter convincingly. While I find a warm blanket to drape across my grandpa’s lap, I pray he forgives me for how long it has been since my last visit.

Restless without clean-up duty, my grandma turns to the desktop computer crammed directly behind the dining room table. I watch her pull up Facebook and fight the urge to crack every last glass plate over my own head. I turn the faucet hotter. My hands scream. Hotter, still. I can observe her, mostly unnoticed, from this vantage point at the kitchen sink. Her body is shaped like an apostrophe as she leans into the computer. Mouth slightly ajar, she scrolls past the obituaries of her friends and Tucker Carlson clips and articles with titles like, “Can you spot how many horses are in this picture? Only geniuses know the real answer.”

She snorts from the computer. “Have you seen Nancy Pelosi’s face recently?” I pretend to focus intently on the Alfredo stain I’m removing from the table linen. She continues, “Her eyebrows are practically into her hairline!” I make a noncommittal, “hmm” and hate myself for — what, exactly? All the fights I have picked? All the fights I haven’t? No, I hate myself for not knowing which story I want to tell myself about the cavernous distance that has swallowed my adult relationship with my grandparents. I ask myself for the billionth time if these fights I’ve picked and these fights I’ve abandoned are the real reasons I don’t call enough. I ask myself for the billionth time if it’s all just a morally defensible mask for the fact that I’m a lazy, selfish granddaughter. My grandma keeps scrolling. I keep scrubbing. I wish we both knew a better love.

My grandma has the best hands in all of Oregon, in all of Washington, and probably in all of your state, too. They have enough fat to squeeze without ever feeling like you’re holding onto something that will break. These are hands that could hold you forever. Each finger is thick and soft, and I cannot see them without wanting to put each one to my mouth.

One hundred road trips ago, my grandma stayed up late to greet us at the screen door of this same trailer. I was young enough to have legs that swung from my chair without touching the ground. A window over the kitchen sink captured her reflection, almost iridescent against the night, while she prepared my bedtime PB&J. She always made our sandwiches with white bread which gave me the distinct impression that my grandparents must be very rich, because white bread was a luxury I dreamed of as a resentful child of whole grain crusts. She sharply inhaled from the kitchen counter, and horror seized me when I realized she’d sliced open one of her plump, perfect fingers. “You’re bleeding, Grammy,” I whispered. She put her finger to her mouth and sucked the thick drop of blood off the tip of her reddening wound.“No, I’m not.”

Nobody knows my grandma’s history well, including my grandpa, who has slept next to her every night for over sixty years. Our family tree has gnarled roots and one of those knots choked her stories out of our collective archive well before I was born. I know she was harmed deeply, irrevocably, by someone who was supposed to be safe. I know she taught herself to read by studying the newspapers that plastered the dirt walls of her home. I know her father walked to the barn alone with a shotgun and never came back. I know our family does not share a language that makes it easy to talk honestly about harm we have caused or endured. Because of that harm, and the silence that followed it, I know she booked a one-way train ticket away from rural Virginia and all her ghosts.

So what I’m saying is my grandma can teach you how to greet death with a cold shoulder. Death can come for your father, for your spirit, for your youngest daughter, for your friends, for your husband, and you never have to reach out your sturdy hand in welcome. You can turn away, close the circle, and squeeze the person next to you until it almost hurts. Death will still come, but it can never call you friend.

Our time together is coming to an end. The plates have been cleared and the cards have been played and all that’s left of the coconut cream pie is a greasy aluminum tin. Every time I have said goodbye to my grandparents, I have wondered if it will be our last, but I am finding this long practice has not prepared me for the real thing. I am pacing their mobile home, feral and cagey, because the sob I have been biting back all weekend is gathering like a tight fist in my throat. The pacing is not helping because on every wall and surface of this home is a picture of me; me as a baby in black and white, me as a toddler in a cowboy hat, me in a homecoming crown, me in the garden, me in the bath. It is unforgivably selfish, but in that moment, I have my second honest thought of the weekend: When I lose my grandparents, I won’t have anybody left who will love me enough to wallpaper their home with my face.

I am staring up at the asbestos-filled ceiling and pinching the skin between my index finger and thumb. I am begging the emotional Novocain I usually reserve for my family to numb the growing ache in my chest. “Fuck,” I whisper at the ceiling, and I wince, because even in facing death, I should not be swearing in my grandparents’ home. But there’s no memory I can borrow here. No more hiding. I square my shoulders and walk the five steps it takes for me to reach the living room, where my grandpa is back in his recliner. I kneel down again to kiss his yellow head, this time as a goodbye, and it is too much. Every dam inside me breaks. My emotional processing regresses to a hopeless grasp at the present: If I keep kissing his head, if I stay stooped at the foot of his recliner, maybe this won’t become a memory. Maybe we can put this moment in amber. There will never be a before and after, there will only be now, with the smell of his cologne right under my nose. We can have right now if I can just keep our faces together.

But I am crying in front of my family and I cannot take this level of perception any longer so I rush out a few hundred I love yous before standing abruptly and sticking my face in a corner of the room while the others say goodbye. It is a ridiculous thing to do because the living room is so small, the corner affords me no real privacy. Still I stand, presenting my rigid back to my family while I pretend to study a painting of a flying duck. Instead of letting out the hiccuping sobs growing in ferocity under my breast bone, I am holding my breath and cementing my shoulders. I feel intense pressure gathering behind my sinuses and eyeballs.

Just as I think I am going to burst a vein in my neck, my grandma is slipping a hand around my waist and squeezing the balled fist that sits there. She is looking at the painting, not at me, and I recognize it as the mercy it is. She is commenting on the brushstrokes, not my purple face, and I know she is buying me recovery time. It is this — her intimate understanding of my needs — that finally punctures me. I bend over to fit my head in the curve of her neck and my body shudders with everything it has been holding back. The delicate blue forget-me-nots on her blouse deepen to indigo as I soak her shoulder with my tears. “I do love you so, Suzy Q,” she whispers into my hair. We stay like this until it is time to go.

My mother, my father, my brother, and I tuck ourselves into the car and roll down every window so we can wave goodbye. Every trip ends with this ceremony of frantic waves but we know this particular goodbye is different. My grandpa stands alone in the doorframe and my grandma’s absence is notable. I wonder if she has retreated to her own corner, staring up at her own popcorn ceiling, hiding from this particular goodbye in whichever way she needs.

So, my yellow grandpa stands alone in the doorway of their not-trailer trailer, and he is saying goodbye. The cry that evaded my mother for so long came for her on the short walk from her father’s arms to the car, and now she is wailing in the front seat, and I know I will never forget this sound. We wave until the outline of my grandpa disappears behind another row of mobile homes, and still, she wails. I am trying not to notice how my father does not reach out for her. I am trying not to resent this open display of grief while my own pain sits vacuum sealed and subdued in the trunk of the car. I am trying to forgive myself for all the ways I hide from my family.

I cannot listen to the howls of my mother for one second longer, because it is shaking something inside of me that needs to stay dormant, at least as long as I am here, in this car. This is not the place I can safely examine the pulp of my heart. I do what I have to do, even though it is unforgivable, even though it makes me distinctly ungood, and I slip my earbuds on. I make sure my hair covers my ears so I’m the only one who knows of my betrayal. The relief of silence gives me enough space, enough aloneness, enough breath to extend my wooden arm forward, past the headrest, past our histories, onto her shoulder. She reaches up to touch my hand and I will myself to stay put. I will not flinch away from this intimacy. I keep my hand there until she gives my fingers a firm squeeze — permission to let go.

So what I’m saying is my family can teach you how to greet death. You hear death knocking and you turn up the TV. You hear death knocking and you lay out a banquet. You hear death knocking and play your last hand of cards. You hear death knocking and you find whichever exit opens itself to you. You pray the prayer you all know and only half believe:

Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed, amen.
O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endureth forever.

Amen.