No matter how many times I say it or re-say it, it never sounds right. How does a woman like that, a woman who never stopped talking, stop talking for good? Her apartment is now hollow and quiet, all that's left is the puffing sound of my grandfather's oxygen machine. Is this death? Is this what it sounds like?
And then there's my grandfather and, thanks to age and senility, there's his inability to hold onto the memory of his wife's death for more than an hour. It slips away from him; the glue refuses to hold and things fall apart and each time we have to remind him where his dead wife has gone to.
The fact is I've been lucky enough in life to never have had to deal directly with death. In fact, I've thought astoundingly little about death and what death means and what I believe death to be. If you asked me two weeks ago what I thought of death, I'd say it was when your heart stopped beating and your brain stopped thinking and your being stopped being. But now, I don't know about any of that.
I tell my students to stop thinking in binaries. Maybe I should do the same. Specifically, what I'm thinking of is William Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" and the little girl who insists that she and her siblings "are seven" even though "two were buried in a grave." "Are" and "Were" are verbs meant to separate what is from what was, but lately it doesn't seem enough--as if, there needs to be a verb for all that falls in between.
If she is around, at least I know that she'll be glad at how the ceremony went and she'd, for once, love the way her hair and makeup were done. Of course, the lingering crumbs all over her counters and Chloe Dog on the furniture might be enough to aggravate the dead to rise again.
I don't think I'm coming home at all this winter break. Florida is a place where people come to die and, after this whole ordeal, I am very much in the mood for (the) living.
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