For Lupe.
Friday, July 14, 2006
When I couldn’t find my toothbrush a few nights ago, it could have been Tuesday or Wednesday I think, I popped open one I probably received as a present from Dad and Kathy. One of those Merry Christmas here’s some dental floss and winterfresh altoids, both of which are never used and given away. So I only brush once a day, mostly for bad morning breath as opposed to actual fears of dental problems, but this new brush..oooo. Soft bristles. I am now brushing just to feel the brushing, to feel the clean and the crisp taste, the smoothness of my teeth as I run my tongue over them. I brush long and comfortably, for the hell of it, to prove I do brush, and I like it. It all feels new.
I haven’t spoken above a whisper since yesterday afternoon. Since Uncle Nick picked me up at the airport and I first felt the sunny warmth of El Paso. It felt beautiful, that baking sun that I love to feel on my skin, that feels that it’s roasting me inside and out, searing through my layers straight to my core and god do I love that feeling. I don’t mind the heat, and in fact I love it. I spent almost two hours outside today just sewing, no sounds but the tinkling of the many windchimes. Even outside no sounds above a whisper. I bet by the end of the week I’ll be uncomfortable and maybe even burnt a little but right now it feels so comfortable, that desert sun microwaving you from the outside in. Dry, dry hot, cooling hot. Lovely hot. I think about how I’d like to live here, move into my grandma’s house, take it over and make my own meals, make friends of the locals, go to tequila bars and sample. Take trips to Juarez and make my house into a copy of Frida’s. But where would my water be with the river all dried up? I need my water, my ocean and we don’t have dry heat near an ocean, do we? No…too cold, muggy. I’m sure it gets muggy here, and cold, but this dry heat just does the trick. It feels like an actual vacation, not doing anything but sitting around, reading. No tv, no radio, no loud noises whatsoever. I almost read a book in an entire sitting. I don’t remember when the hell I last did that. When I last concentrated on one single thing and not a million at once. This is a surreal vacation, glorious and upsetting, soothing and disturbing all at once. It’s quiet because we don’t want to wake her up. There’s no cable because she doesn’t watch it. I don’t even know how many channels are in Spanish, probably a dozen. Maybe more. Simpsons in espanol? Whatever.
And the food. I don’t have to pay for it, but it’s not grand meals. Eat when I want to eat, as much or as little as I want. Dinner was tamales. Snacks, tamales, a little cheese and a bagel. Delicious pasteles from Gussie’s, tea from the market. Grandma wanted more lemonaide. She loves her lemonaide and her sorbets.
I didn’t see much of her today. Last night was a bad night I guess. They almost thought she died. I wish they had woken me. I want to be there when it happens, if you can imagine. It’s part curiosity, part making up for the last two deaths, and part I just want to be there for her. I want to do all I can for this house, but I can’t. so I do the dishes, and I keep the kitchen clean and I am available when they need me to sit with grandma, to feed her, to move her, to make lunch and dinner for them, to stay out of the way when they need rooms for company. I am seen and not heard, I am here for when they want. That’s all I can do.
I saw a picture of dad in his junior year of high school in one of his year books. No beard, long hair, glasses. Kinda like me, or more, I look kinda like him, same cheeks. We have big cheeks, us. And I’m sure if I tried I could get my hair to look like his, in a few months when it’s longer. Aunt Irene said she wanted to show me some video of when he was in elementary school or Pre-K. I mentioned this to grandma, and she said she wanted to see it. She wanted to see her little Danny. Her Danny Boy. He had been with her for a week before I got there, and she wanted to see him. But she remembered Natalia and Diane, John and Mary, but not John and Karen, Katie and Kara she remembered too. Or she said she did anyways. I bet the first four, but I’m sure the cousins are faint.
My hands are so dry from washing them, washing them, washing them. Dishes and washing them. They are like paper.
Water is in the pot for coffee, and the aunts are waiting for the long night to begin. No one wants it to be like last night, but no one knows what to expect either. Each day is a new one, with new hours to tick by like an eraser scratching out her life. I don’t want to sleep tonight. I don’t want to miss anything. I’ll just wait, with the others. The house of golden girls waiting for the station break.
Her body is lean. She was never a huge grannie, but she was round, jolly. Kinda like a Mexican Mrs. Santa Claus. Now she is gaunt. A shell of Lupe, draped across a hospice bed, swathed in scratchy hospice sheets. Her hands were old woman hands, a little bony, a little worn, but the veins now wrap themselves around each finger, blue green ivy, raised spider webs. All that excess skin falls off the bone, hangs lifeless with gravity. She has a second set of arms, comprised of skin and unburnable fat. In between moments, with pinpoint lucidity, running fingers through her fleecy hair, she calls to god, she asks, when will it be all over? Why must it last enough night? Another day or hour? The pain is not much but the sorrow is.
I have not seen her all day, only a five minute watch as she snored and her nurse took a break. This second day she was not Lupe. How much her features fade after a night of near death and a day of medicated sleep. Her mouth like a bass, grasping at air but at least a deep sleep, hopefully one that will continue for a while.
Monday, July 17
I’ve inventoried the living room and the dining room, and the amount of stuff written down equals about fifteen pages front and back in a notebook Aunt Irene bought especially for the job.
I’d say she has about a week. Maybe next weekend. I’m not sure. I leave tomorrow though.
I’ve gone through so many photos, my father, Aunts and Uncles, Grandma Lupe. She was so pretty, so tiny when she was younger. Seeing her as a young woman helped me cope with seeing her very close to death now. I can see in her face and eyes the young woman in her wedding photo back in 1938. If I can just make that connection that she was young, she had children, she grew older and died, they I can see her as just a woman who now has to end and not my grandmother who prays over my head in Spanish, watches her Telenovelas and sends care packages with tamales.
I feel worse for my father. Aunt Irene showed me the video she had made from old Super 8 films of the family. My father at four, eight, dancing at Christmas as ten, dressing like Grandpa and wearing cowboy boots to school. He wanted to be so much like him, the taciturn man who never smiled in photos but whose voice I can still hear pronouncing my name like it’s meant to be. Nuh TUH lee uh. Heavy Mexican accent. My father has already lost his father, his hero, and now he’s losing his mother too. He’s technically an orphan after this.
One by one they are plucked off.
I’ve had bad dreams almost every night while I was here. One night was the standard, blank faces, which turned into the melting black eyes and mouth in Emily Rose. But I knew it wasn’t them, it was me, it was my own mind. Something in my own mind was distorting faces and distorting the truth, and that was the horror of the dream. Not the scary faces, not some devil otherworldly power coming to take over from the outside in. It was coming from the inside out, and that’s what tore at me.
Last night was not as graphic, but more emotional. Something about serial killers, but not killers, torturers, sexual but not in a rape sort of way, fetishist torturers. Thinking about it, just thinking about the feeling makes me hyperventilate and start to cry in the most wimpering sort of way, like pleading. Crying like pleading. At breakfast I had a panic attack about it and had to calm myself down, saying over and over that no one is coming to get me.
They are two men, possibly three but only one or two of them actually come into contact with me. One or two of the possible three come into contact with others. One looks like a short Stephen Dorff, in that crazy blonde Cecil B. Demented sort of way. Another is tall, dark haired, nerdy and skinny. I can’t remember the third, but I think he was also dark haired. They are all young, and mostly just curious.
They have IVs and needles and bags to fill; bleed me until I am so week I can do nothing else but lay there and cry, pleading. Sometimes they cut me with little knives, very sharp and small, like exacto knives, only my stomach and arms. But I don’t move, I don’t fight, I’m too weak. I’ve lost so much blood. It spurts out of my arm when they remove the tubes but not the needles. It doesn’t hurt, I have no pain. I’m just so weak, so so weak and I know I’m going to stay that way for a long time. No one helps me. They do this to me twice in the dream, the second time I haven’t recovered the loss of all that blood, but I’m still bled within an inch of my life. All I can do is cry in some faint, dizzy, pleading way.
There are phantom pains in the crook of my arm like when I have to have blood drawn, a dim throb of broken skin and emptied veins. I’m terrified, but it’s just a dream.
When I couldn’t find my toothbrush a few nights ago, it could have been Tuesday or Wednesday I think, I popped open one I probably received as a present from Dad and Kathy. One of those Merry Christmas here’s some dental floss and winterfresh altoids, both of which are never used and given away. So I only brush once a day, mostly for bad morning breath as opposed to actual fears of dental problems, but this new brush..oooo. Soft bristles. I am now brushing just to feel the brushing, to feel the clean and the crisp taste, the smoothness of my teeth as I run my tongue over them. I brush long and comfortably, for the hell of it, to prove I do brush, and I like it. It all feels new.
I haven’t spoken above a whisper since yesterday afternoon. Since Uncle Nick picked me up at the airport and I first felt the sunny warmth of El Paso. It felt beautiful, that baking sun that I love to feel on my skin, that feels that it’s roasting me inside and out, searing through my layers straight to my core and god do I love that feeling. I don’t mind the heat, and in fact I love it. I spent almost two hours outside today just sewing, no sounds but the tinkling of the many windchimes. Even outside no sounds above a whisper. I bet by the end of the week I’ll be uncomfortable and maybe even burnt a little but right now it feels so comfortable, that desert sun microwaving you from the outside in. Dry, dry hot, cooling hot. Lovely hot. I think about how I’d like to live here, move into my grandma’s house, take it over and make my own meals, make friends of the locals, go to tequila bars and sample. Take trips to Juarez and make my house into a copy of Frida’s. But where would my water be with the river all dried up? I need my water, my ocean and we don’t have dry heat near an ocean, do we? No…too cold, muggy. I’m sure it gets muggy here, and cold, but this dry heat just does the trick. It feels like an actual vacation, not doing anything but sitting around, reading. No tv, no radio, no loud noises whatsoever. I almost read a book in an entire sitting. I don’t remember when the hell I last did that. When I last concentrated on one single thing and not a million at once. This is a surreal vacation, glorious and upsetting, soothing and disturbing all at once. It’s quiet because we don’t want to wake her up. There’s no cable because she doesn’t watch it. I don’t even know how many channels are in Spanish, probably a dozen. Maybe more. Simpsons in espanol? Whatever.
And the food. I don’t have to pay for it, but it’s not grand meals. Eat when I want to eat, as much or as little as I want. Dinner was tamales. Snacks, tamales, a little cheese and a bagel. Delicious pasteles from Gussie’s, tea from the market. Grandma wanted more lemonaide. She loves her lemonaide and her sorbets.
I didn’t see much of her today. Last night was a bad night I guess. They almost thought she died. I wish they had woken me. I want to be there when it happens, if you can imagine. It’s part curiosity, part making up for the last two deaths, and part I just want to be there for her. I want to do all I can for this house, but I can’t. so I do the dishes, and I keep the kitchen clean and I am available when they need me to sit with grandma, to feed her, to move her, to make lunch and dinner for them, to stay out of the way when they need rooms for company. I am seen and not heard, I am here for when they want. That’s all I can do.
I saw a picture of dad in his junior year of high school in one of his year books. No beard, long hair, glasses. Kinda like me, or more, I look kinda like him, same cheeks. We have big cheeks, us. And I’m sure if I tried I could get my hair to look like his, in a few months when it’s longer. Aunt Irene said she wanted to show me some video of when he was in elementary school or Pre-K. I mentioned this to grandma, and she said she wanted to see it. She wanted to see her little Danny. Her Danny Boy. He had been with her for a week before I got there, and she wanted to see him. But she remembered Natalia and Diane, John and Mary, but not John and Karen, Katie and Kara she remembered too. Or she said she did anyways. I bet the first four, but I’m sure the cousins are faint.
My hands are so dry from washing them, washing them, washing them. Dishes and washing them. They are like paper.
Water is in the pot for coffee, and the aunts are waiting for the long night to begin. No one wants it to be like last night, but no one knows what to expect either. Each day is a new one, with new hours to tick by like an eraser scratching out her life. I don’t want to sleep tonight. I don’t want to miss anything. I’ll just wait, with the others. The house of golden girls waiting for the station break.
Her body is lean. She was never a huge grannie, but she was round, jolly. Kinda like a Mexican Mrs. Santa Claus. Now she is gaunt. A shell of Lupe, draped across a hospice bed, swathed in scratchy hospice sheets. Her hands were old woman hands, a little bony, a little worn, but the veins now wrap themselves around each finger, blue green ivy, raised spider webs. All that excess skin falls off the bone, hangs lifeless with gravity. She has a second set of arms, comprised of skin and unburnable fat. In between moments, with pinpoint lucidity, running fingers through her fleecy hair, she calls to god, she asks, when will it be all over? Why must it last enough night? Another day or hour? The pain is not much but the sorrow is.
I have not seen her all day, only a five minute watch as she snored and her nurse took a break. This second day she was not Lupe. How much her features fade after a night of near death and a day of medicated sleep. Her mouth like a bass, grasping at air but at least a deep sleep, hopefully one that will continue for a while.
Monday, July 17
I’ve inventoried the living room and the dining room, and the amount of stuff written down equals about fifteen pages front and back in a notebook Aunt Irene bought especially for the job.
I’d say she has about a week. Maybe next weekend. I’m not sure. I leave tomorrow though.
I’ve gone through so many photos, my father, Aunts and Uncles, Grandma Lupe. She was so pretty, so tiny when she was younger. Seeing her as a young woman helped me cope with seeing her very close to death now. I can see in her face and eyes the young woman in her wedding photo back in 1938. If I can just make that connection that she was young, she had children, she grew older and died, they I can see her as just a woman who now has to end and not my grandmother who prays over my head in Spanish, watches her Telenovelas and sends care packages with tamales.
I feel worse for my father. Aunt Irene showed me the video she had made from old Super 8 films of the family. My father at four, eight, dancing at Christmas as ten, dressing like Grandpa and wearing cowboy boots to school. He wanted to be so much like him, the taciturn man who never smiled in photos but whose voice I can still hear pronouncing my name like it’s meant to be. Nuh TUH lee uh. Heavy Mexican accent. My father has already lost his father, his hero, and now he’s losing his mother too. He’s technically an orphan after this.
One by one they are plucked off.
I’ve had bad dreams almost every night while I was here. One night was the standard, blank faces, which turned into the melting black eyes and mouth in Emily Rose. But I knew it wasn’t them, it was me, it was my own mind. Something in my own mind was distorting faces and distorting the truth, and that was the horror of the dream. Not the scary faces, not some devil otherworldly power coming to take over from the outside in. It was coming from the inside out, and that’s what tore at me.
Last night was not as graphic, but more emotional. Something about serial killers, but not killers, torturers, sexual but not in a rape sort of way, fetishist torturers. Thinking about it, just thinking about the feeling makes me hyperventilate and start to cry in the most wimpering sort of way, like pleading. Crying like pleading. At breakfast I had a panic attack about it and had to calm myself down, saying over and over that no one is coming to get me.
They are two men, possibly three but only one or two of them actually come into contact with me. One or two of the possible three come into contact with others. One looks like a short Stephen Dorff, in that crazy blonde Cecil B. Demented sort of way. Another is tall, dark haired, nerdy and skinny. I can’t remember the third, but I think he was also dark haired. They are all young, and mostly just curious.
They have IVs and needles and bags to fill; bleed me until I am so week I can do nothing else but lay there and cry, pleading. Sometimes they cut me with little knives, very sharp and small, like exacto knives, only my stomach and arms. But I don’t move, I don’t fight, I’m too weak. I’ve lost so much blood. It spurts out of my arm when they remove the tubes but not the needles. It doesn’t hurt, I have no pain. I’m just so weak, so so weak and I know I’m going to stay that way for a long time. No one helps me. They do this to me twice in the dream, the second time I haven’t recovered the loss of all that blood, but I’m still bled within an inch of my life. All I can do is cry in some faint, dizzy, pleading way.
There are phantom pains in the crook of my arm like when I have to have blood drawn, a dim throb of broken skin and emptied veins. I’m terrified, but it’s just a dream.