Family Consciousness (CW Exercise 7)
This is the story of my grandfather’s death, but really it is about my grandmother’s death, eventually, and my father’s, inevitably. This all happened after my grandfather died, but before he taught us all about singularity and time travel. This all happened before my grandmother died, but after she stopped baking cookies. Above all, this is a story about cats, not dogs. It is about swimming pools, but only above-ground pools, pregnant with implausibility and rotting leaves. If you are the type of person to prefer your swimming pools heated, with a serpentine lagoon, you will not enjoy this story.
If this was a better story, I could tell you what parting wisdom my grandfather felt necessary to share on his deathbed, which was in actuality more of a death-driveway: unpaved but final. If this was even a marginally better story I could tell you about my grandmother’s face when she locked the peeling yellow front door of her house for the last time. Instead, all I have is the early imprint of a language interchangeable only with objects and ideas. We didn’t have cookouts or pool parties. We had mildew, mathematics, broken light bulbs. This was our language. Before my uncle lost his leg but after he won a Ford Taurus means more than we were happy. After my grandfather died but before he taught us about potentiality in quantum physics, we had nothing.
In plain English, he died of prostate cancer. My family never spoke English, not around each other. We knew the truth. He died of an overdose of memory, more specifically a protracted dose of tampered milligrams administered throughout the last years of his life, when he went back to work to support himself and they took away our fiery tongues. To give you a better idea of where we are, this is before my grandmother threw away her pots and pans but after she stopped sleeping again. This before my grandfather died, but not much. If that’s not clear to you, you probably like lagoon-like swimming pools.
In the way that we were never a dog family, we all knew the secret of his death. Like I said, if this was a better story we could draw together and be strong and stoic but endearingly vulnerable for his death, and the lesson of his life. But this was after the swimming pool had filled with leaves several times over. This is before we knew anything about time travel. The only thing that isn’t lost in translation is this, and this.
Because one of our shared affinity for infinity and kitsch, we went to Bali Hai. This is the closest thing we have to a death story. This is after my sister learned to play a sixteenth note but before she could play a sonata. This is before I was fourteen but after I was twelve, and language was unformed. We had the chicken, and my grandmother had a Mai Tai. I would have to create the Rosetta stone for my family years later, after I learned all of the important concepts, like nicotine, monosodium glutamate, eternal return.
After this, but before my father covered all of the mirrors with Care Bears bed sheets, we went to the beach. This is after my grandfather stopped counting days. He drove, because although the learning curve had accelerated and I knew the different ways to say “nicotine” and what individual-level predicates were relevant to us, I didn’t have a license. We went to the beach, and I listened to my grandfather’s context whorl and whip around where he was perched on the hood of the car. I splashed in the sixty-degree-in-summer Massachusetts Ocean. I lost a flip-flop chasing a seagull. We used the same word to describe the sun. This was before he died, but not much. This was the morning he found blood in his urine, but we all knew it was really history and memory. This was the day he took me to the beach, regardless. On the way home, we stopped and had a slice of beach pizza and talked about Superman, but what I think we were really talking about was my grandmother’s gingerbread, and the disrepair of the swimming pool, and life. And death. And life.
But before this, before the blood and the beach and the ersatz Last Supper, there was that night at Bali Hai, and the closest approximation to denouement we would ever receive from him. This is when I was thirteen and a half; this is when my sister was ten. This is six months before he died, and seven before my grandmother left the house she and my grandfather had lived in for fifty-two years. We had the chicken, and he made a joke about MSG. My grandmother lit up cigarette after cigarette, fading in and out behind a stonewall of smoke. We all knew then, and at the end even in mamaloshen there is only one ultimate word for death. We finished; we were passing through the bright blue feathered arch into the reality of the garbage choked parking lot, when he said it. He said “I love you, goodbye.” He said “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated in the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” He said, “Let’s drive up to the battleships in the harbor one more time.”
If this was a better story, I could tell you what parting wisdom my grandfather felt necessary to share on his deathbed, which was in actuality more of a death-driveway: unpaved but final. If this was even a marginally better story I could tell you about my grandmother’s face when she locked the peeling yellow front door of her house for the last time. Instead, all I have is the early imprint of a language interchangeable only with objects and ideas. We didn’t have cookouts or pool parties. We had mildew, mathematics, broken light bulbs. This was our language. Before my uncle lost his leg but after he won a Ford Taurus means more than we were happy. After my grandfather died but before he taught us about potentiality in quantum physics, we had nothing.
In plain English, he died of prostate cancer. My family never spoke English, not around each other. We knew the truth. He died of an overdose of memory, more specifically a protracted dose of tampered milligrams administered throughout the last years of his life, when he went back to work to support himself and they took away our fiery tongues. To give you a better idea of where we are, this is before my grandmother threw away her pots and pans but after she stopped sleeping again. This before my grandfather died, but not much. If that’s not clear to you, you probably like lagoon-like swimming pools.
In the way that we were never a dog family, we all knew the secret of his death. Like I said, if this was a better story we could draw together and be strong and stoic but endearingly vulnerable for his death, and the lesson of his life. But this was after the swimming pool had filled with leaves several times over. This is before we knew anything about time travel. The only thing that isn’t lost in translation is this, and this.
Because one of our shared affinity for infinity and kitsch, we went to Bali Hai. This is the closest thing we have to a death story. This is after my sister learned to play a sixteenth note but before she could play a sonata. This is before I was fourteen but after I was twelve, and language was unformed. We had the chicken, and my grandmother had a Mai Tai. I would have to create the Rosetta stone for my family years later, after I learned all of the important concepts, like nicotine, monosodium glutamate, eternal return.
After this, but before my father covered all of the mirrors with Care Bears bed sheets, we went to the beach. This is after my grandfather stopped counting days. He drove, because although the learning curve had accelerated and I knew the different ways to say “nicotine” and what individual-level predicates were relevant to us, I didn’t have a license. We went to the beach, and I listened to my grandfather’s context whorl and whip around where he was perched on the hood of the car. I splashed in the sixty-degree-in-summer Massachusetts Ocean. I lost a flip-flop chasing a seagull. We used the same word to describe the sun. This was before he died, but not much. This was the morning he found blood in his urine, but we all knew it was really history and memory. This was the day he took me to the beach, regardless. On the way home, we stopped and had a slice of beach pizza and talked about Superman, but what I think we were really talking about was my grandmother’s gingerbread, and the disrepair of the swimming pool, and life. And death. And life.
But before this, before the blood and the beach and the ersatz Last Supper, there was that night at Bali Hai, and the closest approximation to denouement we would ever receive from him. This is when I was thirteen and a half; this is when my sister was ten. This is six months before he died, and seven before my grandmother left the house she and my grandfather had lived in for fifty-two years. We had the chicken, and he made a joke about MSG. My grandmother lit up cigarette after cigarette, fading in and out behind a stonewall of smoke. We all knew then, and at the end even in mamaloshen there is only one ultimate word for death. We finished; we were passing through the bright blue feathered arch into the reality of the garbage choked parking lot, when he said it. He said “I love you, goodbye.” He said “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated in the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” He said, “Let’s drive up to the battleships in the harbor one more time.”