Long Gone Now
On the whiteboard, under the heading “Today’s Goals,” was written one thing: DNR. I leaned over the hospital bed and peered into his gaping, gasping mouth, riddled with fillings. Above it sat a nose, similarly shaped to my own, the nostrils of which spilled over with errant hairs. They were pointless to pluck, as the whole of him would soon be ash anyway.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I told him. “Don’t do anything crazy.”
If he were to regain consciousness and look to his left, he’d see a piece of particle board haphazardly duct-taped into the window frame of his room in the ICU unit, in the hospital the eight-page local paper reported would soon declare bankruptcy because apparently a town of 43,000 doesn’t need a hospital. Most of the current residents of the town, which I always resented being born in, commute over two hours a day to work in Silicon Valley. They’re used to driving — what’s another 45 minutes squandered at the end of your life?
I generally only return to the town under duress, and this qualified. My grandfather, who became a de facto father to me when I finally abandoned the hopes I had in my biological one, was dying, having fallen into a coma from which he’d never wake up. The irony was lost on none of us gathered around his bedside that the previous owner of the stuffed lion someone slid into his arms, that being my sister, also once fell into a coma from which she never awoke. He never really got over her death (this statement implies one can “get over” the loss of a three year old), but at least he’d soon be in a place where he no longer had to think about it.
After a series of false alarms, the wheezing finally stopped and the silence began. The nurse looked at her watch in order to call the time of death. When she told us, “I’m sorry for your loss,” she seemed earnest. He was 89 years old. I wondered what she said when the deceased was 8.
I walked my grandmother out to the desk to sign the death pronouncement and walked back into the room and pulled his scuffed, gold plated watch from his bloated wrist and that was that.
Weeks before, when he had been placed into the “senior living facility,” I wrote the following:
The body is going but the mind is still there and that’s what makes it so difficult, what makes it feel like Johnny Get Your Gun, what makes interacting with him like a hostage trying to negotiate their own release.
The crime which resulted in his imprisonment in the senior living facility was this: he occasionally woke up in the middle of the night not knowing where he was, or what year it was, and blearily pissed in the corner of the room. During the day, he was mostly cogent, albeit miserable, because he could no longer see and thus could no longer read novels purchased from the drugstore about lawyers investigating miscarriages of justice. When my grandmother signed him over to the facility, he sat silently on an overstuffed leather couch in the corner, hands folded in his lap. The look on his face was that of an ashamed child facing punishment. He no longer resembled a father.
In the days that followed he would beg, to the extent a man from the Old Country can, to be released from this prison of fluorescent lights and cardboard holiday decorations and Family Feud on a communal television turned to max volume. When the begging went nowhere, he attempted to escape, cutting his arm on the fence surrounding the property. I have little doubt he would have found his way back through the orchards that separated the facility and his home of 50 years.
I told myself I’d call him — I even saved the facility’s number in my phone, where it remains, in spite of the fact he unceremoniously died of pneumonia shortly after being put away.
I realize now we never really talked about feelings, only facts — his mother’s entire family was murdered in the Greek Genocide, his father was an alcoholic. When you have the facts, though, you don’t really need to talk about the feelings. You can surmise, given context clues, the emotional result of x, y and z.
As my grandfather sat in a coma, my mother and I flipped through an old family photo album. We came to a page containing a photograph of my great-grandfather, who died of cirrhosis two decades before I was born. After studying it, my mother looked up at me. “I don’t think I ever had a conversation with that man,” she told me. “He’d just give the kids silver dollars.”
We never really talked about feelings, but at least my grandfather and I talked. Generally not about anything of consequence, but I still knew he appreciated me — he wouldn’t have driven a truck full of my effects down the I-5 when I moved to Los Angeles, or framed the certificate I got when I made the Dean’s List in college, if he didn’t.
A consequential thing my grandfather once told me was that, when she was 89, his mother told him she did not want to become a burden on her children. Despite being in relatively good health, she willed herself into death shortly thereafter. I refuse to believe his own death is circumstantial, because that strips him of agency. I choose to believe it was, is, deliberate. You create a myth when you don’t know the truth.
My mother told me how, more than anything, my grandparents just wanted me to be happy. “That's all they ever wanted,” she said. I sat in their house that evening and thought about how miserable I had been there for so many years.
The day before he died, when we had been summoned to greet the end and the breathing tubes had just been removed, I leaned over my grandfather’s bed.
“It’s Megan,” I told him. “Anthony’s here, too.” Comatose, he extended his liver spotted yet still substantial, callused, hand and shook Anthony’s, the picture of a gentleman to the bitter end. I stood there. I watched it. A goddamned miracle. He had conducted a miracle to tell me he was happy I found someone who would make me less miserable.
Prior to flipping through the photo album, I did not know my grandmother had a brother who killed himself (“How’d he do it?” I asked my mother. “Blew his fucking brains out,” she vulgarly replied, an vulgarity that, sadly, continues the fuck in me), nor did I know that my grandmother’s father abandoned the family, leaving my great-grandmother to painfully parent his collateral damage. I looked at photographs of my grandmother, having just given birth, posing alongside her father who decided, presumably in the interest of saving face, to show up for the occasion. In these photographs her smile is pained, forced — not easy like it is in the candids of her next to a big rock or hole in the ground or wherever the fuck her young family went on vacation. I looked at photographs of her mother, with the painted-on face I remembered from my childhood, and viewed her visage in a new way. (Well, two new ways. “I think I understand why Granny Rosa always looked so weird to me,” I told my mother. “She was wearing the wrong color foundation.”)
My grandmother never told me any of this, because she was never in the business of discussing emotions, or trauma and the byproducts thereof. A few months ago, a year after her husband had died, she told me her solution to trauma was to not think about it (therapists HATE this one trick!).
Before the body had been burned, she seemed hell bent on getting rid of his effects, placing them on the daybed in his office and telling anyone within earshot to take what they wanted. All the clothing I had just, weeks before, wrote his name in when they put him in the home laid in piles. I considered her actions callous at the time; I now see them as an act of self-preservation.
She pushed the clothes on me, using the excuse that I sell other people’s unwanted things and therefore I would probably like to sell this, a stained shirt that says AMERICA but was unethically manufactured in a Chinese sweatshop. When I was a child, my grandfather insisted on only purchasing American made products, a task which became more and more impossible the longer he lived.
Buying American was not the only antiquated thing he partook in. He was also a Mason.
As a result, his memorial service was held in my hometown’s Masonic Lodge, the same one I’d play in as a child while he cleaned the kitchen. What was billed as a “celebration of life” entailed the reading of a Masonic text prepared for such an occasion, delivered to a hall of shell shocked survivors. His friend Bill, who used to wear matching Three Stooges pajamas with him, broke into sobs twice while reciting dry, anachronistic copy he’d surely read aloud before.
I know the popular narrative is that Masonry is a nefarious organization, but it’s only nefarious insofar as anything non-native that was around at the founding of America is nefarious. When you see Masons in the 21st century, collected in a lodge that was built after the Great Quake of 1906, you see the target demographic of antenna television no-pain catheter commercials digging through a bin of loaner aprons to wear as they mourn the loss of one of their own. “Even when I was a kid,” I leaned in to tell Anthony, “these people were fucking old.” Powerful only by proxy and dwindling in numbers, they are all pomp and no circumstance. They are not long for this world.
When they die, no one will replace them, like the trees in my grandfather’s orchard, all gnarled and no longer bearing fruit. The stomachs of the younger ones all strain against their Hawaiian shirts. They, too, are not long for this world.