Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Biology

(1997)

I pull a chair over to the side of the bed and sit silently, holding my mother's hand. I want to be there when she wakes up. But what if she doesn't wake up? No. I don't need to think about that, not now. Not yet.

I close my eyes and hear voices. Old voices, from the past. The old ghosts. As long as I've heard these voices I've respected my obligation to listen, preserving their stories in my memory. My mind: where do the voices come from? Are the old ghosts really speaking through me, or are they propelled by my fancy, products of my imagination? No. These voices have always spoken to me, and I have never doubted them. I have felt, always, part of a life that's bigger than me. And while it's difficult to explain it, these ghosts-lives that expired before I knew them-have always been within me. In my mind, in my memory. Certainly I'm different, but that difference-believing in these voices-has always been my strength, my faith.

My faith is being tested...

Later, I stand outside, thinking about my life.

Above me the stars, in their serene discourse with the darkness, seem to hold the secrets I struggled to understand. Glimmering, so far away, that light: sending messages in a coded, unfathomable language.

...

What did I know about death? If you counted books and movies, plenty. If you limited it to actual experience, very little. I was too young and uninvolved during my mother's mother's death, in 1980, to perceive much beyond the simple fact that her dying made me very sad. I also understood that my grandmother was entirely too young to die and even if, at ten, I hadn't necessarily grasped this, I now had my mother's brush with death, at age fifty-five, to remind me.

The most recent funeral, my father's mother, whom I called Grammy, had occurred just six years earlier, in 1991. This one had been more difficult for me, for more than one reason. Obviously, as a twenty-one-year-old I knew exactly what was happening. More, I understood what was happening before it happened and, worse, understood what would happen after it happened. This is precisely the sort of insight a ten-year-old is incapable of processing, which is ultimately best for all involved. It was a difficult funeral for my father for all the readily discernible reasons, but I knew it was hitting my father hard because I knew how to read my old man. My father was showing less emotion than usual, which at best (or worst) was less than little.

(It was what it was, and I had slowly started to reconcile this reality as an unalterable component of our relationship. My father was a product of his era, just as his mother had been very much a product of hers, only more so. This was a woman who had come from a family that measured how little they had by calculating how much less they would have if they'd stayed in Ireland, which made them more or less identical to every family that had emigrated in the latter years of the last century. This was a woman who, as a young girl, had stood with her classmates after school and pretended she didn't recognize her uncle as he lurched, inebriated, down the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. The same uncle who'd been knocked unconscious by his brother-who happened to be a priest-for stealing the family turkey on Thanksgiving. The same uncle who played his ignoble part as the proverbial town drunk although, in fairness, every town had more than one drunk per town in those days, which made it more or less identical to every other town in America then, or now. The secret to my father, I knew, could be best understood by having a better understanding of this woman. The things that shaped him and the feelings that got caught in his throat could mostly be traced back to this woman, the same woman who had grown up to be a grandmother, thereby expunging the past and deflecting all outward signs of discontent into a post-maternal amity, which made her more or less identical to every woman who eventually found herself being called a different name once her children had children.)

Unlike my father's father's death three years earlier, which had been both sudden and unexpected, Grammy's death had been prolonged by several months of extreme, occasionally stark discomfort. It was as though a lifetime's reserve of fortitude and old-fashioned force of will had cracked like a frozen pond in spring, finally freeing her from a self-imposed stoicism. It wasn't quite accurate to describe her death as a relief, but it wasn't unfair to say it was, in many regards, welcomed-not least by my grandmother. It had long since become clear that, for understandable reasons, she'd never recovered from the shock of losing her husband. During this last year her physical and spiritual states had deteriorated rapidly. Too rapidly. This couldn't be inexplicable to anyone, considering how abruptly she'd lost the man she'd spent half a century with.

Her funeral had been difficult; more so than my grandfather's, which seemed incongruous since we'd had time to prepare for hers. I could appreciate what my father was dealing with: in the last four years he'd watched his son leave for college and then lost his parents, one after the other. So I'd braced myself for the possibility (inevitability?) that this was the occasion I would finally witness my father crying, even if it was no longer something I desired to see. Not now, not under these circumstances.

I was, nonetheless, unsurprised when my father displayed the same intransigence he'd exhibited at the first funeral. It might have been a relief, in its way, but rather than easing my mind that this was simply the way my father operated, it became excruciating to observe. Because I knew my old man was struggling, and I could hardly comprehend the type of effort this mindset necessitated. It was as though I could actually see my father hardening before me, clinching every muscle to restrain the grief imploding inside him.

(Where does it go when you won't let it escape? Does it work its way out at night, in dreams? Can you kill it with beer, or enough TV, or the ultimate antidote, religion? Can you pray that pain away, and ask God to cast a benevolent spell, transporting those concerns you can't afford to release? Do you just cover your eyes and close your mouth, forcing those feelings to suffocate slowly, with no chance to abscond?)

There was a reception afterward, at the same establishment we'd gone to three years earlier, which lent a solemn symmetry to the occasion. When it was time to offer a toast to the departed, my old man stood up. "She is the last vestige from a very different time, a disappearing time," he pronounced. "We won't see her kind again anytime soon, if ever." He went on to say some other things, but being a man of few words, the speech was short and dutiful, if respectful. I couldn't help noticing the words love, son, and God were never spoken.