lyris

I hardly let myself think it; it sounds so trite, so childish, so self-involved and pretentious. But even after admitting all of those things, it's still true. I am so tired of death.

It happens every once in a while. Your grandfather gets ill and slowly, slowly, he dies. It's as though the whole process is being played out at half speed. Less. Those last few moments of deceleration while the body shuts down, stretched and drawn (wan, and pale, turning to dust before life is gone) for months to the point where you can only realize the difference if you look at photos from a few months ago. Day to day, the change is so small.

Or, rather than waiting for that long process, he takes a gun to his face, leaving a violence for his sons to clean when they find him.

They die from cancer, from aids, from sudden heart attacks. They shoot themselves, hang themselves, over-dose on pills and booze. It is quick or slow and every one different because the people are different, the pain is different. And you are different.

You are six and you do not know death. You know pain, which is when you fall on the uneven walkway and skin your knee or you prick yourself on the cactus. You know pain and blood, the deep red of each. And you know tears. You know sickness, which is your mother's cancer, and the large chalk drawing she did of her own breasts before they took them away. You don't know your grandfather well; he lives on the other coast and your most poignant memory of him involves your father doing the Heimlich, and teeth that you didn't know weren't attached suddenly coming out of the old man's mouth. He taught you chess. He seemed very tall. So his death, with nothing but what you do know to compare it to, is sort of red and sort of chalky, and you draw tears because you feel that your father is sad.

And now you are eight. And you do know death, and death changes. You have seen how life is what keeps your chin from falling down and your mouth coming wide open. You have seen that death, like illness, really is chalky, like tissue for skin; death is old and slow. You know old age's fear of death and loneliness. You know clear plastic tubes and hospital beds and hospice and groups of other kids who deal with death, too. You know that life is plump. And you know that you don't like it that now there are these markers on your memories. Before. After. You don't like that death gets in the way so much of life. You enjoyed the flowers that the back yard used to have, when it was a back yard. You would pick them because there were so many and so many colors. And you wanted to show her, your Exchange student from Japan whom you liked because she was older but not too old. Only, when you got there, you couldn't think about the flowers anymore because where was Rachel, your big black lab who had guarded you on the beach and been your pillow? And your parents said she was dead and you couldn't think about the flowers anymore. You know it gets in the way.

They stop classes for a day and bring everyone into the theater to talk about the eighth grader who hung himself from a telephone pole outside his house. We cried because it was weird. We weren't sure why we cried, but we hug each other and said, "don't ever do something like that." And maybe that was the closest we ever were to each other there. And even that was getting in the way.

It gets in the way, but maybe less, you tell yourself when you are 14 and there is a Before and there is an After at your birthday party because your neighbor, Bob, who grew tomatoes and spoke too loudly, who sprayed your mom's roses even without asking, had a cancer that was faster than the other ones you knew. Livers are more important, you learn before everyone gets in their sleeping bags. The slow motion isn't, as much, and the After starts faster than before.

You feel that you are growing, that you can greet death and keep walking, meet a neighbor's son who has AIDS and smile and talk to him and retain a memory about M&Ms, and then go to school. You can think about your grandfather and go play outside. The Before and After are able to exist in you, you think.

But then you are sixteen and then you know grief, and it is not the depression, which keeps you in bed sometimes, or the anxiety which only allows you sleep with the payment of tears. It is not like sadness, alone in a bathroom at lunchtime, or anger, red like pain and like blood. It is new and you hate it for getting in the way again.

He had loaned you two books and you had kept them, and you didn't want to go back to the room where he had been teaching you physics, where he had jumped on tables and laughed at your meticulousness during the optics lab. You ditched school to see a movie, to keep walking, but this time it followed you, and you hated it for getting in the way. Doing schoolwork wasn't harder, it was simply impossible, like now you didn't have legs to walk on, not that they aren't working. You don't like that nothing seems to help. You plant a tree at school with the rest of them, but it seems like a quick fix; poetry, even as angsty and pretentious as you are capable at 16, doesn't begin to tap the depth of strange emotion you feel. And you think it's ridiculous, and it pisses you off.

When, in college, your mother flies back to the United States because her brother has commit suicide, you're already tired of it. You're tired of the breaks in your day to bawl shamelessly in public places and you're tired of putting your own life, your needs and wants on hold for someone who's already dead. You're tired of feeling like a bad person because you're used to death and you can say goodbye to people and wish that everyone else could, too, so that you wouldn't have to be tactful and feign sincerity. You're tired of people who look at you like some sort of devil because you're capable of saying that someone was a horrible human being, even after he's died. You want to go to your concert and you want to be able to feel sorry for yourself about your own shit. Death just butts itself in and expects you to care and you're tired of it.

I woke up this morning with high ideals of getting shit done. Art, work. I was going to spend some time cleaning the living room and some time being good to my body. But my mom called and even though I'd been waiting for this for months and every time my grandmother's number shows up on my cell phone's caller ID, I expect it, it was a little shocking, because even with all of the planning, it gets in the way. And even though I've said good bye and I'm not sad that she died, I cry and cry and it pisses me off that it's getting in the way again.