Bliss at the Precipice
Keep it sharp, boys, it cuts better
When it comes to true grief, I was a late bloomer. My first memory of genuine sadness was the day my family moved back to the states after a five-year-stint in Paris, France. I can still remember with crystalline clarity, crying and turning back in the car to watch our house fade over the hill; and for whatever reason, the memory stuck in my head of my last bowl of cereal and my favorite spoon sitting in the empty bowl after I was finished eating.
I was a painfully sensitive child. At an early age I found that I had an odd sense of empathy for unusual things such as random strangers or inanimate objects. When I thought of that spoon in the bowl, I felt sorry for it.
Around this same period in time, I was screwing around in a hotel lobby’s game room while my parents booked a room, when another kid, a black boy, older than I was and much larger, came into the room. We played around with the cue ball on the pool table and made small talk. For some reason I began to feel an intense sense of sadness around and for this kid. He gave no indication that anything was wrong, said nothing along those lines, and yet I remember crying to my mother about it.
I’m not sure if it was a blessing or a curse, but I managed to avoid funerals until I was just shy of 30. And then, within the course of six months, I attended five of them. In order, there were the ones for each of my maternal grandparents, then the ones for each of my in-law’s parents, and finally the wife of my therapist (don’t ask, it was riotously inappropriate, a pattern that has haunted my rocky history with psychotherapy). After that stretch of tangible loss, I was so emotionally exhausted I was unable to attend the funeral for my paternal grandmother, something which I regret, but which was not possible given my mental state at the time. I felt shell-shocked, ending up in a state of constant anxiety, expecting the next piece of bad news at any moment. I ended up with a full-blown panic disorder, and have had to deal with excessive anxiety ever since. That was a rough stretch. I’m prone to those, apparently. Over the years I’ve noticed that I tend to get them in big, ugly bunches.
The first two of the funerals—and the hardest ones for me to deal with—were those for my maternal grandparents. Both of them died from lung cancer, three months apart, in their mid 80s. My grandfather smoked most of his adult life, including many years of heavy pipe smoking. My grandmother never smoked a day in her life, and yet she was the first to go, three months prior to his death. I wasn’t prepared for all that loss, and it really took a toll on me.
After my grandmother’s gut-wrenching service, during which I watched my grandfather—a proud, strong, tall, and endlessly kind man—come apart, we returned to their home to spend a couple final days with him. We all knew that once we left to fly home, the next flight back would be for his funeral. It was surreal to realize that, to be in someone you love’s presence knowing full well that when you part you will never see them again, that they will be gone forever.
In preparation for my grandmother’s funeral, my mother had made copies of a favorite portrait of my grandparents so that our family would all have a copy to take home as a keepsake. The original framed photo hung in the hallway of my grandparents’ modest home. One day I noticed that there were lip markings on the glass over my grandmother’s half of the photo. My grandfather had been kissing her goodnight every night before bed.
The night before we flew home to Texas, I stayed up well past midnight with my grandfather, just the two of us, and I mostly listened to him as he recalled parts and periods of his life, lamented the loss of his wife and of his own life, and tried his damnedest to keep up the illusion of calm. I distinctly remember him saying, “You live your whole life, and for what?” His pain and anger at having reached the end and not being ready for it was something I’d never dealt with before.
When I convinced him that he needed to get some sleep and reminded him that I had to catch a redeye home, he made every effort to stall, wanting to share anything he could to keep the night going as long as possible, to fight back against the end. Breaking that off was torture for me. The next morning, as we loaded into the car, he stood on the doorstep waving and crying. I put everything I had into appearing strong for him, but when we pulled out of sight of his house I lost it. That experience has had a fundamentally profound effect on my perception of many things in the years since.
My grandfather was a special man in my life. He was a role model to me for how to treat others with compassion, and how to appreciate everything you could while you were still able to do so. He even tried to teach me how to fish because it meant so much to him. He was also very funny. His wry sense of humor was so subtle that if you didn’t know him, you might not pick up on it. He made up his own songs, silly stuff with rhymes, much like children’s songs. He was a cool guy.
He also had a tendency to save odd things. He wasn’t a hoarder though. Their house was always clean and always tidy. I never saw any clutter there. It was more that there were just certain things that he held on to, kept because he couldn’t see the point in throwing them away. Things like the cotton from medicine bottles, toothpicks, takeaway napkins, and plasticware and condiment packets. He also would take handfuls of candy at restaurants on his way out the door, and then hand them out to everyone he met. My mother guessed that my grandfather saved these things because he lived through the scarcity of the depression and appreciated their value. It was a fair argument, and probably not entirely untrue.
Personally, I think that those things to him were perfectly usable, and why throw them out? It was sensible. And as it turns out, I save that kind of stuff too (barring the cotton from medicine bottles, because they don’t put cotton in there anymore, and I’ve never once had a need for wads of cotton). I even save jars sometimes and use them for drinking glasses. I stopped saving plastic containers though, like for margarine and stuff, because we have plenty of storage containers at home already.
I live in an apartment, so we don’t have curbside recycling service like all the single-family homes in town. Yes, I could take my recycling items to a recycling center, but it’s beyond impractical. I am one of the “one missed paycheck away from the street” guys. Driving ten miles in a car with no AC, using gas I can’t afford, to recycle stuff that ends up a drop in the bucket, is not a sensible decision in my opinion. You pick your battles.
Even at my work I fret over the waste. We throw away forests worth of paper and it makes me a little crazy. Our multi-billion dollar company doesn’t want to spring for recycling, so, everything is thrown in the garbage.
I also keep things until they either get lost, or come apart. And once I find something I use and like, such as a guitar or an amplifier for example, I will keep it forever. I hardly ever buy new musical gear, and I hardly ever sell any of it either. It’s not like the new stuff makes me a better musician.
It’s weird and a bit bothersome to me how inherently conservative this part of me can be, especially considering my general rule that I would rather be thrown, bleeding, into a piranha tank than support anyone on the right. Let’s be honest, those guys are dicks. But then, nobody is entirely one-dimensional. Don’t get me wrong. Many, many people are complete assholes and always will be, regardless of how much they love their mother, or donate to charity, or whatever the fuck they do that isn’t entirely horrible. I try to make every effort to remain on the good side of that spectrum.
I also try to be as honest with myself as I possibly can. I don’t want to lie on my deathbed wondering who the fuck I am, what the hell I’ve done with my life, and why I sucked so much. That’s terrifying to me. My deathbed dream is to take incomprehensible amounts of psilocybin when the end is near and see what happens. But I’ll settle for strength and peace in the face of the unknown. And when it happens, and you hear about it and care at all, go have some fun. Don’t get all weird about it. I don’t want that.
The things I learned about love and persistence and class from my grandfather are the most valuable things I saved from him, and I fully intend to take that shit with me when the time comes.
I try not to hold onto grief anymore. It’s extremely poisonous to do so, because as I know all too well, grief will destroy you, will consume you from the inside out like a ravenous parasite. It was a hard lesson, but an essential one. It’s okay to mourn, but it’s a mistake to let it control you.
In 2006 my mother died suddenly after a brutal stretch of health problems that layered themselves on top of her, ultimately causing her heart to stop beating. She got to meet my baby son, and missed the birth of my daughter. I still miss her terribly, and I always will. But I don’t let her death control me. And that was a fear I carried with me until the day I received the dreaded phone call. I never had much confidence in my ability to handle her loss, if I was still around when that day came. And then when it happened, I handled it as well as a person can. Grief is like death in that it is inseparable from life. You can’t escape these things. Grief can become a compulsion, and the fear of death can become an obsessive waste of time. The best you can do is embrace the reality of them both. They are always coming. They just are.
You can’t avoid death. And you can’t avoid ever being sad, at least not at the expense of your humanity. Put effort into giving them both a seat at your table. However you are able to do this, do it. And don’t stop trying, even if you’re never quite there. It’s as worthy as anything you’ll ever try to do.
As for that weird empathy thing I’ve got going on, it’s still there, but I’ve trained myself to be pretty good at shelving it, because left unchecked it can become a problem.
So, in that spirit, fuck off, because I’m already tired of playing nice.