This year on my birthday: 66. This year four days after my birthday: my mother will be gone for 27. It’s easy to keep track of her absence because she died a month before my younger son was born. I will always know how old he is.
Come a week in March, both boys will roll round one year older. THAT same week will mark my sister being gone four years.
The confluence of dates is not my doing. My mother died four days after my birthday and my sister died on one of my son’s birthdays.
Noticing is inescapable, in other words.
And it’s not morbid as it turns out. Listening to a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert while walking Finn this morning opened up some pockets of gladness or recognition or something. They talked about grief. How it’s a gift. Or rather, how still being alive is a gift. It’s more nuanced than that though, given how grief acts as a vessel for remembrance, celebration.
Both of them experienced devastating losses early. Cooper’s father died of heart disease when he was ten and then eleven years later his brother jumped off a building, killing himself (while their mother watched). Colbert also lost his father at age ten, but in an accident. That accident also claimed the lives of two of his brothers. Their conversation is really worth a listen.
I was born just after sunset in a hospital that no longer exists. Here’s a haiku I wrote last week.
Cooper is documenting cleaning out his mother’s apartment. She died in 2019 and apparently she left notes for him everywhere. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while.
Looking at this doll without a note, how would D know that I dyed the wool, cotton strips, and linen myself? Or that I knit the legs in the waiting room of Children’s Hospital while a surgeon put pins in his arm, all the while praying for his bones to knit (get it?) and heal. Or that the striped top came from a shirt I wore frequently when he was little, the collar from a cuff of a sweater of his dad’s?
PS it didn’t occur to me until after posting this that year zero for me would’ve been sixty-seven years ago. But the syllables don’t work for the haiku form!
The support and love that readers offered here moved me profoundly. Thank you! I’d considered turning comments off for the announcement that my sister had died and I’m glad I didn’t know how! Locally, friends have stepped up with legion acts of generosity. Flowers. Dinners. Errands. Packing up the apartment. Prayers. The word that I hear in my head this week to describe friendships is: MIGHTY.
My sister had many compulsions, all of which added up to a disordered life and her premature death at 64. She’d been incapacitated physically for most of the last ten years and morbidly obese for nearly the entirety of her adult life.
Her need was bottomless, her rage explosive, the triggers countless. There were many times over the last nine years when I didn’t think I would survive her. But I offered up a battered loyalty.
Relating to my sister was so crushingly difficult that the demands placed by her remaining mess feel very nearly trivial.
Her clip file, however, poses special problems. For one thing it’s huge — the equivalent of ten banker’s boxes? Fifteen? It’s hard to tell yet, because I keep finding more.
The collection was housed in boxes that lined the walls and spilled into her teensy living spaces. Also in cardboard lids, recycled Kleenex containers, drawers and scattered on table tops. Bills and medical statements mixed in. Foil packs of albuterol buried. While fetching her things (coffee, lunch, address book), I constantly tripped over some box or other. Consolidation, not allowed. I felt a constant, smoldering resentment of all her fucking paper.
The above assemblage represents just a third of the images she pulled while at the nursing home. She couldn’t sit up. Had no scissors. Knew she was dying. But she kept at it.
As for myself, being a collage artist who also sometimes uses images as writing prompts, I view these papers as a treasure trove.
The second they assume an ugly weight, which might be tomorrow, I’ll recycle.
After ten years of not exactly saintly but certainly thorough and effective advocacy for someone with an unfortunate cluster of problems, your vocabulary changes. Words like ‘impairment,’ ‘handicap,’ and ‘disorder’ become second nature. You may not like their clinical sheen, but since they’re far better than the words applied during a tempestuous childhood, you use them. The ugly echoes: ‘fat slob,’ ‘fucking nuts,’ and ‘impossible.’
Indolence, apathy, compulsive consumption of low brow television and food, the repetitive shooing of most people away, and the manufacturing of insult and victimhood with others, it turns out, leave a grubby residue.
When you’re telling yourself that it wasn’t enough to supply her with a brand new pack of jewelry findings — that you should’ve figured out how to get her crafting as well — you’ll need to remember this.
As to fatalism: think I’m gonna start taking my social security. At 62, I am now the age my mother was when she died. I’ve outlived my father by eight years. My sister is receiving hospice care at 64.
The destruction was unexpectedly and utterly fascinating. Yes, there went the bedroom then the room with the radio, the staircase — but what an efficient and powerful brutality! I was no longer the target, I was the gun. Sometimes the bucket chewed on support beams like a hungry beast. Other times the operator used it to nudge weakened walls into collapse, not unlike a mother animal nudging her wayward young. How did the operator know when to grab and claw and when to shove and tip? I was the finger pulling the trigger.
It was 19 degrees that morning. Gloves off to use the camera, my fingers quickly froze. Finn had hopped up onto the rock wall at my back, so when he started shivering I could feel it immediately. Oh but I wasn’t ready to leave!
Close to dusk, I went back only to be shocked at the uniformity and anonymity of the debris. It seemed to consist only of wood and bits of insulation. Where did the bed springs go? The yellow velvet cushions of the couch? Naturally, not a chip of the praying figurines showed up, but the pink bathroom tiles? How did they so thoroughly vanish? The crocheted afghan that had occupied the end of one of the beds just hours earlier might as well have been vaporized.
There were two very large stuffed creatures, pierced and toppled in a gruesome fashion. There was a piece of wood (part of a closet wall?) on which an oil change had been noted. A coil of wire. A glove. But not much else except round back.
Since the basement was still intact after day one, I went back to see what I could grab, not quite remembering earlier rationales for restraint. Perhaps the linens? Maybe that strange collection of incense burners? But to no avail. The basement door gushed pieces of the caved-in house like a barfing mouth.
On the second day of demo, they wrecked the last of the wooden structure and removed most of the debris. Again the utter lack of identifying detail in what was left seemed physically inexplicable. How could there be so little evidence of all those things — of all those years of living?
I told myself that if I found anything I would treat it as something important.