You never met them - Marie, Retha, Bill or Carl depending. But what does it matter - you don't like old people anyway. It's safer not to, I suppose. Old people are just waiting to stab you in the back - they all go and die after you got used to them being around.
Bubby was the first in my life. I was nine. The ache that that found me was the sound of my dad sobbing in the parlor. No one ever sat in the parlor - arch-backed chairs with stiff upholstery. It was an alien sound coming from an unfamiliar room. And I could see my mom through the slatted door, seated next to him, hands comforting, the portable phone in their lap. It was odd to see my mom holding not one of her children, but this frail and shaking wreck of a man. I knew what had happened from the sounds he was making. That Bubby died. It was resigned weeping - not like the sounds he would make if a young person had been killed unexpectedly. Bubby was 98 years old.
She had intimidated me. (Though not on family visits. Those were fine, mom allowing me to cling to her skirts no doubt.) Once I was supposed to be spending the weekend with her, but after riding the bus to the grocer's, returning to her studio in a high rise for the elderly, and learning from her veiny and wrinkled hands how to form plum dumplings... I insisted on calling my mom to come pick me up. No thank you, I didn't want to stay the night. To this day I have no idea why. Was she speaking unintelligibly in Czech? Did she boss me around? Was the smell of age so noxious? I wish I could go back and spend the weekend with her. Play checkers and watch soap operas. I regret my failure to squirrel away as many moments with this woman as I could. She was more of a mother to my dad than Grandma, and his face glows when he tells stories about his boyhood with her. That means something - a person like her is important to a person like me. She stopped existing, though. And I didn't really know that could happen. But I suspected as much.
Death made herself known to me since I was too young to understand the rules of probability. She whispered to me late at night when I was 7, 8, 9, face toward the window under the canopy of the antique bed Nana had given me as a birthday present. The voice whispered, "Your mom will be driving home from late tonight. After midnight. So dark. Those curvy Auburn roads. Drunk drivers common on a Friday. The odds are not good - especially because she makes this treacherous drive home from work (surely exhausted) every second weekend. That makes her more likely to... die. On the road. The more one drives the more likely one is to crash - it's only a matter of time for her." [Even as I write this, the old familiar nerves tingle. The irony that I could be invoking disaster by using this condescending tone to name the ancient fear childish.] I worked this fear late at night like a rosary, finding some kind of solace in worry. Preparing for the worst seemed safer than being surprised.
But a fear is different from an event. Insidious whispers different from soundlessness. A death can be like becoming deaf to a sound you once knew. Losing a color. This - a death - is a violent reordering of the insides. A crushing and rebuilding of What Is.
The ripple was even greater when Papa stopped being. He was like home base - as safe as a human presence could be. Like a plant, he consumed all the carbon dioxide of a situation, easily oxygenating the room and making it possible for anyone to thrive. After he was gone, the polarizing personalities in the extended family clashed so much that I eventually reconfigured my holidays to avoid the day before and the day after. But fuck the holidays. What changed was that... well, if I could stop knowing someone I knew as intimately and enduringly as I knew him, maybe there was no God. Maybe my relationship with this God that I had grown up with (who's laughter I had never heard, bear hugs I had not felt, proud gaze I had not enjoyed), maybe that was just as fictional as this dead man now was. The memories of Papa - they were short stories and films. Not a living person. And if something as real as Bill Newell could stop being, then it seemed likely there was nothing Real. Just encounters. Fluidity. Brain chemistry. Days.
Four years later when his wife finally followed him, after she spent years of striving to keep on keeping on, and then years of pining for their reunion... the possibility of a living Reality had managed to reassert itself on me. Nihilism, atheism hadn't made a compelling enough case. And, now guided by the sense that Nana is no less real now that her body was buried, I have been accepting her exit with more grace than I could have asked for. She, who was the Last Unicorn to me - the narrator of my life's direction from birth - the wicked witch whose henchman I loved to be - the blessed woman who took me to pierce my ears when my parents refused to allow it. I suppose I just don't know how to believe she is no more.
At first, I was furious with her. My entire life, she'd never prepared me for the possibility that she would leave - painted herself as a survivor who'd endured the Depression, been thrown from a bull onto a barbed wire fence, fallen out of a second story window, been hit by a car 3x, cancer 4x, a broken back, and surely more threats I am forgetting. Death was not in the cards for her, she intimated religiously. But she left me after all - ME! How could she?????? Why does death feel like such a betrayal?
Ultimately, my anger has relaxed into peace. It must be the conviction that I loved her as well as I could and gave her as much joy that a granddaughter might, that is allowing me to release her. Unlike the ruinous regret of my failures to lavish enough affection on Bubby and Papa. Regrets are what haunt. If I ever loved someone, I know it was Nana. Probably to the detriment of my bonds with other grandparents. And my many acts of treason against her, they elude my memory kindly. I see them there, lurking in the corners, but they are decidedly meager in the looming shadow of our fierce bond.
Each death, I've experienced so differently. But the ache - that is consistent. It's strange that my childhood death fantasies were always about my parents or siblings, never the old people. I didn't know that they would leave such craters in the surface of my heart. It seemed natural that the grandparents would die eventually - only horrifying if someone living in my house were to disappear before their time - but it's not natural at all. Ever. Even if medical miracles have showered on us dozens of years and thousands of memories after someone's natural time of death. Papa had an extra 30 years. Nana, 25. Bubby, who knows? Still it's not natural for them to go.
I almost unconditionally love change, surprise, adjustment, a fresh perspective - for better and worse. But the elimination of a human being is not well with my soul. It is an irreparable emptiness that only faith can calm. I dread the next funeral I'll attend but have desisted in fearing specific deaths now, knowing that preparedness helps none. Only love. Love alone makes death feel less like theft.
