Mortality: Non-Fiction
Mar. 14th, 2011 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drownedinlightSo, I went through a few kleenex on this one. It's very personal, so yeah. this is called Mortality.
I remember a time during the summer I turned nine (at least, I think it was that summer), we were staying with my Aunt Diane over the summer, because Clarence, my mother’s father, had died, and Mom had to go and sort out his “estate.” I use the word estate very loosely, because I remember junk piled up in his living room, and standing for at least an hour, which is a long time when you are nine.
“There’s no place to sit in here,” I whined. “The only clean thing is his wheelchair.” Even that had a thin layer of dust settled over it. I don’t remember what expression my sister made, but I imagine in my head that she was grinning when she said,
“Well, what if had been sitting in that naked?”
I stood, until I was hopping foot from foot because my feet hurt so much, and my mom told me to go sit in the van while she sorted through some of the mess.
The heat hung in the air; dry or not, it was still Arizona in June—so it wasn’t when I was nine, because I remember, we celebrated my birthday while we were there, and I remember during my ninth birthday we were moving into the house, and definitely not in Arizona. So I was probably ten, or I might have been eleven. I think that was it. I got a really cool pair of embroidered jeans that I loved, and grew out of in a year, and Mom said she would have bought me a twenty pound chocolate bar if it would not have melted.
And in the scene I am thinking of, we are sitting on my Aunt Diane’s porch, and she and Mom are smoking, and we are all just talking. About what I can’t remember. It was probably about Clarence, but maybe not. Aunt Diane once talked about how she got a model ship that decorated one of her walls. But it might have been about Clarence. And if you are wondering, “Why does she call her grandfather, Clarence?” Well, it’s because when I first met him, he was in a box, ready to be put in the ground.
But we were on the porch, and it was June in Arizona, and I remember that I was sitting on a leather chair. At first, because of the heat, and because I was wearing shorts, I stuck to that chair, like people normally do. But it didn’t take long for me to start sliding around due to the condensations accumulating there. I remembered thinking, “how gross.” Now I just think it’s a good story to tell.
I can’t remember if this was the same trip, but I think it was, because eventually we left my Aunt Diane’s and stayed in two different hotels. One was a motel, the other was a high rise in Phoenix, I think. I remember the high rise one, because I remember going to see Finding Nemo, and then going back to that hotel. I remember the motel, a Days Inn or something like that, because we spent almost every day and night in the pool trying to get away from the heat. But they might be two different trips. Maybe I was nine in one and eleven in the other. Mom offered to let Alizza drive during one, though so I would have had have been eleven, and that’s when we were staying in the motel, because my cousin Kyle went swimming with us. I think that was also the trip where we spent a lot of time at Aunt Diane’s, but maybe we started sleeping there because the hotels got too expensive. But I swear we saw Finding Nemo.
I’m having trouble thinking, because I know the same summer Clarence died was the same summer Grandma-Ma died.
She was my great grandmother—I only saw her seven times.
When she died, I felt emotionless, because everyone was crying, and there was a lot to the everyone. She had ten kids, and each of them had something like five of their own. Mom can remember most of her cousins by name, I am amazed to find.
There were three things: a church service, a memorial, and the actual burial. The church service was held and then a bunch of people came up and spoke, and my Aunt Cissie had actually written an essay, and I remember feeling a little embarrassed because Mom went up right after her and said, “I just want to say, like Cissie said…” I don’t remember what she said, but I remember that part because it was terrible rhetoric, and I had started caring about things like that. But it didn’t matter, because all of the Oklahoma/Arizona family talks like that. I remember my little brother didn’t want to be there, his ADHD was showing the entry time, and he remembered Grandma-Ma less than I did, because he only would have been five, or seven.
But during the memorial, with a great slide show, and there was music, and this whole great sanctuary, it had not been a small chapel like with the church service, it was all filled up with people standing in the back, and everything. And I could not bring myself to cry. I felt so inhuman at eleven-years-old and I just wanted to cry, and I would not go look at her body lying out in the casket. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, so I didn’t do it.
I met my great-aunt Patty at that memorial. She’s almost a year younger than my aunt Diane, because Grandma had Aunt Diane at fifteen or sixteen, and Grandma-Ma was still having kids then. I remember thinking it was odd, because she was only a year younger than Aunt Diane, and she was a great aunt, but her hair was neatly curled, and she wore a nice suit, and good make up and her teeth were all straight and white. And I remember thinking it was strange, because my aunt’s teeth were bent and yellow (and I was a shallow eleven-year-old), but my great-aunt just looked so nice.
I don’t remember much about the burial. I think Mom had us wait in the car.
Clarence’s burial was different because I didn’t care that I was apathetic; I had never met the man, and I think, by then, I had already heard the story of how he had left my Grandma.
It goes something like this:
When Mom was four, Grandma lay deliriously ill in bed. Clarence walks in and says, “We’re divorced.” And walks out. It’s embellished, and Alizza told it to me, so probably not much is true. But at the core it is. And it’s terrible, but that’s really one of the only things I know about him. Aside from the fact that he was married six times.
All I remember is that I stood around because my mother’s aunts got to sit, and I felt hot and wondered why people had to wear black to the funerals that happened during the summer. Especially those in muggy mosquito covered Oklahoma.
It was probably a different summer, when I was younger, but I remember when we were staying out with Grandma to visit family, Mom took us to a graveyard. More accurately, I think she and Grandma went to go see the family plot out in the back woods, and they wouldn’t leave us sitting around in the trailer my Grandma had (it was a different summer, because she was living in this only partially carpeted place, where if you were walking barefoot down some of the places, you’d have to jump from carpet square to carpet square, or run the risk of getting a splinter in your foot, or having a bug crawl across you).
It was twilight, and it was getting cooler as we walked through the grass that had grown up to where it wet my pant legs instead of just my shoes. Alizza told me not to walk on the graves, because someone would reach up and grab me, but I found it impossible. I think I got the image of Abe Lincoln rising from the dead (even though he has nothing to do with Oklahoma), and grabbing my foot by the ankle, and me screaming, but there being no one around to hear.
Eventually, Mom and Grandma found the plot where Grandma’s aunts and uncles were buried.
“Because all of the Petties married the Bennetts and all the Bennetts married the Petties,” Grandma said when we asked why they were all grouped together.
No, that was wrong; it was the Petties and the VanWinkles. Grandma-Ma was a VanWinkle who married a Bennett that’s why I got confused. But that stuck with me, being buried all in the same place, with your family, who had all intermarried (hopefully not more than once). I remembered staring hard at those stones, shoved into the ground so only the rectangular face showed. But I didn’t know what it meant.
That summer that Grandma-Ma and Clarence died, Clarence went first. I think Mom took us out of school in May to go to that funeral, and then we went back before we went to Arizona to sort out his junk.
When we were in Oklahoma for the funeral, we knew that Grandma-ma was not doing so well. It was the kind of thing where all you could do was wait, and you just got so terribly sad from the waiting that it almost consumed you. I think people must have cried a lot, because they cried when they were waiting for her to die. And then they cried when she was dying. And then they cried when she was dead.
When we left Arizona, and went back to Colorado, I remember it was less than a month before we got a call from someone, saying that it was time, and that the waiting was almost done. And so we drove back down to Oklahoma, and I remember feeling sick of being in that car, but I can’t imagine what Mom felt as we got closer and closer, wondering if we would make it time for her to say good-bye.
And it’s strange how Death brings people together for just the briefest of times, but my aunts who can’t stand each other and my mother who refuses to get in between them, just stood together and cried and held each other’s hands like it was the only thing in the world to hold onto. And I remember feeling sick and flush, because I could not cry; I could not summon the emotion and mortality into my eleven-year-old body to cry tears for a woman who could summon a great congregation of people with her death.
But I’m crying now. I can’t really fathom why memory would do this, because nothing’s changed except me. I still did not know these people as well as I should have, because time conspired against us and I was a shallow little girl then, who knew nothing that I know now of mortality and the chances we get. And I feel like nothing will ever make up for that, even though it couldn’t be helped. Because I was a little girl, it was all that could be done to keep them around long enough for me to meet them.
That summer, I remember finding Oreos in the microwave, because were had not been any space left on the counter when we were making lunch one day, so someone had shoved them in the microwave, and forgot them. I remember seeing Finding Nemo, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and laughing so hard. I remember those embroidered jeans and the yellow top I got to go with them. I remember the pool, and even the twenty pound chocolate bar I didn’t get. But those shouldn’t be the things I remember the most clearly.
I remember some of the dolls Grandma-Ma had left behind, only I don’t think I got one, because everyone else picked before me. I remember protesting not to let my baby cousin Chadlee call my Grandma “Grandma-Ma,” because that was the name of a woman who I had only met seven times in my whole life, and then vanished, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and I didn’t want that for him. I remember feeling sad. But I can’t remember crying. And sometimes, I think it’s better like that.
3/14/11 WC: 2090
I remember a time during the summer I turned nine (at least, I think it was that summer), we were staying with my Aunt Diane over the summer, because Clarence, my mother’s father, had died, and Mom had to go and sort out his “estate.” I use the word estate very loosely, because I remember junk piled up in his living room, and standing for at least an hour, which is a long time when you are nine.
“There’s no place to sit in here,” I whined. “The only clean thing is his wheelchair.” Even that had a thin layer of dust settled over it. I don’t remember what expression my sister made, but I imagine in my head that she was grinning when she said,
“Well, what if had been sitting in that naked?”
I stood, until I was hopping foot from foot because my feet hurt so much, and my mom told me to go sit in the van while she sorted through some of the mess.
The heat hung in the air; dry or not, it was still Arizona in June—so it wasn’t when I was nine, because I remember, we celebrated my birthday while we were there, and I remember during my ninth birthday we were moving into the house, and definitely not in Arizona. So I was probably ten, or I might have been eleven. I think that was it. I got a really cool pair of embroidered jeans that I loved, and grew out of in a year, and Mom said she would have bought me a twenty pound chocolate bar if it would not have melted.
And in the scene I am thinking of, we are sitting on my Aunt Diane’s porch, and she and Mom are smoking, and we are all just talking. About what I can’t remember. It was probably about Clarence, but maybe not. Aunt Diane once talked about how she got a model ship that decorated one of her walls. But it might have been about Clarence. And if you are wondering, “Why does she call her grandfather, Clarence?” Well, it’s because when I first met him, he was in a box, ready to be put in the ground.
But we were on the porch, and it was June in Arizona, and I remember that I was sitting on a leather chair. At first, because of the heat, and because I was wearing shorts, I stuck to that chair, like people normally do. But it didn’t take long for me to start sliding around due to the condensations accumulating there. I remembered thinking, “how gross.” Now I just think it’s a good story to tell.
I can’t remember if this was the same trip, but I think it was, because eventually we left my Aunt Diane’s and stayed in two different hotels. One was a motel, the other was a high rise in Phoenix, I think. I remember the high rise one, because I remember going to see Finding Nemo, and then going back to that hotel. I remember the motel, a Days Inn or something like that, because we spent almost every day and night in the pool trying to get away from the heat. But they might be two different trips. Maybe I was nine in one and eleven in the other. Mom offered to let Alizza drive during one, though so I would have had have been eleven, and that’s when we were staying in the motel, because my cousin Kyle went swimming with us. I think that was also the trip where we spent a lot of time at Aunt Diane’s, but maybe we started sleeping there because the hotels got too expensive. But I swear we saw Finding Nemo.
I’m having trouble thinking, because I know the same summer Clarence died was the same summer Grandma-Ma died.
She was my great grandmother—I only saw her seven times.
When she died, I felt emotionless, because everyone was crying, and there was a lot to the everyone. She had ten kids, and each of them had something like five of their own. Mom can remember most of her cousins by name, I am amazed to find.
There were three things: a church service, a memorial, and the actual burial. The church service was held and then a bunch of people came up and spoke, and my Aunt Cissie had actually written an essay, and I remember feeling a little embarrassed because Mom went up right after her and said, “I just want to say, like Cissie said…” I don’t remember what she said, but I remember that part because it was terrible rhetoric, and I had started caring about things like that. But it didn’t matter, because all of the Oklahoma/Arizona family talks like that. I remember my little brother didn’t want to be there, his ADHD was showing the entry time, and he remembered Grandma-Ma less than I did, because he only would have been five, or seven.
But during the memorial, with a great slide show, and there was music, and this whole great sanctuary, it had not been a small chapel like with the church service, it was all filled up with people standing in the back, and everything. And I could not bring myself to cry. I felt so inhuman at eleven-years-old and I just wanted to cry, and I would not go look at her body lying out in the casket. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, so I didn’t do it.
I met my great-aunt Patty at that memorial. She’s almost a year younger than my aunt Diane, because Grandma had Aunt Diane at fifteen or sixteen, and Grandma-Ma was still having kids then. I remember thinking it was odd, because she was only a year younger than Aunt Diane, and she was a great aunt, but her hair was neatly curled, and she wore a nice suit, and good make up and her teeth were all straight and white. And I remember thinking it was strange, because my aunt’s teeth were bent and yellow (and I was a shallow eleven-year-old), but my great-aunt just looked so nice.
I don’t remember much about the burial. I think Mom had us wait in the car.
Clarence’s burial was different because I didn’t care that I was apathetic; I had never met the man, and I think, by then, I had already heard the story of how he had left my Grandma.
It goes something like this:
When Mom was four, Grandma lay deliriously ill in bed. Clarence walks in and says, “We’re divorced.” And walks out. It’s embellished, and Alizza told it to me, so probably not much is true. But at the core it is. And it’s terrible, but that’s really one of the only things I know about him. Aside from the fact that he was married six times.
All I remember is that I stood around because my mother’s aunts got to sit, and I felt hot and wondered why people had to wear black to the funerals that happened during the summer. Especially those in muggy mosquito covered Oklahoma.
It was probably a different summer, when I was younger, but I remember when we were staying out with Grandma to visit family, Mom took us to a graveyard. More accurately, I think she and Grandma went to go see the family plot out in the back woods, and they wouldn’t leave us sitting around in the trailer my Grandma had (it was a different summer, because she was living in this only partially carpeted place, where if you were walking barefoot down some of the places, you’d have to jump from carpet square to carpet square, or run the risk of getting a splinter in your foot, or having a bug crawl across you).
It was twilight, and it was getting cooler as we walked through the grass that had grown up to where it wet my pant legs instead of just my shoes. Alizza told me not to walk on the graves, because someone would reach up and grab me, but I found it impossible. I think I got the image of Abe Lincoln rising from the dead (even though he has nothing to do with Oklahoma), and grabbing my foot by the ankle, and me screaming, but there being no one around to hear.
Eventually, Mom and Grandma found the plot where Grandma’s aunts and uncles were buried.
“Because all of the Petties married the Bennetts and all the Bennetts married the Petties,” Grandma said when we asked why they were all grouped together.
No, that was wrong; it was the Petties and the VanWinkles. Grandma-Ma was a VanWinkle who married a Bennett that’s why I got confused. But that stuck with me, being buried all in the same place, with your family, who had all intermarried (hopefully not more than once). I remembered staring hard at those stones, shoved into the ground so only the rectangular face showed. But I didn’t know what it meant.
That summer that Grandma-Ma and Clarence died, Clarence went first. I think Mom took us out of school in May to go to that funeral, and then we went back before we went to Arizona to sort out his junk.
When we were in Oklahoma for the funeral, we knew that Grandma-ma was not doing so well. It was the kind of thing where all you could do was wait, and you just got so terribly sad from the waiting that it almost consumed you. I think people must have cried a lot, because they cried when they were waiting for her to die. And then they cried when she was dying. And then they cried when she was dead.
When we left Arizona, and went back to Colorado, I remember it was less than a month before we got a call from someone, saying that it was time, and that the waiting was almost done. And so we drove back down to Oklahoma, and I remember feeling sick of being in that car, but I can’t imagine what Mom felt as we got closer and closer, wondering if we would make it time for her to say good-bye.
And it’s strange how Death brings people together for just the briefest of times, but my aunts who can’t stand each other and my mother who refuses to get in between them, just stood together and cried and held each other’s hands like it was the only thing in the world to hold onto. And I remember feeling sick and flush, because I could not cry; I could not summon the emotion and mortality into my eleven-year-old body to cry tears for a woman who could summon a great congregation of people with her death.
But I’m crying now. I can’t really fathom why memory would do this, because nothing’s changed except me. I still did not know these people as well as I should have, because time conspired against us and I was a shallow little girl then, who knew nothing that I know now of mortality and the chances we get. And I feel like nothing will ever make up for that, even though it couldn’t be helped. Because I was a little girl, it was all that could be done to keep them around long enough for me to meet them.
That summer, I remember finding Oreos in the microwave, because were had not been any space left on the counter when we were making lunch one day, so someone had shoved them in the microwave, and forgot them. I remember seeing Finding Nemo, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and laughing so hard. I remember those embroidered jeans and the yellow top I got to go with them. I remember the pool, and even the twenty pound chocolate bar I didn’t get. But those shouldn’t be the things I remember the most clearly.
I remember some of the dolls Grandma-Ma had left behind, only I don’t think I got one, because everyone else picked before me. I remember protesting not to let my baby cousin Chadlee call my Grandma “Grandma-Ma,” because that was the name of a woman who I had only met seven times in my whole life, and then vanished, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and I didn’t want that for him. I remember feeling sad. But I can’t remember crying. And sometimes, I think it’s better like that.
3/14/11 WC: 2090
Piece Count: Same
Project Count: 32798
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