In Which the Hospital Morphine Hits and My Grandfather Bud Rambles
You’ve heard this story before, and you’ll enjoy sharing it with others on the outside. One more thing, when I finally do die, if I end up dying, and I won’t… My grandfather says. He passes out from the pain or the substance numbing the pain and wakes up confused, once again, by the tubes in his nose and forearm drawing bile and replacing it with morphine. He squeezes my hand, hard as labor, and screws his eyes onto mine, ladling death into my open palm. You know what this means? This means I love you. It is the first time he has said these words to me. A painless grin walks up the corners of his mouth. His eyes ascend. I’m so happy. I just wish I were dead already. My mother, she died, and I love her. And my father. I can see them… And Barbara. “Yes, Grandma is up there. You’ll be with all of them,” I say. I don’t believe in a celestial future but he does, and we are on his terms. Yet he looks at me in terror, eyes quivering with unrecognition. I’ll be what? I don’t want to die. His expression shifts into remembrance. Barbara went first. She said she would die first. And my sister, Betty, she took me to the movies. She’s dead. And her husband Tommy. And Charlotte, my daughter. She was slow, do you remember? She lived in a special home, but we loved her. “Yes I remember she liked Coca Cola.” And Sid, and Barry, and Peter. And Susie Pearl. And Evelyn. I no longer recognize the names but it doesn’t matter. They are all angles within the same shape. And Mike and Maggie Patterson, and Lewis, and my grandfather Stephen.
He ran out of whatever juice was propelling him, like a wind-up toy petering out, and he settled into the look of calm, unquestioning authority that had characterized him for 88 years. “I love you Bud,” I said. And that in universal death there must be universal love did not seem true exactly but close enough for me to breathe out my grief and replace it with a mild strain of joy as the pendulum of sleep swung back over his eyes and I could leave.
The next morning when I asked, as a formality, the nurse said no, they had not administered morphine.
My Mother Dreads Summer
I go to the Gulf like people go insane. I go to the Gulf like my dad went to the bottle. I go to my mother, in the middle of my untethered twenties, to cut her loose from all the meaning she stages in the television’s glow, where phantom content exhausts itself amid the rockabye patter of the Corpus Christi Bay.
South Texas heat. Mother is wrapped in blankets in the bed. Another Summer, stuck to the Weather Channel, Hurricane Central, waiting, watching the incubation of a new spiral trauma. Mother’s vaccine: to inoculate memory with images of the hurt: salt water up to the nose, live wires, boxed lightning from burst transformers shedding their metal skin in the rain.
Yet still no plan for what to do when the eye of woe stops blinking tornadoes, and the neighbors decide whose pieces of fence are whose, and things seem calm. And what to do with the painkillers in the shoebox in Mother’s closet? Mirrors full of torpor. I want this loveless, frozen year to remain so, because I’m terrified of what thaws.
Do I seem alright to you? asks Mother.
You do.
Even though you flinch at the mention of a thunderstorm, you do.
Even though your neurons are the power lines in the street going nowhere, you do.
Even though Tammy and Meg and Greta and Joe and Cathy and Juan and all the couples that sit on your porch talking shit about snowbirds move with a faint hesitation as if trailing former selves, you do.
In the post-torrential dream we all still share, I am the wandering eye, shifting and scanning and tearing up neighborhoods with my camera that does not forget. The gas lines that slip into combustion. The striped sheepsheads belly-up like debris. Wood and bricks weep for the Body of Christ Bay.
Though there is laughter too, and charm, a banquet for survival. Tommy tells a joke and flips a burger for Mother in front of his collapsed shack, the roofbeams stacked like looseleaf pages on the table he cowered under with Craig, who is quiet. A lighthouse. Why do I weep seeing goodness? Such sudden scarcity. Mother laughs at the roofless homes, calling them open concepts, and I wish she meant it metaphorically, like zero, or grief. We’re diluting ourselves out of existence. Pebbles in sand.
Here, now, on the television, Ed the meteorologist warns of an unsurvivable red oval named Beta. I step between Mother and Ed, interrupting the storm’s path, trying to block it with the only body I was given.
If I could present her a reality less fraught than reality, and have it be real.
But I’m mute. To myself, I whisper the one teaching I can remember: We are adrift in a tense and joyless world that is falling apart at an accelerated rate.
