Your Hair Keeps Growing After You’re Dead.

When my father’s mother died, I was about four years old. She had been driving to work early one morning, I was told in my adolescence, and fell asleep at the wheel, drifting into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler. At the funeral, I was allowed to kiss her dead cheek, which I remember finding strangely cool and solid, like plastic. She didn’t smell like anything. I don’t remember a sensation of loss, but I do remember thinking she was being buried in a giant watch-box, since when my parakeet had died, that’s what had served as its tiny coffin.

I didn’t develop any interesting psychiatric peccadilloes (that I am aware of) as a result of this event in my young life. I didn’t develop a sexy heroin addiction, for example, for which I could have gone to a recovery center and which, after a drag on a cigarette and a dramatic plume of smoke, I could have blamed on my grandmother’s death. “I started on smack because I couldn’t get over seeing her lying there, dead as a big fat doornail,” I could have said. “I got on the horse and chased the dragon, and so on and so forth, because of my terrible grief.” I would have squinted away tears and then perhaps looked poignantly out the nearest window, as if staring off into a too-distant horizon. I might have then written a gripping memoir about it that could have been adapted into a major motion picture with Kathy Bates as my poor dead grandma. Who would have played me? It seems tacky to speculate. Drew Barrymore, is who.

When I got a little older, I became preoccupied with the notion that my dead grandmother, now residing in heaven, could and did watch me in my earthly activities. I became worried about going to the bathroom, for fear of my grandma peering supernaturally at me while I did my body’s dirty business. This fear also arose when I would dig the Hustler magazines out from under my parent’s mattress and flip through the pages, staring with a mixture of disgust and curiosity at the bizarrely contorted female bodies. I had no idea that pubic hair didn’t naturally grow in an exclamation-point shape until puberty. The combination of shame at the thought of my deceased grandmother gazing at me from above and panic at the notion of being caught made this entire activity one fraught with nauseous tension. But I still did it, because I was grimly fascinated.

The night my father’s mother died, he came in to my room in the middle of the night, sat down at the end of my bed, and sobbed in the dark. I pretended to be asleep, because even at four, I knew something was very wrong with him. I have never seen him cry before or since. I never told him that I was awake that night. I doubt he even remembers it.

After a few years of paranoid delusions regarding my grandma watching me while I ate secretly in my room or whispered “fuck you” at the back of my teacher’s head, my mother, who hated my father’s family, angrily and spitefully informed me that my grandma hadn’t actually been driving to work, she’d been driving to catch her cheating husband, my grandfather, in the act with another woman. And that she was probably drunk at the time. After that, I stopped whispering.

Untitled Work in Progress

Cleaning blood stains out of a light-colored carpet may seem like a daunting task, but with the right tools and a lot of elbow grease, it is possible to make it seem as though the blood was never there. First, get some cold water and an absorbent cotton towel. If the blood forms a trail from the couch where your mother sleeps to the front door, start at the first, and largest stain – the one likely formed when she stood up to call an ambulance while blood pooled around her feet. Start by soaking this area with cold water, and wait a minute or two for it to soak in.

The phone at my sister Molly’s house in Texas rang only a few times before she picked it up. It was two or three in the morning – I don’t exactly remember which – and her voice sounded rough and older than it does when she’s not woken from a dead sleep. “Mom’s in the ER,” I said. I remember feeling like I couldn’t catch my breath all the way, so everything I said was in phrases, fragments of terrible news, like ripped up newspaper with just a few words on each strip. “She had another heart attack.” She didn’t break down – we don’t do that – but her voice went up an octave. Maybe she was squeezing her sleeping husband’s hand. Maybe she hadn’t even opened her eyes yet as a told her the details in layers. “They told me they ‘lost her’ in the ambulance. I got here maybe ten minutes after the ambulance. They brought her back. In the ambulance.” I could see her from where I stood, surrounded by volunteer EMTs – people she worked with in our tiny rural town, where she was the deputy city clerk. A few of the EMTs were fellow city employees, but all of them were well-known to her. Their faces read panic and confusion – old ladies breaking their hips and teenagers smearing themselves across the highway with stomachs full of liquor are apparently not enough to inure one from being afraid that you might make a mistake and kill your friend. I briefly worried that she would be embarrassed that her underpants were showing. I thought of going back in there and pulling her nightgown back down. I didn’t.

After you have allowed the area to soak for a while, take your cotton towel, lay it upon the stain, and beat your fists on it, over and over. Do not rub; that will work the blood in deeper to the fibers, and then there is no way at all to pretend it wasn’t there. Blot the stain forcefully – don’t be afraid to stand up and use your heels. If need be, reapply more cold water and start again.

She was being taken to a hospital in a town forty miles away after they had stabilized her in our local ER – a “bandaid hospital,” some people in town call it. As I sat in the ER waiting to follow the ambulance there, my grandma walked in. Her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying. She had her purse clutched tightly in her hands. “Hi honey,” she whispered to me as she came in, as though we were in a church. Or at a wake. She only calls me “honey” when she’s very upset or when I’m doing something like getting married or having children. She sat down next to me and asked me questions about what had happened in that same hushed tone. Out of her white old lady purse she produced a crumpled Kleenex and with it, savagely wiped her eyes and nose, almost as though she was angry with her tears and snot for being so rude and invasive. Later I wondered what secret tears she had mopped away with that same wadded up tissue, and when, and where.

Continue soaking and blotting each stain as you come to it, making sure to remove as much of the moisture from the carpet as you possibly can. This can be a very time-consuming process, so it helps if the house is totally empty of people other than yourself. The silence will help you focus on your job, which is getting the carpet clean. That’s the most important thing. Stay focused.

At the larger hospital, she was hooked up to a variety of cardiac monitors. We stayed only long enough to make sure she was okay and to talk to the doctor. He said a lot of things. She’d had a heart attack, obviously. She’d flatlined in the first ambulance, they’d shocked her heart to get the rhythm back. The trip to this hospital had been uneventful. Her face was the color of pencil lead incompletely erased away, as though you hadn’t pressed hard enough on the paper. They were going to do an angiogram, see what damage had been done. My dad was still on the road, somewhere in Georgia, probably, delivering a load of cookies or peanuts or lawn chairs or whatever – “call me right away after you talk to the doctor.” I had to wait until we were away from the sensitive monitoring equipment. We waited as they took care of the business of admitting her, completing their assessments. When they let us in to see her, she was groggy. She joked about wanting a cigarette. My grandma took her Kleenex out again.

The key to successfully removing blood stains is to do it as quickly as possible. Letting it sit for a long time makes the stain much deeper and harder to remove. The faster you can get to the stain, the better the results. Don’t be tempted to use hot water; it will only aid in setting the stain.

A few weeks later, she came home. They gave her home care instructions. They gave her a “stop-smoking” binder. After her first heart attack, ten years earlier, she’d stopped smoking for awhile and then surreptitiously started again. I caught her more than once before she finally came clean. I remember feeling furious and helpless in my fury, because there was nothing I could do or say to make her stop. She had gotten “better” and wanted to pretend as though it had never happened, I think. Who wants to dwell on the fact that they’ve had a heart attack at forty-three? Blot it out of your mind.
This time, the angiogram knocked cholesterol from her artery loose and sent it floating gently through her bloodstream, until it stopped and formed what is known as an atheroembolism in her kidney. Shortly thereafter, her kidney began to fail, and the embolism choked off the blood supply to the tissue near it, causing a large wound on her flank that opened from the inside out. When it surfaced and broke open, she woke from sleeping on the couch to find herself drenched in blood. Another ambulance ride, another trip to a larger hospital, another grave discussion with a nameless doctor. She didn’t lose her kidney, but she had a severe wound and required hospitalization and treatment for a long time. I cleaned the blood off the carpet and decided to keep a Kleenex in my purse.

In the best of cases, most of the blood stain will disappear; however, you should be prepared to have the carpet removed and discarded if you simply cannot fully eradicate the damaged areas. After all, carpet is easily replaceable. Another alternative is to simply live with the faded outline of the large areas where your mother’s blood once pooled around her feet.

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At the very head of the line, there is a canopy which provides shade from the blast furnace heat of this late July afternoon. Under the canopy, it is perhaps twenty degrees cooler than anywhere else, which means that under the canopy it’s just Regular Hot instead of Unbelievably Hot. About ten people can stand in a straight line under the canopy at a time. We are at the back of the line. Ahead of us are approximately seventy-five other people, all of them seemingly as close to the border of heat stroke as we are – except the lucky few at the very front, enjoying the luxuriously decadent five square feet of shaded concrete. There is a sound ahead of us, and the line lurches forward a few feet – not enough to get us out of this scorching heat, but enough to fill us with grim hope.

The others in this line are morose-looking teenagers like me; or women and men with chubby, beet-faced children whose shorts (invariably either neon pink or yellow) are wadded firmly between their legs, forming that funny inverted shorts-v that some people get if they’re not paying attention. Most of the boys have buzz cuts. The girls mostly have pony tails, some perched at an odd angle on the parietal side of their skulls. Their sweaty mitts lay like stillborn puppies in their parents’ hands, or else clenched around an electric blue Sno-Cone. Next to me stands my sister. We’ve been in line for forty-five minutes. At first we were excited and talked of the fun time ahead. We stopped speaking about fifteen minutes ago owing to the exhaustion we both are experiencing. I am fifteen and she is ten, and we have been here for what seems like the whole of our young lives. We are being slow-roasted. Our brains are bubbling. We are waiting to get on the ValleyFair Raging Rapids ride.

The fun of the Raging Rapids ride is essentially predicated on the idea that you will enjoy being violently whiplashed from side to side while having water sprayed on you from a variety of high-pressure hoses concealed behind fake rocks. This simulates “white water rapids.” As a fifteen year old, I took this to be a reasonable claim. Normally, I wouldn’t have placed myself in the position to have my hair – meticulously Aqua Netted that morning before we left our motel – thoroughly drenched and thus utterly ruined, but the insane heat of the day has changed things. After I got in line, my sister Molly joined me, and here we have been, shuffling slowly forward, for all this time.

This is the kind of place that is 90% concrete and 10% grassy area which you’re not allowed to walk on, and which in fact is roped off from the public; the occasional tree is planted smack in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere near one of these bizarrely placed trees is our mother, aunt Colleen, and grandmother, probably drinking Cokes and bitching about who-can-guess. With them is also our youngest sister Suzie. Suzie is seven, and one of those kids with a strangely rich vocabulary and full of the kind of moxie that some little girls have – the kind where, when they storm into a room, you expect to hear musical cues a la some old Ann-Margaret movie. Like bum-bum-BA-DA! BAP! Suzie is not fond of the word “no” or of being told she’s too young to do things.

The head of the line comes into view. Finally, hope springs up inside me again; I can even see the “you must be THIS TALL” – fifty-four inches – “to ride RAGING RAPIDS” sign. I look at my sister; she’s about five feet tall, even at age ten. We smile feebly to each other, our usual sister-versus-sister death match temporarily suspended; sweaty-faced, miserable but determined. Then I see Suzie.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see her marching up to where we stand in line, hands balled in little fists, ginger bobbed hair bouncing indignantly with each step. I can hear the zerrp-zerrp-zerrp of her plastic jelly shoes as they stomp across the hot concrete toward us. She comes to an entirely officious-looking halt next to us, and slams her fists on to her hips.

“You guys,” she says. She is panting. Her cheeks are bright red, whether from the heat or from the righteous indignation. “Mom says you have to let me go on the ride, too.”

In the distance, I can see my mother, sitting and smoking on a bench under a lone, preposterously placed tree, watching. She has that face on, the one that is intended to warn me in advance that she is in no mood. I look at Suzie, standing before me like a furious gnome. She’s way too short for this ride, maybe four feet tall, total. The sign clearly states fifty-four inches and up. If there is one thing I love at this age, it is getting to rebuke my sisters thanks to rules that my mother can’t change. I look at the sign, then at my mother. I think she reads it on my face, because her eyes narrow a little and she takes a long drag on her cigarette.

“You can’t,” I tell Suzie, packing as much triumph in my voice as I can reasonably fit. “You’re too little.” Her little face crinkles like Christmas paper. She wails, loudly. She runs back to our mother, jelly shoes zerrp-zerrping out the song of her sorrow. My mother, seeing this, looks at me angrily and mouths what is going on? I point to the sign and hold my hand horizontally next to me, first at about my eye level, then at my ribcage. She’s too short. I shrug. Maybe it was the shrug that got to her.

I turn back to Molly. We agree that Suzie is way too short for the Raging Rapids ride; moreover, she is known for demanding to participate in things like this, then getting scared halfway through and having to be rescued. Plus we always have to take her along, and she tells on us if we swear. Later this year, Suzie will find the carefully hidden cigarettes in my bedroom and will gleefully present them to my mother, who will dramatically destroy them and will ground me for weeks. And will light a cigarette while lecturing me.

We’ve made it to the blessed canopy. We’re almost the next ones to get on the ride, which is sort of like a giant tire with seats. Our excitement has reignited, and we’re grinning, anticipating the fun that surely awaits us. The guy working at the head of the line is visibly bored and hot and tired, his red ValleyFair FUN! t-shirt sticking wetly to his back as he waits for the ride to return.

That’s when I see my mother climb over the chain with Suzie in tow and begin storming toward us across the forbidden grass.