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.
Yeow. Excellent work.
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