Death and Dying and the Sea

In spite of the classic Texas thunderstorm that threatened to strike at any minute, my parents and I did make it successfully through our four hour layover in Dallas and on to the plane and on to our hometown, where my husband picked us up and we struggled to talk comprehensibly through our exhaustion. What a delight it is to arrive home, after really any trip whatsoever but especially a long one involving some measure of discomfort. I love coming home, whether I’ve been in Texas visiting my dying grandparents in their fantastically expensive luxury nursing home, or whether I’ve been on a camping trip with all my best friends, or whether I’ve been to Sweden to receive a prestigious award, or whether I’ve been to the moon. To be once more in one’s own space and time, one’s own routine, food, schedule, breathing one’s own air, sleeping in one’s own bed, however crummy, is indeed a pleasure divine.

On the airplane I read The Art of Cruelty, by Maggie Nelson, which J Hopper sent me ages ago and which I’ve been waiting to feel called to. I felt the call, read the book, and am stoked, for it is a great book. Why is there cruelty, what is cruelty, how come some brutal art is moving and other brutal art is just boring or sophomoric? I have many questions after reading it. Are we all misunderstanding Lars von Trier? I am very conflicted about that man. I know I hate his films (Melancholia excluded) but reading her dismissal of him I found myself thinking “too obvious.” I almost cried on the plane reading about Abramovic’s Rhythm 0.

“as long as you are alive, things can happen that you don’t like. Even if you couldn’t bear them, they would happen.” –a little boy in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Parents and Children, explaining why he wants to die

On the plane there, my seatmate was one of those seatmates who really really wants to talk. You know this guy? He waits for any sign that you might put your book down or even look up for a second to grab your tomato juice. I respond to this kind of person by focusing with a totally unyielding ferocity on whatever I am reading. Thus I thank this man for enabling me to read almost the entire book on a single flight. When we landed and I put my book away he was so excited to finally talk with me but then I could tell I disappointed him hugely.

“Is that a good book?”
“Yes.”
“It’s got an interesting title.”
“Yes.”
“I assume it’s not teaching you HOW to be cruel, right?”
“Yes it is [looks through a couple of pages for something, then looks back up] FUCK YOU.”

That last part was made up. Actually I said “it’s about art” and he was baffled. Generally men on airplanes do not want to talk about the brutality underpinning the avant-garde, although probably there are a few and I would very much like to meet them. One of them luckily is my husband.

My grandparents are slowly dying in a small dying town way far down in Texas. I don’t understand what people do there, or where they go, or work, or even really where they live. But the air and the ocean are always kind of amazing. So wet and hot, but because the sea is right there it doesn’t feel like an affront, the way it does in the midwest. My skin feels all brown and moist like a little berry.

We went straight from the airport to the nursing home. My mom was riding the thin edge of hysteria, and who can blame her? Her parents–both of them!–are a million years old and just pathetically, pitifully taking their sweet time dying. I can’t tell how many times I’ve written about this here because I’ve also written so many entries about it and then deleted them for being too horrifying, so my apologies if you are sick of hearing about my grandparents. They are miserable and confused and making life difficult for everyone including themselves; their luxury nursing home costs so many dollars a month that I am embarrassed to even tell you what the amount is because you will think I am Mitt Romney; my grandmother has Alzheimers and calls my mom and aunt constantly throughout the day, like 20-30 times, intensely upset/disturbed by various things, or thinking her children have been murdered for various reasons; they can’t take care of themselves but their children are chickening out about moving them to the real Final Destination wing of the nursing home where they change your diapers for you and stuff. My aunt luckily lives in the town where they live and so she bears the brunt of the day-to-day but when my mom goes down there (like once a month, sometimes, can you imagine) she tries to take way more than her share of the work, to give my aunt a break, and it’s intense. There are really awful bathroom- and vomit-based emergencies that I don’t want to describe. You call to say you’re coming to see them in 15 minutes and then when you get there they are shocked and delighted to see you. Then you sit and my grandpa offers you ice cream over and over and over again. My grandpa used to be a great provider of ice cream but now we just say no thank you, no thank you. They’re in the beginnings of the phase where they don’t really know who anyone is anymore–they confuse all the cousins and they also kept thinking my cousin’s babies were my cousin. They exist in a multitude of time periods simultaneously, it’s very trippy to talk to them. They experience us all as 30-somethings with spouses and jobs, but they simultaneously believe we are 15, 10, 6, 2 years old. My grandma kept saying she had so many pictures of me, and she went into the bedroom and rummaged around and when she came out she had a picture of me graduating from college and a picture of my aunt getting her PhD. Like her brain put the graduation gowns together, rather than the identities of the person wearing them. I was like “this is your daughter; and this one is me!” and she just goes “oh!” There’s shit and blood all over their apartment, from my grandpa’s crazy body that is like disintegrating in front of our eyes. He falls down every day, all the way down onto the ground, and somehow only scrapes and mauls himself–if you saw him, you’d think he would just shatter into a million pieces. Instead his bones are fine but he’s completely covered with scabs and lesions and his skin is peeling off in big flakes. There’s a “pull for help” emergency call-button in their bathroom. My grandpa still has his checkbook even though I tell my mom over and over to take it away from him. I think it must be awful, when it’s your parents. They’re my grandparents and I feel distance from them–it helps that we never had what you’d call a super intimate relationship, although I know them well and they have always been good to me–and I’m able to see that my grandpa needs to have his car keys taken away like 8 months before my mom and aunt can see this. They too exist in simultaneous time periods–he’s at once this shriveled shell of a human being and also their daddy who knows how to take care of himself. It must be very hard, and very disturbing, to have to loudly boss your daddy around. My mom talks to them like they’re children, because she has to, but a part of her doesn’t want to submit to the full reality. So he keeps his checkbook until he writes a $100,000 check to a stranger or something, I guess. They keep all their papers until they throw them in the garbage and then no one can find the life insurance policy or the medicaire stuff. They take cabs to church when it’s not time for church and then wander around the church parking lot in terror until some total stranger takes pity on them and drives them back to the home. They don’t read, or talk, or listen to music, or watch television. They don’t go to any of the activities the home offers. No one knows what they do all day, when somebody isn’t there with them. Imagine that every day you just sit, in a misty half-dreaming state, vaguely wetting your pants and forgetting what peanut butter is. When their money runs out I don’t know what will happen. If you’d told them 20 years ago that rather than leaving their children an inheritance they’d spend their entire life savings (and then some) on themselves while waiting to die, they would have been mortified.

What makes people hold on? How does it happen. Part of it is medical intervention (my grandpa got brain surgery at age 89, which should never have been allowed to happen, given his end-of-life vibe–no doctor should have ever suggested such a thing), but even that is too easy to just say and not engage with. When do you just stop going to the doctor? That’s not an easy call to make. My cousin’s husband believes that if you really calmly let yourself go, mentally, you could die, but it must not be that easy. I think it must be harder when you have always lacked interiority–when you don’t lead a life of the mind. But regardless, it must be awful, to contemplate the reality of that choice–nursing home or death by your own hand. My mom’s friend’s dad had dementia and they couldn’t take care of him anymore and they had a meeting with the nursing home people which the dad overheard from the next room and all of a sudden there was a gunshot and he was dead. My dad says of this story, what a blessing, what a great thing he did for his children, and if they had any sense they’d be proud of him and not upset. It is so hard to imagine your daddy shooting himself because of something he heard you say, and then feeling proud and glad and thankful to him for that, but I can now report that there is no peace or wisdom to be found in this slow wasting away, this gradual total loss of one’s whole self, one’s personhood, the last possible shreds of any kind of physical dignity, not to mention the slow whittling-down of people’s feelings of love and appreciation for you. I have compassion for my grandparents but there is also frustration and horror mixed in there. Having lacked warm true intimacy with them in life it is hard to feel close to them in death, especially since at no point has any person been able to have any kind of even vaguely honest or open conversation with them about what’s happening to their bodies. And especially because they are literally only alive right now because they are rich, and that is disturbing. But as a fellow human, I see them, and I burn inside with pity and shame for them, and with fear for my own parents, and for myself. Must we all accept eventual suicide as our only option? And is even that grim option only available to people capable of really searing interior contemplation? Is that really the price we pay for medical science making our lives better? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s worth it–I don’t know. I’m sure we don’t want to go back to dying of syphilis at age 27. But all I know is my mom’s tight face barely holding in her terror and horror and sorrow, month after month after month of this, is a hard thing to witness with equanimity, and I know that when her dumb friends tell her that God works in mysterious ways I want to tell them to shut their fucking mouths.

At one point though I was sitting in the living room with my grandmother and my dad, and my mom was in the kitchen with my grandfather and my brother, and suddenly my grandfather pointed across the room at me and said “That one is married to an unusual fella,” like asking for corroboration.

After that, though, we left the nursing home and all it contained behind and we went to the beach!

This is the beach I grew up going to. Thus, I was probably in college before I realized it is not normal to have to scrub tar off the bottoms of your feet with turpentine and an old rag every time you swim in the ocean. Texas of course is oil country, and when you look out to sea the horizon is dotted with oil rigs. Still, it’s a nice beach, a warm ocean, and this time was the cleanest anyone could remember seeing it.

As you may know, I have a long-standing policy of not swimming in oceans. I go in up to my knees and that’s it. I say it’s “because of sharks,” but really I just use “sharks” to stand in for the kind of nameless, ancient, sublime dread inspired by the unknowably vast ocean itself. But this time, in honor of my childhood and with the urging, redemptive voice of Steve in my mind’s ear, I decided to give it a whirl for old time’s sake, and went in above my head and floundered around for just a second. It was fucking terrifying.

My cousin’s five year old daughter is a total character. She is obsessed with the sea. She’s like someone in a spanish magical realist story who would eventually just go live in the ocean, floating around catching fish with her bare hands and forgetting the language of her ancestors. She wanted to be in the ocean, treading water and body surfing, 100% of the time. Once an hour or so my cousin would go drag her out of the water by force, and hold her struggling body still just long enough to frantically spray more sunscreen all over her, before she’d break free and go streaking back to the ocean. When we first arrived at like 9 in the morning she didn’t even want to wait for my cousin to take off her clothes and give her her goggles, she was fighting and pulling for the sea, like some captive octopus. When finally released, she sprinted directly out of her flip-flops without even looking down, like in a cartoon, and ran straight through a big family that was building a sandcastle, without even noticing them. Like, she ran directly through the castle they were building. They were dying laughing. She ran straight and fast into the sea and disappeared. My cousin and her husband are just like “Ugh, somebody go with her please, I was out there for hours yesterday.” Every adult in our group–which is nine adults–took rotating turns going out into the sea with her. She doesn’t want to play with you or anything, she just wants to swim and swim and swim. You just kind of paddle next to her making sure she doesn’t get sucked out to sea or eaten by a whale. She tired out nine grown-ass adults and still wouldn’t come in, even though her eyes were so red I can’t even think about it without tearing up myself. When I took my turn with her she kept going deeper and deeper until I couldn’t touch anymore, and I got scared and was like “come this way a little bit,” backing toward shore, and she scornfully goes “WHY?!” and I realized the only answer I could give her was that I personally was scared for my own safety.

Owned by a 5 year old! I will surely be telling this anecdote when interviewed after her Olympic gold medal in some sort of water-based achievement.

Her little sister just wants to sit inside all day doing puzzles. It’s so cool how weird and different kids are even when they have the same parents and lifestyle. I took a picture of that one’s naked butt as she begged to be taken back inside after spending 25 minutes on the beach.

This was the first time all the cousins had been together in ages, not counting my boy cousin’s wedding, which doesn’t count because you aren’t really hanging out. It’s been years! When we used to see them all the time. It’s sad/strange how time just passes and things change. When you grow up with people though you are always close in a weird way. It’s never awkward with them at all. We drink so much tequila and scream a lot with laughter. We have an additional Surprise Baby Cousin/Half-Sister who is 14 years younger than us and she is now TWENTY, it’s crazy. She announced that she is sick of us all treating her like a child and we were like, my god, she’s right.

I got a medium sunburn but considering the situation I think this is a triumph. I wore my giant straw hat and a long-sleeved shirt because I don’t give a shit, I’m not here to impress anyone. I only got tar on my feet once.

Anyway, it was a great trip. It was important to see my grandparents, and it was also amazing to leave the grandparents behind and go hang out for 3 straight days with my parents, bro, aunt and uncle, and cousins. We made it out without a fight, too, which goes to show you the salutary effect of not having my grandmother around, sad to say. I think this may be the first time we have all been together with no fighting or crying. My grandmother in her heyday was a pretty mean and trying person, very good at stirring the pot, although like almost everyone she had her good sides. It’s hard to describe and people always think you’re being a jerk when you say it, like you aren’t allowed to say family members or old people are mean or not very smart, but it’s true. She knows how to put her finger directly into the wound, whatever your wound is. I think she was an unusual grandmother-type in that she married the humdrum racism and intolerance of her generation with actual personal cruelty, so it was harder to shrug her off as just “of a different time” or whatever. We talked about how weird it is that her new gently-vacant persona is actually kind of soothing, considering her vibe in years past. Now she’s just pleasantly surprised and full of tenderness, telling you how good you’re doing and how great you look. Where is it coming from, some unlocked part of her consciousness or is it all just autopilot? We spend hours trying to figure out what’s going on in their minds. Now I kiss her papery cheek and call her sweetheart and help her sit down and she is all softness. Where is the woman furiously yelling “YOU WEREN’T CUTE” at me after I failed to get a second date from a boy she was trying to set me up with? That woman is gone. Is that sad? Is this new woman also who she really is, at this time, or has she become something else, some paper cutout of a grandmother?

I also remember her good sides, her amazing parties, her playing in the pool with us like a child herself, what an incredible cook she was, how gentle she was when you were sick, her monetary generosity throughout my life. How she washed and carefully dried my Teddy bear after an unfortunate 7-Up accident even though I was in a terror and didn’t want her to touch him, because of the story of her putting my mother’s special teddy bear in the incinerator while my mom was at school because the teddy bear did not match the new bedspread. The unusually lovely card she wrote me when I got married and she was too old to fly on an airplane.

The funny things too. The time her hairdresser hand-wrote her a letter explaining that he couldn’t do her hair anymore because it stressed him out so much he was having nightmares. Her getting down and pretending to be in labor while acting out “Birth of a Nation” in a game of charades. The way she used to imperiously chink her ice cubes at my grandpa when she was ready for another tequila. The time she demanded ceaselessly to be taken to the Vidal Sassoon in Los Angeles and then when she finally got to her appointment and the hairdresser said “lets do a little something to warm you up,” and my grandmother snapped “I DON’T DO ‘WARM.'”

So, there’s that. People getting old and losing themselves and fading away to dust and finally to nothing: the fate of us all. It breaks your heart but must be borne.

The only bad thing that happened on this trip was that a couple of my mom’s old friends stopped by and told two horrible stories, one involving killing elephants and rhinos and how badass it felt to do that, and one involving how stupid “the blacks” in “Africa” (meaning South Africa) are and how sad it is that they don’t realize they need the benevolent paternalistic apartheid white people to come back and take care of them. My brother heard the elephant story and I heard the “blacks” story and we both just kind of backed away like from a monster. Down there (maybe everywhere, but I only experience it down there), people’s warm friendly faces open up and the most vile shit spews out and even though I’m used to it it always takes me by surprise. Anyway, other than that, though, we got out pretty unscathed in terms of Being Subjected To The Stupidest Fucking Statements On Earth: Texas Edition, considering some of the shit I have been privy to in my life in that milieu.

When you say something like that (about stupid shit you’ve heard people in Texas say) my dad always does his version of the “when I was your age” one-upping, and talks about being a journalist in Dallas in the 1970s trying to break stories about racism in the state judiciary system. And you have to be like, yeah, dad, you’ve got me beat. My dad has visited San Quentin and peered in through tiny door-slits at the men waiting there to die. I guess I can hear a story about how great apartheid was, or about murdering a beautiful elephant for no reason.

But think of it, that elephant, being born and living his life and treading the grasslands, and having friends and family, and then suddenly a big fat drunk loudmouthed American gets driven up in a Jeep and shoots him, and that’s how he dies. He died to give an American man a boner about himself. It really is a great evil.

“as long as you are alive, things can happen that you don’t like. Even if you couldn’t bear them, they would happen.”

ANYWAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

We swam in the pool and everyone drank so many beers!! I was so sun-blasted but I guess they are more used to it. I waited until evening and then crept out like a little wet newt and drank the tequila and lime that is our signature family drink. My mom and aunt made these amazing meals including carrot cake. We played Apples to Apples and talked about life. My brother and I slept in twin beds under a powerful ceiling fan and I dreamed and dreamed. I saw big walking ocean birds and little sprinting sandpipers and my baby second cousin caught a ghost shrimp in her hands and screamed and screamed. I told my cousin I don’t want to have kids, and though she told me “you’ll probably change your mind,” she also kind of just said “you go girl.” she was like, “I love having kids but there’s lots of stuff you can love doing in your life.” My cousin has always been a fanatic supporter of me, even though we are so different. She always, always stuck up for me in the face of my grandmother’s raging. She’s this beautiful Texas sorority girl business major and I’m, you know, not. But I can hear her voice all throughout my adolescence, yelling at people to “LET HER BE WHO SHE IS!!!!”

It is also fun to see my cousin being such a good parent. All my cousins, on both sides, are such good parents!! It is a blessing and I am proud of them. Little children are delightful when well-parented.

All told, a great trip, a fun vacation, a delightful family adventure, with some personal growth in there too (swimming in the sea). Plus, watching the Olympics finally! Those Chinese divers sure can dive! Jesus Christ!

Today I am home! And it is hot. And on Wednesday it is our anniversary. And the dog has an eye infection. And I am excited to go to the store, make a massage appointment, and go on some sort of food-based date tonight, possibly one involving a nice big glass of red wine. I also need to go to the dry cleaner. Last night I had a very long and involved dream in which Tim Heidecker slowly fell in sincere and tender love with me, and then I became disgusted with him because he owned fourteen identical tea kettles that he wouldn’t let anyone else use.

hooray for vacation, old age, the sea, and America!
hooray for Louis C.K.!
hooray for finishing a draft of my article!
hooray for coffee!