Yesterday, Esteban’s grandma passed away.
I wrote about her situation here. Essentially, most people with her condition had a life expectancy of at best two years and the aneurysm had gone undetected for a long time. She’d been getting worse in the last two weeks. Violent and confused, she didn’t understand where she was. Her mind was acting like a time machine, making memories seem like current events. She wanted to know if Esteban had sold her car for her yet, but that happened in 1999. She wanted to know if Ward had sent letters from the war, but she was asking Ward this as he was sitting right there, did he know if she had any letters from her son in Vietnam. Then yesterday, she had been very lucid. She ate lunch, took a nap and didn’t wake up.
We keep trying to remind ourselves that this is a blessing. It really is. In the beginning of 2003, when we received the diagnosis and she understood the score, she had quite a bit of despair, not that she was dying, but that she was going to lose herself. In her senior years, she never lost even an ounce of cognitive or physical ability. She was active. She was proud and strong and I suspect that she felt that being sick displayed a weakness of character. That a growing piece of foreign personality was gradually erasing the Gen we all knew. In some ways, she didn’t die yesterday but rather for five months has been going away word by word, smile by smile, memory by memory.
Esteban called me and told me at work. He just said ‘Ahhhhh&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9- which is the noise he makes when something really horrible happens and he’s trying to take a moment so that he will be able to speak. Sometimes the way we know each other so well are little tragedies. I wasn’t thinking of Gen. I was afraid that something had happened to the cat. Or there had been a car accident. Or something. Something. Then he said ‘Gen passed.’ And the words, they didn’t make sense. Passed? Gen? What? Then I got it. Gen. Passed. My brain desperately scrambled for a remote control, wanting to pause, rewind, stop, let us go back to Tuesday morning. Go, back, go back, come back. But that’s just not how things work.
I couldn’t leave work because I had a big meeting that I had to represent at. The crazy decisions people make when they are in shock. Things seem so very important sometimes. Like on 9/11/01 when our company would not close early, even though the world had stopped, the world had simply sat down and watched CNN, and instead we answered the trickle of phone calls from clients and grimaced every time we caught ourselves habitually saying, ‘Have a good day.’ I hid in the conference room next to my desk. Just closed the door and sat there staring at the soothing gray paint on the walls. Then off to my meeting. I announced to my team that I would likely be out of the office later this week because I had just found out that there had been a death in the family. They said nothing and then continued on in their conversation. I kept reciting in my head the little bit of Auden I remember. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. Later, everyone was talking so loudly about such stupid things and it made me hate them. Stop all the laughter. Stop all the talk of American Idol. Stop. Stop. Stop it. Stop. People die. People who are children and teachers and mothers and post office employees and people who laugh and hold someone’s hand and even the people who weren’t very nice in the first place, they die. They are just gone. Each time, it just seems so surprising, but there it is, irrefutable evidence that people die and there is just nothing that we can do about it. The weird thing is that Gen wasn’t a very nice person. She could even be called mean. I’ve seriously had issues with her at times and even Esteban’s own parents had an enormous rift with that side of the family and didn’t speak to her for eleven years. Even though Ward is literally the sweetest most forgiving man on the planet, he estranged himself from his own mother because she was such a bitch. And even STILL, I want to turn back time, go back, go back, undo it all.
After work, Esteban and I went over to Ward and June’s house, where his Aunt Leticia was already digging through her jewelry, trying to discern the real stuff from the gaudy fake old lady jewelry. We hung out there for a while, looking at pictures, laughing about old stories. Ward made some kind of comment about my breasts that I simply don’t know where to put in my brain, but that’s probably fodder for a different diary entry.
Then we drove home, exhausted in that way that only the business of dying can do to you, but when we got home, Esteban offered to take a ride out by the Bay. He took my favorite road, the one that winds along the shoreline. There weren’t any deer out feeding at the Sanctuary, but the moon lit up the evening clouds like shadow paintings in blue and blue and blue and black. We drove along in silence, my hand on Esteban’s knee, his hand folded over mine. A low-pressure front was doing funky things and throwing all sorts of warm humid air off the water. The Bay was a sapphire pool, dotted here and there with silent shadows of water birds, Canada geese, seagulls, a pelican. That morning on the way to work, I had seen seven snowy white birds (I suspect that they were Tundra swans, but they might also have been pelicans) playing in the air currents above the bridge. They flew in regimental perfection, like ghostly fighter pilots still searching for the Red Baron in an equilateral V. During the three minutes I watched them, not a one flapped their wings. You got the feeling that they were going to suspend forever that way, mobiles in the sky without a bent wire hanger above them.
We listened to the radio, flipping here and there, both objecting to The Cars, placating each other, my Wallflowers for his Bush, my Michelle Branch and then our Evanesence. We talked about Gen, about how it really couldn’t have happened much better than it did, and that really it was the best-case scenario, to go in ones sleep after a pleasant morning. I mentioned that it would have been so much worse, so much worse, I kept saying that over and over, thinking to myself about my great grandmother, watching her disappear each day, change into some stranger, change into nothing. He agreed, admitting that he might think that he understood what that was like but in reality, he had no idea. Then during one of the radio dial flips, amorphous synthesizers that could only herald one thing. Pink Floyd. It didn’t have any words, so I pegged it as the beginning of one of the songs from The Division Bell. Esteban made several other guesses and then decided that it must have been one of the incarnations of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. I told him that I’d prove it was from The Division Bell (which does not contain ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’) because I had the CD in the car. Instead, we sat and listened to the song, and watched the darkening sky. The water was glass, broken only by the dark commas and question marks of sand bars in low tide. I started thinking thoughts that seem to come automatically when listening to wordless Pink Floyd, about how this region had once been hundreds of feet under an ancient sea and giant Pleistocene shapes would have been swimming above us. The sky was a dark electric blue that seems to last for just a second after twilight. In the sky, four proud stars cut through the gloaming and I thought about the layers of rock that made up the ledge we skirted, about how they were rich with lacy fossils. I looked out to the dark shapes in low tide and could almost imagine them as prehistoric shadows of carnivorous whale ancestors and freshwater somethingosaurs. It was all very easy to imagine this as the edge of the inland sea and we as just the building material for fossils yet to come.
Finally, the song got to the lyrics. Remember when you were young/ You shone like the sun/ Shine on you crazy diamond/Now there’s a look in your eyes/like black holes in the sky’..
‘Aha! See? See? I told you!’ Esteban chuckled. ‘I’ll bet you won’t write THAT in the diary. I was so right. I was totally right!’ Esteban is almost never right in the Guess The Song game. Or rather, it’s just that I can usually get the songs in the first few notes before he has a chance because my brain grabs onto melodies the way that other people never forget a face.
‘You think that I only write about things that make me look good and you look bad? That’s so not the case. I think I come off sounding mildly retarded most of the time and you? You’re like the lovable romantic almost perfect husband.’
‘Bah!’ He smiled, still delighted with the musical coup.
I chuckled. We drove through the Precambrian night until the streetlights revealed the shadowy swimmers to be once again merely everyday rocky shoals and inlets. The moon tucked itself behind a cloud, leaving the sky to a fresh spatter of stars. Light that had left its source ten million lifetimes ago just to decorate this sky above an ancient sea. It was as close to a sense of permanence that I was going to get. And you know what? I’ll take that.
