grandmothers

my grandmother is dead. my father no longer has a mother. her death opened up for me a whole new path of knowledge: her life through her enormous collection of photos. her death opened her house up to me and with that all the tucked away boxes in each colour-themed room. her death showed me a new way of knowing her life. boxes and albums full of black and white smapshots of her most free years. her drinking a coke in the passenger seat of a beautiful old car. her dressed in the most elegant clothes, her in her mother's vast iris gardens. my grandmother waiting for a train. her as a girl turning to a woman, her without the harness that family brought. freedom. they are snapshots of possibility. each one its own what-if.
burried in a pale blue pinstriped suit, a simple band of gold on her finger which once played the electric organ. I hardly recall this. she sang often in her youth. she had recordings but I never got to hear them. her hair was soft in th coffin. I know this though I did not touch it. and most fantastic of all, on her mouth was a grin, very subtle, but I swear it was a grin, she was pleased with what she saw in the transition.

her skin always looked as thin as parchment to me. and it was the softest skin. thin loose delicate. once a friend of mine came to visit her with me and could not stop raving about the softness of my grandmother's skin.

Another Death:
my mother's mother died two days ago,
only a month after my other grandmother died.
i am not processing it
i am feeling inept
i took the day off of work yesterday after i found out
and slept and slept,
i had intended to think but
i slept instead
i dreamt that i was driving by my grandmother's house
in pontiac michigan
and having memories of things that never happened,
visits to her that i never made,
then i was suddenly in a submarine deep underwater
watching a scuba diver swim with a dolphin
in the murkiest greengrey water
and i heard a report on the radio that
a supertoxic poison had just been dropped in the ocean and all
life would cease
instantly the diver stopped moving and began to sink
the dolphin just dissapeared,
i watched the motionless diver sinking
and felt a shudder thinking of how cold it would be at the bottom of the sea
how cold it would be if he woke with too little oxygen to make it back up,
i felt this horrible solitude as i imagined his lonely plummet,
but i was only an observer, watching the sinking of the flesh. the turning out of the light and the end of life. the lonliness of it. the simple truth that we all die alone. all of the alliances and marriages of life are meaningless in the face of the inevitable and eternal. life is spent warring against what is inevitable: solitude.
one is never really ready for the news that a soul has left a body, no matter how long the death has been pending. all of the worldly things are abandoned. the body, most personal of all our posessions, even it remains here, no longer familiar to the soul. a remnant, a fossil, a ruin. The huge heavy dirty body remains as the soul soars. my dad keeps saying that no one else knew him so well, his childhood is gone, now that both of his parents are gone. it makes me think of how I will feel without my parents, losing my essential link to humanity, but perhaps gaining a new knowledge, as an orphan like so many ohetrs adrift. parentless. a new perception of the world. nothing is lost without creating a new gain. everythig has its opposite. for my mother the death of her mother is a message, that she must be generous and loving like her own mother so that she can be with her again. for her it is a reminder. for me, something else. An opening of a series of questions. A beginning. seeing my parents as pillars suspended, foundationless. held up by nothing. who are we when our roots no longer flourish? when they begin to decay, does that signal the beginnig of our own ending? when our roots change to soil, who are we? is this a signal for us to up the ante? get moving, pick up the pace and make sure we are doing what we need to do , a subtle hounding? what are we when the family members that connected us to humanity shrivel among rocks and worms? what remains? memory, fiction? the beings we imagine ourselves to be, the tribes and cults we choose, rock music, pop culture?

when you spill coffee on the page and wipe it away, something remains. a stain. the page remembers.