Growing up, he never thought of death or loss. There were no expectations of him, thus he had no expectations of life beyond its constant continuation. Death was something abstract, a historic event that only occurred in a previous time, before he had existed, or a prophecy – fictitious, written in a forgotten language, translated and retranslated into and from various languages over the centuries, an anxiety unfounded and easy to ignore through the distractions of day to day living.
It wasn’t until his maternal grandmother’s funeral that such a monster in the closet as death was to him became a reality. Russell and he had been asked to be pall bearers for her funeral by their Aunt Bella. She had moved in with Grandma Rose after the matriarch had started to suffer from Alzheimer’s in the few years before she died. Each subsequent visit for Dustin and family to B-lo for reunions took on a surreal form. An absence of recognition in the eyes of the old woman who used to smile at the sight of him and his siblings clouded that window to the soul. Tinges of sadness around a smile while children hugged her goodbye after those reunions concluded molted into quizzical lines of confusion about why such strangers were letting their offspring share such affections with her.
He thought about Grandma Rose’s memory loss. How vile a thing must it be to be unsure of the life you’ve lived, of whose life you might have been a part of. But his affection for her was a distant one. Something of a bond not quite formed. It must have been a reciprocal feeling between the two. His family had moved to Roc City from B-Lo well before he could recall any contiguous memories of his own life. He performed affectations for those relatives visited, as the frequency of such visits and their diminutive length left little allowance for deep formulations of familial bonds.
So it was as such when his Grandma Rose had slipped in the shower and broke a hip that Dustin felt only as bad for her as for anyone who might have been the subject of bad news delivered by a friend of a friend having met once or seen around his environs on occasion. A simple sadness, shallow and fleeting, more from the idea than the reality. Having been so old, his grandma had developed pneumonia in the hospital and slipped into a coma. He only noticed those days with any difference to the others in his life in the face and voice of his own mother. She would be on the phone with her sister on a regular basis, discussing the condition of their mother. She was getting worse with each day that passed. His mother began making frequent trips to B-Lo, spending the night there.
Dustin thought of how limited his father’s cooking skills were – macaroni and cheese with the occasional pan fried hotdog slices thrown in for flavor served each night during her absence. He thought of this more than he ever thought of how close to the edge of forever his grandma was.
In the final week, his mother asked if he and his brother wanted to say goodbye. Dustin did not really have an opinion, but seeing Russell’s eagerness, it infused in him the same desire. In her hospital room, Grandma Rose was hooked to a respirator, unconscious and oblivious to all that was happening. Her skin hung off her bones, having been forgetful of meals before the slip and now only being able to ingest food through intravenous tubes connected by needles in her forearms and the backs of her hands. She was covered in bruises from deteriorating circulation. Dustin watched her chest raise and lower with mechanical rhythm, unnatural and haunting. There was a rattle to each breath, as if something might escape, attempts to say some final words of utter import, something profound, but they were pressed beneath so much sleep and anesthetic they could not find their way out. Russell stood at the side of her bed, holding her hand. He said a small speech to her through a veil of tears and phlegmy sobs. Dustin stood closer to the door watching the happenings of the room. The nurses coming in to check her chart, change her IV bags. His mother turned to him, bleary eyed, and gestured for his company at her side. He obliged. Slits of sunlight fell on the old woman’s ailing body through the blinds. They stood their in silence for a long while, his mother combing her fingers through his hair.
Grandma Rose died a few weeks later. There was a wake, a funeral, and a celebration. At the funeral, Dustin, his brother, and a few uncles and cousins wore suits and were pall bearers. Dustin’s and Russell's were ill fitting, their growing bodies in between the stage of child and man. They didn’t quite fill the shoulders as well as their older relatives. Their hair was flat with too much gel, parted and straight save for the ends where the gel lost strength and it curled. They carried the casket from the parlor to the church where a mass was held. Eulogies were said. He looked around and saw all the women crying. A few men dabbed their eyes with the tips of their ties. He felt nothing any different than he had for all those years growing up. And then he looked at his mother. She was holding his father’s hand tight. He could tell how hard by the whiteness of his father’s knuckles, the redness of the fleshy part of his hand, the heel of the palm by the thumb. Her other hand clutched a bouquet of tissues, snot soaked and damp from tears pouring from the corners of her eyes. He watched her face wrench itself into the most pitiful expression he would ever see her wear as someone at the pulpit read something about Grandma Rose as a mother, about her memory loss, and about how much she was loved.
It was that expression that moved something deep within him. A door, a massive boulder at the edge of a reservoir of emotion and tears, a psychic pain he had known no equivalent to had pierced him to the core of his being, having seen the look on his mother’s face. He did not, could not understand it beyond the fact that he never liked to see his mother in pain.
Looking upon his own mother’s lifeless body in the funeral parlor at the wake, her face painted with mortician’s makeup, unnatural and unsettling, listening to Russell read his eulogy, he knew what she felt that day. A true moment of empathy, something rare for him, unable to understand people, he thought about how she would never see what might become of him, no longer there to congratulate or scorn, the same way all the memories of Grandma Rose’s life flaked away from her decaying mind. What are we to those we love but the collection of memories they have of us? How soon we find we disappear from their perspective of the world when their memories disappear from ours.
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