twelve: two green plastic bags and the fourth death

I was at school, got the phone call, and I don’t know if I feel, what I feel or should be feeling. It’s those words you hear on the phone. They’re too simple and too final. A simple gesture. A simple announcement. The finality of the fact. This is it, folks. The end.

The absolute end amidst the absolute, perpetual, mundane, pointless period of time we call “life”. No matter how long you’re expecting it, it sneaks up on you. You know it will happen but when it does it takes you by surprise. It’s, in other words, shocking. The realization. But deep down all you want is people feeling sorry for you. Oh, the shit death has done to you! Can you see me and see ‘it’?

Far removed, deep inside the numbness. The gruesome details will come later. The plastic bags. I was laughing crying angry while I walked away. For the time being, the issue is this, and those of you of faith will not get it: once upon a time there was a man, and he was someone; he was someone up until a few hours ago when he became no-one. I mean nothing.

Want to stomp the foot down, make some noise, scream, make the universe stare, or just the old folks go ’tsk tsk tsk’. but. But nature today, oh, it’s so calm, so serene, and see the poppies amidst the lilies fair and wild weeds, all a chorus moving to the hidden sound of death’s sorrow. Life. Close the eyes, immerse.

There is guilt, there are memories. Most of all, there’s reality and reality is like a dream or like a bad scene out of a bad tv show. There were no last words. Except, as I later find out: “I’m thirsty. I’m cold.” have I missed the point of this death? Have I lost all that once made me human, and in consequence have lost what people would call ’the grandson’?

It’s a vicious, absurd cycle. You end giving in to it, cause, well, there’s not much else to do there, is there? What is acknowledged as: numbness, insensitivity, indifference, inability to emote, it’s all surrender to this.

Still don’t know what it means not to see this person again. He’s lost completely now. And some people, they leave no traces behind. Not to me, anyway. Because they were part of a hierarchy of love where you’re supposed to love those people that come before you, that have, in a way, spawned you, like family people, it’s a matter of respect. You love them because you’re expected to.

It’s death, death every time and I have to keep writing. Sorry I didn’t come to see you but you were a menacing spectacle, plus you weren’t able to recognize me. I sat like a ghost at the edge of your blurred vision’s periphery. You threatened my capability of confronting things, so I ignored them. What a shame, I know. Even the realization, the fact, are vague, are abstract.

The first time. I wept when I realized (11 years old) that something so bad and terrible can happen to me and my family. Or , more like it, I wept because I couldn’t believe something like this was actually happening. Those were tears of denial. No fucking way. I locked myself into the bathroom and spent hours of doing what may pass for praying. You left me your journals that mom threw away and i never got to read, and your love for obscure fiction, and your records of Pink Floyd. Also, people say, you left me your weird, discontented, self-destructive disposition to life. People say I smoke because you did.

The second time I wept because it was a fast, grotesque death, and the first time I said my goodbyes to a corpse. That I kissed the cold forehead, the hollow shell of something that wore the dead mask of someone I used to know. Now she was no-one. Yet, I wished her “bon voyage and say hi”, and cried. It was my first funeral but I always forget the specifics, the technical details. I cried a lot during the burial I think, because my dad’s death, my first death, was too vague, I wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral and I still can only imagine things or recreate scenes and feelings out of what other people say, things made to satisfy my sinister imagination.

The third death makes me want to cry even more, because it was my fault and it ended up in a horrific, macabre environment. I had lots of memories and an almost somatic pain of loss. Death became solid, concrete. For those who stay alive, there are a lot of responsibilities, even after death. My family, we forsake them all.

And now, the fourth death. Have i counted them correctly? Still coming home on the bus, still don’t know what to feel. It’s too early, it’s just an announcement. There was my broken voice. The agitation. The bewilderment. The abruptness, the simple worlds spoken, their cruelty, their silliness. Their simplicity. The simplicity of the fact. There aren’t many memories for me. Right now, there’s only noise, static noise.

I know what I will encounter - again. A body too smallish in comparison to what I remembered. Stuck in a coffin smaller than expected. As if death shrinks us all. And there’s also the other aspect of death. The magnificent triumphant egoism of life. Relationships resume. Recollections and reminders. The horrifically comforting sensation of your being.

We, the alive ones, we honour the dead, gather around them as if still alive, and maybe they’re still alive as long as they’re above the ground. We comfort each other with empty words about god and god knows what. We share memories. I wish I had some memories to share. We hug, we drink to forget or drink to remember. And I don’t know, I don’t know the point of it all, or the use of it. Someone doesn’t exist anymore, and what happened to what he was. Where did he go? The earth that covers him is like a howl in the dark because you know that some day, the same earth will cover you too and all you’ve loved.

It’s the other face of death. Do we cry for them, the dead ones, or for the heap of dust and bones we will become in a little while, or for what they once were? You always hope that death will reveal something to you. Maybe it will make you a better man. And then you realize; nothing.

Just a short note: the family tomb was opened, and after the coffin was deposited in the dirt, two green plastic bags were thrown atop. A friend of mine said she saw bones in them. One of these green bags was my dad. I left the site shaking my head and tryint to suppress wild laughter behind my palm.