Death is inside the folding cots:it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,and the beds go sailing toward a portwhere death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
-Pablo Neruda

http://legacy.suburbanchicagonews.com/obituaries/stng-heraldnews/obituary.aspx?n=frank-a-lisdero&pid=129456964


Strange mood...

im in a little bit of a weird mood right now.. i hadn’t talked to my parents since ive been here and for some reason i was like ok right now is the time and i called my mom last night and she sounded strange and blurted out.." dads in the hospital and dad died" and i said "what!" i was so confused and out of it and then i tried to get her to explain and when she did it came out that my grandpa died and my dad has been in the hospital (for 3 days)... i guess hes fine now.. something with his kidney or something but its eerie.. i just knew my grandpa would die while i was away. :/ he was old and it was time but im really upset i wont be there- we had a really special relationship- i was his youngest grandchild though he had quite a few great children younger than me and a few my age. And he was one of those family/ neighborhood patriarchs that everyone adored. I talked to my mom later that evening while she was on her way to the airport with my brother (my uncle flew down from Berkeley to stay with my dad). She said that later she listened to the messages at the house and the whole first part of our earlier conversation had been captured all the flustered confusion and she apologized for blurting it all out like that. She said she had felt so sad the past 3 days as she realized how small our little family really is in Pasadena; how alone we are in a time of crisis with no family close by to step in on call without some inconvenience. I can't stop thinking about
the postcard that I send yesterday an hour before i called my mom... a postcard that will go to this woman that i now have no real tie to except that she was my step grandmother for 20 years and a lot of my family doesn’t like her. I wonder how she'll feel about the card. It reminded me of when my other grandfather died and a few days later this porcelain carousel came in the mail that he had ordered for me... mail is a funny thing.... neither rain, nor sleet, nor death.... its a funny thing. it’s a strange and almost eerie feeling when the sender or recipient no longer exists but this thing they had or would have touched remains en route.
As I was flipping through my notebook earlier, looking up my brothers cell phone I got caught on a page I had written down my grandfather’s address- my step grandmother’s address- 3 lines that no longer hold any relevance- tied to a physical place I will in all probability never go to again. Simply cut off. My mother had relayed the strangeness of this feeling earlier on the phone, “Theres no one left in Joliet,” she said. All her sisters had moved to neighboring towns but the town/ street where she had grown up was now back to being just another street among many within Joliet Township Proper. All of the stories and episodes of their childhood that had once had more pull in terms of oral history due to the physical landscape that was immediately accessible to my imagination … (anyone not part of these epics could grasp on to, slowly recessed and now sank deeper into that place of intangibility within the remaining individuals who were a part of them, these numbers shrink and grow in pulses as members of the inclub die off and new members form. As this last remaining inhabitant of Waverly Road has left, in a few years a new family might move in and start the cycle all over again.
...cont...
Sonic youth-painbirds
when i got into class today i walked in late and we were doing a listening exercise that was about a kid taking his dad to the hospital. then the next exercise in the book was about taking care of a sick grandfather. The irony of course was that i had come to class in part to get the whole thing of my mind not to translate it all "en espanol"- perhaps thats an immersion program at its best.
we sat in pairs and my partner Merium who always reads the Spanish sentences out loud and translates them into English stopped and paused.. "wait... whats grandfather? do you know, grandfather?" she asked again because i had also paused at the question -caught off guard at its relevance, and had said "abuelo" at a low and most probable inaudible tone. I saw her starting to
pan through her dictionary, looking it up. "Grandfather," I repeated "its grandfather... abuelo". "ohh grandfather, abueello" Merium repeated to herself as the word hummed and buzzed through my frontal lobe- ricocheting as it echoed off the walls. I looked down the page at the rest of the exercise at the picture of an old man- bald with glasses in a hospital gown being
pushed in a wheelchair.
i came back up to my room after lunch- my roommate and i discussed postcards for a while as we sprawled some of the previous evenings selections on the bed and i helped her cut out the cheap 12-pack packaged ones and i cued up one section of a This American Life episode on my ipod for her to listen to. I quickly started to doze off but not before taking note that she had been listening longer than the episode itself was. When I woke up she was gone and still in a daze I pulled my ipod over to me and put my headphones on. She had snuck into a playlist and had listened 3min and 56 seconds into "Old Man" by Neil Young- and of course had paused it right on cue with the chorus. I let it play out and again swallowed and digested the apparent relevance- but not without a low and inaudible eyeroll.
anyway.. this has been a continuing rant brought to you by grief inc. :]