Subject Matter—always dies, what we are left with is architecture, form, sound, all in a room, darkened, a few chairs unarranged. The door is locked from the inside. But still, subject matter breaks in and all the others rise. My mother’s death is not her story. My father’s stroke is not his story. I am not my mother’s story, not my father’s story. But there is a meeting place that is hidden, one that holds all the maps toward indifference. Can pain be separated from subject matter? Can subject matter take flight and lose its way, peck on another tree? How do you walk heavily with subject matter on your back, without trampling all the meadows?
Sadness—dies while the man across the street trims the hedges and I can see my children doing cartwheels. Or in the moment I sit quietly and listen to the sky, consider the helicopter or the child’s hoarse breathing at night. Time after a death changes shape, it rolls slightly downhill as if it knows to move itself forward without our help. Because after a death, there is no moving on despite the people waving us through the broken lights. There is only a stone key that fits into one stone lock. But the dead are holding the key. And the stone is a boulder in a stream. I wave my memories in, beat them with a wooden spoon, just for a moment, to stop the senselessness of time, the merriment, just for a moment to feel the tinsel of death again, its dirty bloody beak.
Empathy—died sometime before January 20, 2017. The gate vanished but we don’t know when. The doorbell vanished. The trains stopped moving. Someone stole the North Pole sign. I am you, and you, and you. But there are so many obstacles between us. I can never feel my mother’s illness or my father’s dementia. The black notes on the score are only representations of sound, the keys must knock certain strings which are made of steel, steel is made of iron and carbon from the earth. Why do we make things like a piano that try to represent beauty or pain? Why must we always draw what we see? Just copy it, my mother used to say about drawing. The artist is only visiting pain, imagining it. We praise the artist, not the apple, not the apple’s shadow which is murdered slowly. There must be some way of drawing a picture so that it doesn’t become an elegy.
The Obituary Writer—can die before the subject. John Wilson died in 2002, before the publication of his obituary on bandleader Artie Shaw who died in 2004. What if I die before my father? I’ve written his obituary in my head every day since his stroke. My father’s brain has died before him. It was surrounded by his beloved skull. What if the hinges on his skull break and the brain falls out? Do I give it back or toss it? What if we call the waiter over and God comes instead? Do we offer Him a seat and a brandy or do we cover our eyes and hope He doesn’t see us? My mother spent years knowing she would die. But in her last days, she had no idea. To suffer for so long with knowledge but not to finish what was known. Why do I need her to know in her last moments? Like the people who died in the Oakland warehouse fire, crawling on the floor, trying to sort between a battered organ and a door, between a staircase and a shadow. Death isn’t the enemy. Knowledge of death is the enemy.
Do you see the tree?
Its secrets grow as lemons.
Sometimes I pretend
I love my children more than
words—no one knows this but words.
*
My children, children,
today my hands are dreaming
as they touch your hair.
Your hair turns into winter.
When I die, your hair will snow.
The Doctors—died on August 3, 2015, surrounded by all the doctors before them and their eyes that should have been red but weren’t. The Russian doctor knew death was near before anyone else, first said the word hospice, a word that looks like hospital and spice. Which is it? To yearn for someone’s quick death seems wrong. To go to the hospital cafeteria and hunch over a table of toast, pots of jam, butter glistening seems wrong. To want to extend someone’s life who is suffering seems wrong. Do we want the orchid or the swan swimming in the middle of the lake? We can touch the orchid and it doesn’t move. The orchid is our understanding of death. But the swan is death.
Yesterday—died at midnight. All gold. Wet handkerchiefs from mourning. John Updike once said, Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? Updike must not have watched someone slowly suffocating. Our air goes in and out like silk in the folders of the lungs. But breathing is a lucky accident. Updike must not have seen Death bring glasses of water but not speak. He must have never carried time over his shoulders as it bled. I think he would change his mind, now having gone through death. His words might no longer come out as birds, but as bandages. The living seem to be the only ones who hypothesize about death. The only ones who try to lift it up.
Grief—as I knew it, died many times. It died trying to reunite with other lesser deaths. Each morning I lay out my children’s clothing to cover their grief. The grief remains but is changed by what it is covered with. A picture of oblivion is not the same as oblivion. My grief is not the same as my pain. My mother was a mathematician so I tried to calculate my grief. My father was an engineer so I tried to build a box around my grief, along with a small wooden bed that grief could lie down on. The texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing me to speak about nothing. If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it faceup on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.
Doctors—died on July 16, 2014. Dr. Lynch was supposed to be the best. I researched. I called. I asked. I read. All my schooling had prepared me to help my mother. I was the youngest and most educated child of Death. A hundred people in the waiting room all pulling green oxygen cylinders. I had all the air to myself but I couldn’t breathe. We waited two hours. The doctor wore a blue banker shirt, silky red tie that covered his lungs. My mother pointed at me, I want to live longer so I can spend more time with her. I think she meant my children, what I represented. The doctor clipped the X-rays to the little box of light. His pen pointed to all the extra dark spots. I was supposed to feel something as he spoke. I looked away because I’ve never looked at the insides of my mother before. The seeing was the wrong way. I know now that to be loved as a child means to be watched. In high school, I loved when the teacher turned the lights off. A moment to feel loved and unseen at once. I understand now. We can’t be loved when the lights are off.
Blame—wants to die but cannot. Its hair is untidy but it’s always here. My mother blamed my father. I blamed my father’s dementia. My father blamed my mother’s lack of exercise. My father is the story, not the storyteller. I eventually blamed my father because the story kept on trying to become the storyteller. Blame has no face. I have walked on its staircase around and around, trying to slap its face but only hitting my own cheeks. When some people suffer, they want to tell everyone about their suffering. When the brush hits a knot, the child cries out loud, makes a noise that is an expression of pain but not the pain itself. I can’t feel the child’s pain but some echo of her pain, based on my imagination. Blame is just an echo of pain, a veil across the face of the one you blame. I blame God. I want to complain to the boss of God about God. What if the boss of God is rain and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown?
Time—died on August 3, 2015. A week before my mother died, the nurse called and said to be prepared. I looked through my purse for the rest of the words. My pockets empty. Prepared for what? Could I prepare if the words were missing? Is a stem with a bud considered a flower? A bud is not a flower but a soon-to-be flower. No word exists for about to die but dying but even dying lacks time in the same way a bud lacks a timeline. My mother thought it was only an infection. She blamed them for not giving her antibiotics sooner. But time was ahead of her, the wheel already turning. The nurse said after, I’m surprised she made it through the weekend. I was surprised she died at all. Time isn’t a moment. Time is enlarged, blurry. As in
, my ten-year-old wrapped my dead mother’s bracelet for her own birthday and said it was a gift.
Today I show you
the people living in tents.
If you lean in and
listen, the lemon makes noise,
pound your fist and it will fall.
*
My children, children,
do you know a dead heart chimes?
That my breath is an
image that you will forget,
you will lift it like a sheet.
Form—died on August 3, 2015. After my mother died, the weather got hotter so gradually we all became blind. Another bird fell out of the ficus, left its eggs. The arm that turned the earth never bothered to stop for the bird and the bird was crushed between the earth and time. After my mother died, my love for her lost all shape. Everything I had disliked about her became fibrous. I let them harden and suffocate. I posted about her last days on an online pulmonary fibrosis board, typing to strangers into the night, the edges of our fingertips touching. That story is still there but I can no longer find it or the people who might be dead. Each letter a small soldier in formation for a new dying person to read, to see how the living might perceive them when they are unconscious. Grief isn’t what spills out of a cracked egg. Grief is the row of eggs waiting in the cold to lose their shape.
Control—died on August 3, 2015, along with my mother. Suddenly I was no longer in the middle of the earth. Suddenly I could change the angle of the liquid pen so that the rocket went the other way. And all the children stopped crying. My sister set up the appointment with the neurologist who asked, What’s your name? My father said, What what the system is… what, as he reached into his wallet and gave the doctor his credit card. His finger angrily pointing at me. We left with prescriptions for my father—antidepressants, antianxiety, anger-management pills. My mother hadn’t thought to medicate him. So much depends on the questions we ask. How is he feeling versus how are you feeling is the difference between life and death. I held on to the small white paper as it waved slowly in the wind like a surrender flag. That day dusk didn’t arrive. I went into it.
The Situation—died on August 3, 2015, at least part of the situation; my father was the other situation. A situation isn’t like a jacket you can just take off the person. The situation is the skin, the body’s eggshell, its flowerpot. If you pull the arms off a clock, you still have the clock. Time keeps going because the arms measure time but are not time. To want the situation to die but not the person is like wanting the gallop but not the horse. There are many things I can’t put into a box: wind, marvel, time, suffering. I have no answer. I have no more questions. Because when? means the situation will be over. My face will carry those of two dead people. And I can finally put down the dictionary.
Memory—died on February 12, 2015. It was a routine. We’d arrive, the children would give my mother a hug, leave the room to watch TV, and I would sit on a small stool ten feet away from the La-Z-Boy chair I had given her. The oxygen machine tired and gurgling, my father pacing in the other room. Alibaba, my mother said. What? I asked. Alibaba, she repeated, I should buy some. Again and again she asked me over several weeks as if for the first time. I can still hear her voice, the shrill accented chorus of the A, the li, then baba, the same phrase for father in Chinese. Even as she was dying, she thought the path to God was money. I wonder if she heard coins in her dreams, if when God touched her forehead, His fingertips felt like gold. I bought her the Alibaba shares in March, and it’s up 40.64%.
Doctors—died on August 3, 2015. Dr. Lynch, Dr. Chang, Dr. Mahoney, the ER doctors, the nurses, their blank faces as they pulled thin blankets up to my mother’s shoulders, the frozen summers. When Dr. Mahoney finally arrived, I forgot all my questions. My heart opened like a tear. He said he was leaving the practice and I wondered why we call groups of doctors a practice, as if not yet experts. Maybe because they can’t know how to die until they die. When he spoke, I tried not to emit warmth. He wanted to do something different, as if saving my mother could be a career option. He talked for twenty minutes. We forgot about my mother in the small bed, just a curtain separating her and the three moaning women. How we go in and out of caring about others. As I returned to my mother’s room, I slid down the microscope and felt myself shrinking.
Obsession—born on January 20, 1940, never died after the stroke but grew instead. The stroke gained an oak door, not just hard but impenetrable. The obsessions lived in solitude behind the oak door. After his stroke, the obsession took my father to the gym to walk on the treadmill. He walked as if through a wildfire, he walked so much, he disappeared. His brain now had an accent and no one could understand how to stop him from learning the new language. My mother called and said he fell on the treadmill, hit his head, blood thinners spread his blood like moonlight. They drilled holes in his head, vacuumed out the blood and more words. My father was finally arrested, he turned in the rest of his words, they bound his tongue. And he dreamed in blank paper.
My children, children,
tonight, during a reading,
a white writer said:
She was a squinty-eyed cunt.
My squinty eyes remain closed.
*
My children don’t have
squinty eyes, they have breathing.
Their breathing sends roads
into the white man’s body.
These roads can lead to starlings.
The Clock—died on June 24, 2009 and it was untimely. How many times my father has failed the clock test. Once I heard a scientist with Alzheimer’s on the radio, trying to figure out why he could no longer draw a clock. It had to do with the superposition of three types. The hours represented by 1 to 12, the minutes where a 1 no longer represents 1 but 5, and a 2 now represents 10, then the second hand that measures 1 to 60. I sat at the stoplight and thought of the clock, its perfect circle and its superpositions, all the layers of complication on a plane of thought, yet the healthy read the clock in one single instant without a second thought. I think about my father and his lack of first thoughts, how every thought is a second or third or fourth thought, unable to locate the first most important thought. I wonder about the man on the radio and how far his brain has degenerated since. Marvel at how far our brains allow language to wander without looking back but knowing where the pier is. If you unfold an origami swan, and flatten the paper, is the paper sad because it has seen the shape of the swan or does it aspire toward flatness, a life without creases? My father is the paper. He remembers the swan but can’t name it. He no longer knows the paper swan represents an animal swan. His brain is the water the animal swan once swam in, holds everything, but when thawed, all the fish disappear. Most of the words we say have something to do with fish. And when they’re gone, they’re gone.
Hope—died on October 15, 2014 when the FDA approved two drugs, Esbriet and Ofev for pulmonary fibrosis. I did what I was trained to do, researched, read, asked questions. I taped to my wall articles that now look like tombstones. Hope is the wildest bird, the one that flies so fast it will either disappear or burst into flames. My mug from Japan says Enjoy the Happiness Time. As if it knows happiness is attached to time somehow. The drugs could slow down the disease but not reverse it. We chose hospice. In my child’s homework: Which of the following happens eventually? a) You are born, b) You die, c) A long winter comes to an end, d) Practice makes perfect. I no longer know how to answer this.
The Head—died on August 3, 2015. When the two men finally came, they rolled a gurney into the other room, hushed talking and noises, then the tip of the gurney came out like a cruise ship. They were worried about dinging the walls. My mother’s whole body covered with a blanket. Her head gone. Her face gone. Rilke was wrong. The body is nothing without the head. My mother, now covered, was no longer my mother. A covered apple is no longer an apple. A sketch of a person isn’t the person. Somewhere, in the morning, my mother had become the sketch. And I would spend the rest of my life
trying to shade her back in.
The Blue Dress—died on August 6, 2015, along with the little blue flowers, all silent. Once the petals looked up. Now small pieces of dust. I wonder whether they burned the dress or just the body? I wonder who lifted her up into the fire? I wonder if her hair brushed his cheek before it grew into a bonfire? I wonder what sound the body made as it burned? They dyed her hair for the funeral, too black. She looked like a comic character. I waited for the next comic panel, to see the speech bubble and what she might say. But her words never came and we were left with the stillness of blown glass. The irreversibility of rain. And millions of little blue flowers. Imagination is having to live in a dead person’s future. Grief is wearing a dead person’s dress forever.
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