These Old Coats, On Grief

We lost my grandmother a little bit to gallbladder, a little bit to heart troubles, and a lot to hospital error. She spent a day in my living room, holding my infant daughter, rocking her, knitting her a blanket. She went home and finished that blanket, then called to say she had bad indigestion.

She was in the hospital with a ventilator the next time I saw her, bloated beyond recognition from the fluid retention typical of heart-failure patients. She had not a wrinkle in her body. Liquid was oozing from her pores.

This is not a snapshot anyone wants in his album of memories. It is the last in mine, however, and I have had to pin her up—in all of her ages—around my house so the other could, with time, fade.

By the time she died (candidiasis caused all her organs to fail), I had already folded myself in tissue after tissue. My dog, sick throughout my pregnancy, had stopped barking at the mailman just two weeks before. My final picture of him is a howl of goodbye, just as the medicine went in. It has to be a howl of goodbye, because it's too painful to think of it as a howl of not yet.

I am still howling for them. I howl please and no and for god's sake why. And I did it again when an aneurysm exploded in my father-in-law's stomach and again when my grandfather, who didn't come down for breakfast, suffered a massive stroke and died alone, a game of solitaire on his table. And again when my dog, Buddha, child of the first to go, was hit by a car.

My final snapshot of him is really one of me, wailing and moaning on the side of the road as if my own soul had been ripped from my body while my husband carried him across the street.

Grief, though familiar, never becomes your old friend.

It took me a while before I could channel some of it into anything but insomnia and depression. After my grandfather died, after my family had cleaned out their house, after I shut the door for the final time and did not return, I was able to write the poem I needed to get me through.

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these old coats

have pockets of tissues, gently rumpled,
packets of sweet ‘n’ low,
origami birds and matchbooks,
a baggie for what’s left on the table,
and a grocery list in both their hands—
her cook’s cursive, his draftsman’s block.
these old coats have their smell,
Aramis and old lipstick,
which burn through the must.

the rest of this lifeless house,
rummaged through,
picked over by early scavengers,
is haunted by dust mites,
and mandel bread and brisket.
here is where she baked.
here is where he fed me
farina and life.
here is where she stepped in slippers
to light the shabbos candles and say her
private brucha,
her hand a wide brim to shield her eyes
from heaven’s brightness.
and here and here and over there is where
he called her dear and love
and she answered him with honey.
now this house is heavy;
its spirits are low.
and the ghosts of African violets
strain to reach splinters of sun
that squeeze past always-drawn blinds.

outside in almost-spring
a forsythia hides amid a tangle of yew,
and daffodils are ambivalent.
hens and chicks still roost,
though their roots are shallow,
the soil beneath them, powder.

but these old coats
in the closet by the door,
hold on to their secrets
like a last breath:
on this day, they had a cold.
on this day, they ate at Friendly’s.
on this day, they needed blueberries.
these old coats with their notes and birds
and pockets of packets,
these old coats still have their smell.

-----

My grandfather would have been 92 next Monday, August 29th. My grandmother would have been 93 on September 12th.

It gets easier. And then it gets harder. Eventually, the harder is less hard; the easier, a little easier. Except on some days. Some days it's a new cut, a callous that allows a blister to form and burst before you've even realized you were rubbing it raw. Again.