Last summer for the first time I saw a body that once belonged to a person I loved. The body was my grandmother’s, and it sat still in her bed at her house in Cold Spring, New York, on the morning of July 3. At the time, I was alone at the house with my maternal grandparents. I had just finished brushing my teeth when my grandfather came into my room to get me. I opened my mouth to tell him he should have knocked. “There’s something wrong with Bunny,” he said. I closed my mouth, opened it again, and said, “Okay.” I followed him into their bedroom, and there was her shed skin, a silent yellow-gray molt sitting stiff and supine in the spot where just hours earlier there had been a pink and breathing person.
* * *
A month before I saw my grandmother’s body, Anthony Bourdain died and I entered an inexplicable period of mourning. It was a strange reaction for me to have, since though I’d always liked Bourdain’s interviews and Twitter account (which gifted us with gems like “I’m doing a Kickstarter to buy Ted Cruz a Fleshlight”), I was not a fangirl. I’d never read Kitchen Confidential and I’d seen only a handful of episodes of his two big shows. Bourdain had a name and a face that I recognized, but I didn’t really know him at all.
And yet his death struck through me like a fever. I became a woman obsessed. I watched every episode of Parts Unknown and No Reservations, and every clip from every late-night interview. I scrolled through his tweets as far back as the archives permitted. I read article after article after article, pre- and postmortem, so I could sit inside his life for a minute. I lay awake at night and cried, and in the morning, I woke up drenched in sweat and the sense that something in the universe as I knew it was amiss.
I am always upset when celebrities die because in my sad made-up world, I know them as intimately as I know my own friends. When Heath Ledger died, I was so startled I spent $200 on empire waist dresses at Urban Outfitters. I cried over Philip Seymour Hoffman. You will need to come collect me when Harrison Ford kicks it.
But this inexplicable obsession was intense in a different way, maybe because of this: Bourdain looks exactly like my father. Perhaps exactly is a strong word, since Bourdain was six-four and my father is decidedly not. But they are both half Jewish and half Mediterranean (Bourdain’s father is from the South of France, while my paternal grandmother’s family is from Southern Italy) with curly salt-and-pepper hair. They have similar bone structures, and the skin on their faces creases in the same spots. In certain photos, the resemblance is uncanny. They are alike in other ways, too—they both had wild pasts, are older fathers, and boast a gruffness burying a secret sweetness you have to earn.
When I watched Bourdain navigate new cities on Parts Unknown, I searched for familiar side angles and glimpses of my father’s face in his. When he died, it struck a chord, a reminder of an inevitability that I largely keep out of view.
* * *
The day after the Bourdain news broke, some friends and I went to see a horror movie called Hereditary. I love horror movies because I hate them. After I saw The Ring, I wouldn’t sleep in a room with a television in it for months. But I am a masochist and I love to torture my brain, so I bought tickets in advance for this film, which critics were calling “uncommonly unsettling” and “the scariest movie in years.” I was ready for terror.
Unfortunately, though Hereditary was marketed as a spooky ghost flick, the real horror is rooted too much in reality to make it fun. For the sake of no spoilers, I won’t disclose exactly what happens, but know that about half an hour into the film, there is a significant death. The death scene is shot in such a way that you, an audience member who bought a ticket to this ayahuasca trip because you thought you’d just be dealing with jump scares and Casper, are forced to sit with and process this death along with the bereaved. You are forced to think—for several minutes, in brutal silence—about how you would feel if you saw someone you loved die violently, what it would be like to know you and your life were changed forever, and that nothing was ever again going to be or feel okay.
I tend to leave horror films haunted by shadows in my room and breezes in the shower, but I left this one haunted by death. I was already grieving Bourdain and my not-dead father and now I grieved everyone. What would I do if my sister died in an accident? How would I process the loss of my best friend? What was I going to remember about my mother? If the men I’d once loved succumbed all of a sudden, was I allowed to cry?
Death was everywhere, and now it was in my brain. I could not stop thinking about it, I could not stop fearing it, and I could not stop seeing the people I loved lying lifeless on a slab. And then, a few weeks later, there was my grandmother, dead in her bed.
* * *
I decided early on in the summer that I would spend the first week of July at my grandparents’ house with them. I had just started writing this very book, and though New York City is a good muse for writers, in part because of the crush of people and also because of the subway horror tales, all the great stories the city feeds you while you’re living here tend to distract you from actually writing them down. My grandparents split their time between Cold Spring and their rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side (OH, TO HAVE LIVED AND LOVED IN THE 1960s), and though they offered me their house when they were in the city, I decided to pick a week when we’d all be together. The Good Granddaughter version of me said this was because the two of them were having trouble navigating steps, and I wanted to help them out. The Selfish Granddaughter chose that week because I had never in my entire life spent a night alone in a house, and I was scared. I’m not sure which version had the final say.
I am not a great driver and my grandmother was not great at stocking a fridge with unexpired food, so my parents offered to ferry me up to Cold Spring, buy us some groceries (I am very spoiled), and spend the night before heading back into Manhattan. When I showed up at their apartment for my free ride, though, they informed me they’d be driving back to the city after dropping me off. My sister was sick, and she was crashing at their place until she felt better. We are both very spoiled.
“We don’t want to leave her,” my mother said, so instead they were going to leave me. We made it to Cold Spring, but when we got to town, my father discovered a bubble in his tire, so they left right away, dropping me at the house before heading to an auto shop in hopes of staving off a fatal blowout on the West Side Highway. As I watched them pull out of the parking lot, I felt a sudden stab of longing, a sense that I was being left alone. I wanted to run after their car and ask them to stay. This was strange. I am an adult. It is easier for me to spend less time with my parents, not more, because I can drink as much soda as I want and no one tells me when to go to bed. And yet I did not want them to go.
This was not the first time my mother’s parents and I were spending time alone together. We grew up as much with them as we did with my real parents. When my sister and I were little, my grandparents babysat us often, feeding us ice cream and letting us stay up late to watch old movies (much, I presume, to my parents’ delight, when two very cranky children were dropped at their doorstep in the morning).
My grandmother and I had monthly lunch dates. She loved art, theater, and fashion, so we went to museums and Broadway shows and fought endlessly in clothing stores because she refused to believe I didn’t look good in gauchos. We went to the movies and sat in her living room and drank tea, and she told me she was glad I talked to her about real things, not just the weather and school, as grandchildren who treated their grandparents like obligations did. We were so close we could argue, but not so close our fights were as vicious as the ones I have with my mother. My grandmother was much more concerned about the coat I wouldn’t zip up than about whether I’d grow up to reflect all the things in her she didn’t like.
But on this particular hot day in July, the instant my parents pulled out of the parking lot, my nerves started shredding. It was very hot. It was at least 90 degrees, with a delightful mid-Atlantic 1000 percent humidity, and the old house had air conditionin
g in only two rooms. My grandmother kept complaining about the heat, but she refused to wear a short-sleeved shirt. I told her to sit in a room with AC, but she kept wandering around the subtropical kitchen instead. “It’s so hot,” she said. “Why are you wearing a sweater?” I asked. “It’s not a sweater,” she said. It was, but she wasn’t going to change.
All this sounds like a warning shot, and considering what happened next, it should have been. But my grandmother loved to complain almost as much as she loved the Metropolitan Museum of Art and telling me to put on lipstick. She was upright and elegant and doctors said she was in mostly perfect health, though she spent a decade claiming she was nearly dead. My sister likes to tell a story about going to the theater with my grandmother a few years ago. They were in line for headphones, right behind a woman with a walker who was wrinkled, bent over, and essentially crumbling, and she apologized to my grandmother after bumping into her. “We’re in the same boat, you and I,” my straight-backed grandmother told her, pointing to the cane she carried with her but somehow never let touch the ground. The woman looked at her in disbelief.
(She complained about more than just aging. One time I was walking with her on Columbus Avenue on the tony Upper West Side when she jabbed at a single small crack in the sidewalk. “You see that?” she hissed. “De Blasio,” referencing the much-maligned mayor of New York. My grandmother was very political.)
So my grandmother’s complaints didn’t seem out of the ordinary, and I didn’t have the energy to fight her. I was starting to think staying in Cold Spring was a mistake. The heat was so intense I couldn’t bend my fingers. It was the kind of hot that makes you feel like you’re trapped in a box, like you’re suffocating, like you’re having a panic attack and there is no respite. I wanted to go home. My landlord had not gotten back to us about our lease renewal, and I was worried the new rent would be too high. My friends had July Fourth drinking plans, pre–July Fourth drinking plans, and post–July Fourth drinking plans, and I was going to miss all of them. I had struck up a flirtation with a man in the city, and now I was far away from him. I wanted the week to end. It was only Saturday.
* * *
On Sunday night, my grandmother started screaming that she thought there was something wrong with her. My grandfather called her doctor, and on Monday morning, they drove back to the city. She’s fine, the doctor assured them. It’s just the heat. My mother urged them to stay in the city, where air conditioning was plentiful. I wanted them to stay in the city, too. The house was peaceful without them. I got a lot of work done. I liked having all the rooms to myself. But they insisted on coming back. That night I drove them to dinner, worrying the whole time that I’d crash the car into a pole or a deer or twelve deer and kill us all. But we made it and drove back, and I said good night to them. In the morning, my grandmother was dead.
* * *
Like turning off a light in a familiar room, it takes a minute for your eyes to adjust to a dead body that once belonged to someone you loved. The outline is there, yes, but the details are all wrong. The body is still and silent, like an object, like a table, like nothing. The skin doesn’t twitch or heave or even minutely pulse. This sounds obvious—of course someone who is dead cannot move—but it is startling to see it for yourself in inaction. And you know death when you see it. You know immediately that the person who was once in that body has gotten out of it, even if you yell their name and shake them and ask them very desperately to wake up.
I have never believed in the afterlife. The idea of spending an eternity in heaven seems just as unpleasant as spending an eternity on earth. Nothing is ever good forever. I always liked the idea of reincarnation, if just because it fed my desire to experience life as a different person or a bird, because I would love to peck out all my enemies’ eyes.
But when I saw the Nana-skin, I started to suspect whatever was once inside had to go somewhere. Sure, science says life is just blood circulating and some brain activity, but if that’s the case, why did the Nana-skin look so empty? How is it just organs that make a person smile and laugh and breathe and go “camping” with you under the dining room table? Was it just mitral and tricuspid valves that sewed your rag doll a new face after you destroyed the old one with too much love and toddler snot? Are oxygenated blood cells responsible for bandaging your bruises and hugging you when you cried and telling you they loved you even though you simply refused to try on those gauchos?
The thing in the bed was not my grandmother. It was a pile of bones and flesh, but there was nothing inside. The paramedics came and confirmed it was a body and not a person. The body got picked up by the funeral home and driven back to the city. It got put in a cold drawer in the funeral home, where my mother and aunt looked at it and confirmed what it once had been. It got put in a box that we rolled down the aisle at a standing-room-only funeral in a 300-capacity hall. It got driven to a cemetery in Westchester, and then it got put in the ground. And the rest of us, the living, drove back to Manhattan without it.
* * *
When an elderly person dies, grieving feels like an unnecessary indulgence. People are supposed to die when they are old. My father’s mother was much older than my mother’s parents, and when we visited her in her musty apartment in Brooklyn, she cried when we tried to leave. In her nineties, she lived for Rice Krispies cereal, Wheel of Fortune, and intermittent visits from family members who didn’t really want to be there. When she died at age ninety-three, I was almost happy for her.
And so I have felt strange, grieving for my grandmother—perhaps even stranger than I did in grieving for Bourdain, a person I did not know but who was not supposed to die. I don’t think I deserve to be as sad as I am. I don’t think I’m allowed to listen to a voice mail she left me in April and sit down on the street. I’m not even sure that when she left it, I remembered to call her back. But this is not a story about mourning. It is a story about death.
It sounds like this was my first experience with death, but it was not. Death has always been around me, because it is always around everyone. My father’s best friend died of a heart attack when I was nine. I remember going to shiva at their apartment and eating cake and sitting in his eighteen-year-old daughter’s room, giggling when someone asked me if I wanted a cigarette. The father of two children I babysat for in high school dropped dead one day at work. The mother of a little girl I tutored died by suicide. A twenty-year-old girl in my roommates’ sorority was killed by a driver while walking to the campus one morning. Family friends and family members and friends I had but lost touch with have died. Often these were people who were young and strong and who were not supposed to die.
But I did not see their bodies. I know what I’m looking for now. My parents will die. My sister will die. My friends will die. You and I and everyone we love and hate and meet and walk by on the street and sit next to on the train will die. If I feared looking at their lifeless bodies before, I fear it even more now. I can see them stepping out of their bodies, leaving the rest of us with empty gray piles of aged tendon and skin. This will happen again and again and again and again and again. If we’re lucky. Maybe we won’t be. Maybe the Arctic will melt, the sea levels will rise, the Earth will run out of food, oxygen, water, sun. Maybe it won’t, but we’ll all die anyway.
I Went to South America to Find Myself and All I Found Was a Forty-Foot Jesus
Handel’s Messiah boomed from speakers hidden in the plastic mountain, while we, the onlookers, huddled atop bleachers about twenty feet away. It was a perfect early March day in Argentina, with a soft breeze and sunshine so abundant my friend Lauren and I had to shade our eyes, even though it was already late afternoon. As we strained to see the mountain from our perch, we could hear children squeal in Spanish as they climbed a pack of plastic camels to our right. I was tired. We’d been at the park for hours and I was ready to go back to the hostel. It was my second-to-last full day in Buenos Aires, and I wanted a nap and a steak before I had to pack. I was not looking forward to
going home, not that my new post-fire apartment, which I’d moved into just a couple months prior, felt much like one. I did not want to go back to work, which now seemed exclusively populated by men who had seen me naked. But my trip was almost over, and thus loomed the inevitable.
It was Handel that pulled me out of my fatigued reverie. The music drew my attention to the brown plastic mass that had started creeping out of the rock. First, there was a plastic forehead; then plastic eyebrows, plastic eyes, a hint of plastic ear.
* * *
The site of this baffling plastic resurrection was Tierra Santa, a Bible-themed amusement park for children located right by Buenos Aires’s domestic airport. Tierra Santa means Holy Land, and certainly it is thus—in fact, it is set up to evoke biblical Jerusalem, permitting visitors to walk where Jesus walked and experience his life through his eyes, provided he lived his life in tiny plastic dioramas populated by his clones. You can climb Golgotha, the hill where Jesus hung on the cross, and indeed, there are the three life-size bloodless plastic dead bodies hanging atop the plastic rock.
You can see Roman soldiers flogging Jesus outside the plastic Temple in Jerusalem, which, yes, has also been re-created for your personal enjoyment. You can see plastic Jesus carrying the plastic cross through town, plastic blood on his chest and dripping on the ground in his wake. You can also visit other people and places in biblical history. There’s a plastic Lazarus, freshly risen from the dead and looking like it. There’s plastic Pontius Pilate, happy to greet you in his fancy plastic Roman temple. There are plastic examples of other houses of worship, including a plastic Muslim mosque that is at least vaguely if not openly racist. And all of this is for children! It is magnificent.
Good Things Happen to People You Hate Page 13
