4.08.2010


drumming with a paintbrush: always a good/bad sign.

i've got a friend who's a drummer. she's not professional, but she's very rhythmic.

i'm full of red wine and energy drinks and beer and diet cola and cak (sic) and various potato bi-products and the like. in short, wasted. what're you gonna do, judge me?!

anyway.

it dawns on me tonight, on the birthday of one of my nearest and dearests, that i am infinitely lucky. i have friends who tease me and know me very well. friends who call me on my shit and applaud my ridiculousness. it's a good life, all told.

the lover sleeps in the next room. the night is wild.

as usual, our street is full of riff-raff and malcontent. i call it the intersection of screaming women, where we live, mostly affectionately. there tends to be much unrest.

i'm writing a story about sadness and grief and depression and self-destruction and love and lust and all the rest. and so i'm thinking a lot about all those things.

and then i spend an evening with some peeps that truly redeem every cynicism i have about the human race. i have known them all since i was basically a child. i have grown up in front of them and shed some baby fat and gained some adult baggage and through all the worst periods of my evolution they have stuck there; hilarious, intelligent, brazen, dynamic; i love them like i love my mother and my brother.

and my father, who is dead.

this post didn't start out being about death but on this night i feel i must address a certain terrible happening in my neck of the woods. this terrible happening is the awful event of willful suicide in a human being.

in the last year i have been connected, however removedly, from no less than three cases of suicide. one of my nearest and dearests, one of my favorite souls on this planet, lost a mother to a case of suicide last summer. all of a sudden, there she was with all that reckoning, and here she is now, 10 months later, still reckoning.

there is a friend on the west coast who lost a nearest and dearest (not one of my own) to an overdose of opiates and alcohol. the girl who died was bi-polar by nature and troubled at heart, and now she's dead.

and tonight, a friend i've known for 10 years and counting, was here in the wake of the suicide of one of her childhood besties.

and i don't know. i'm sorry. i don't want to be a downer. but fuck it, sometimes things are a fucking goddamned downer.

there is great sadness around. it creeps up on the faces of our nearest and dearest's and the best we can do is be there to witness it. Most of the people in my living room tonight bore witness to my father's diagnosis with the Big C and the following four years of his slow and drawn-out, painful death.

and so it goes.

five people left my apartment tonight about whom i can say the following, honestly: know me, accept me, love me. '

it's pretty good, no?

this from people who've seen me at the depths of despair. when my every moment was filled with wondering if that would be the day he would die; when every phonecall was a possible deathtoll.

and on the day it happened, i watched the movie NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE with 3 of the souls here tonight. and halfway through the screening my phone rang and it was my mother telling me the nurses at the hospices were saying he (my dad) could go at any time. in the lobby of the cinema i laughed gregariously into the phone. the nurses had been saying that for weeks and his death just never came. i went back in to watch the movie.

afterwards, at sunset, one of the besties drove me westward from the city toward the hospice in the suburbs in her family's red pick-up truck. the sun was golden and calm and we listened to music and smoked cigarettes with the windows wide open.

at the hospice everyone was there. my aunt and uncle--my father's siblings--my cousins and my mother and my brother. my father was calmer than usual, his breathing steadied. we all sat around and spoke in whispers and watched his heaving chest. at 11pm my mother and brother and cousins and i all decided to depart for the night. his brother and sister would stay for the evening shift with him. everyone left so we could say goodbye. he was lucid for the first time in days and days. i went to him and pressed my face against his clammy cheek. he gripped my hand and called my name. he hadn't recognized me, or anyone, in some time. 'i love you,' he said. 'i love you, sweetie pie,' and we both cried. i held him for a long time.

my brother drove my mother home in one car and i drove the other. i blared music from the speakers and smoked cigarettes and sped along the country roads, racing for home.

my brother went out to meet a friend at a pub. i went upstairs to ready for bed. not fifteen minutes passed when the telephone rang and i sat on the edge of the bed, poised and waiting. in another moment, the intercom buzzed and i depressed the speaker. 'you're not going to believe this,' my mother said.

and he was dead.

we drove together back to the hospice at midnight. i searched for music to play but none was appropriate. the moon was full and ripe over the road and we both were mostly silent. there was nothing to say. he was dead.

together my mother and i observed his body. he looked unfathomably small and delicate on the neat white bed. we pulled the sheet back and stared at his naked body. his face was peaceful for the first time in months and months and months. we touched his cooling skin; held our faces against his; said our goodbyes and that was that.

and that was that.

and so, now, in this month of april, in the year two thousand and ten of the christian calendar, after spending a night amongst the people who have seen me to the edges of darkest (in)sanity and drawn me back again. who were there after i saw things i never wanted to see. who held me on nights when his morphine terrors had been particularly bad or my mother's grief was too much for me to bear. these are the folk who poured my whiskey's and rolled my joints on the darkest nights and days.



but so it goes.

i'm very happy now.

but even in my very grateful acknowledgement that the days have brightened and i am

finally

fine again,


i feel compelled to pay a respect to the friends i know that have had people close to them die this year.

it's never going to be easy, and it's never going to be ok, but even so,

baby,

it gets easier with time.