Blog Post #8: Away (almost) in the Garden

My grandma is dead. Her house still stands, decaying and darkened like her/like her insides/the plush inside her coffin as comforting as the remaining decorations in her house. I walk in, first time since January - the time my mom enlisted only me to help clean out the house. 

It looks like she was robbed: an empty orange rug, stained yellow with age, the walls a color I can’t even begin to understand. The love seat remaining is sunken in and stuffed with bags of her things to give away. We won’t tell them they wear the belongings of a dead woman. 

Somehow the umbrella bin still hugs the backside of the front door. The musk is as unreal as the darkness/as unreal as the haunted-housing-creaking staircase/unreal as it all is. I never look the same in the hallway mirror. I, too, look unreal. I was so happy growing up, walking up and down the stairs, modeling for the hallway, dressing with my brothers in our grandparents’ clothes. I look like a ghost in the landscape spread mirror. 

This isn’t grief. This is life/where I water the flowers/where the aloe plant that’s been in our family for two generations will die/where no one can save this place/save this.

Only one more light in the house works. Thank goodness for the Easter warmth. Even in the rain and wind it is almost fifty degrees. It was winter when she died. It has been freezing in this house since then.

She didn’t die here. She died next door. In my aunt’s house/in her hospital bed/in the pink covers we got her/in the clothes we dressed her in/in her body: some hell. 

It was always so fucking hot in there. My frail grandmother so cold/thin/bone/chilled, we blasted three feet tall space heaters in all free spaces of the living room, for her. The walls overflowed with medications, bandages, morphine/dripping from the bags.

I imagined it dripping from the walls one night, then catching on fire with the old-fashioned space heater. I imagined dying with her, taking the row house/her row house/my aunt’s, with us. 

I dreamed of the garden outside, somehow alive again. I came back. She didn’t. I stand at her kitchen door, now. There is a large piece of wet wood underneath the handle of the door to make sure no one gets in. Everybody knows us, here. No one will come in. No one will go out. I put my hand on the wood. I could kill someone with this. I could break these glass cabinets, this menagerie, these good dishes, the whiskey glasses, the windows. I could break out. 

I keep thinking I’ll open the door. I stand there. My mom calls, interrupts from the other end of the phone, from next door, “What’s wrong?” I breathe, say, “Nothing. Just finished watering the plants.” Her voice wavers. She knows. My hand is still on the door. I think of the garden beyond the backdoor, barred with our backyard tree’s wood. The garden that is death/the everything that is dead, here.