Requiem Avus

I wake up confused. Blink, stretch my neck, arch my back into the mattress. There’s no light except from the candle-shaped lamp in the window, tucked behind the closed blinds. I hear ringing, but I soon realize it’s not my alarm; it’s in my head. My tinnitus worsens when I’m grinding my teeth in my sleep, and right now, it’s screeching like a siren. I roll over to check my phone and see it’s after 1:00am. I do the math in my head: I’ve slept for an hour or so, probably tangled in a knot, if the soreness in my back and right hamstring are any clue. I wobble to my feet, use the bathroom, reorient myself. The ringing in my head lessens as I massage my jaw. I refill my water glass, drink deeply until I can feel my stomach expanding, aching. I pad back to bed, avoiding the creaky spots in the floor so I don’t wake my partner, snoring in the next room; Michael could sleep through a firebombing, but I zig-zag across the carpet anyway. I lie back down, knowing I won’t fall asleep again anytime soon but forcing myself to try. My eyelids flutter, protesting my forcing them closed. Eventually, I settle for staring at the shapes the blinds make in the moonlight on the ceiling.

My phone rings on the bed next to me. A photo of my mom flashes across the screen. Immediately, I realize this is the call that my body has somehow expected. The tangle of my own limbs, the shriek of my teeth in my skull… my muscles, my bones, my blood have felt him leave this plane. The weight of my world shifted while I slept, but my body knew. Our bodies always do.

I pick up, voice shaky, expecting the words as they come: “He’s gone. He died a few minutes ago.”

I hear her crying. I hear my father, his oldest son, muttering in the background as he leaves a message for the funeral home. I make a plan to meet them in mere hours to discuss disposition of the body, cremation, and other arrangements. I hang up, inhale deeply, and cry. Despite being wide awake moments ago, I fall into sleep mid-grieving.

***

We have been in this position before. A few years ago, we all rushed to Penn Medicine in Princeton to say our goodbyes as he trembled and wailed uncontrollably. No one knew what was wrong, and he wasn’t speaking, just moaning. Two days later, it was as if nothing happened.

This time, though, we knew it was the end.

Because this time, we visited him in hospice, where he was unconscious, shrunken to the size of a slumbering child. He had pneumonia, the bi-product of a weeks-old COVID infection, and his nearly-century-old body seemed to have finally given up. We peered at him through a window, watching his body shake with the effort it took to breathe. We whispered to each other in the hallway, as if we were in church or a mortuary (or both). Finally, after several protocol reviews, we were allowed inside his room. I was in shock at the tiny person lying before me. I forgot until that moment that he had a fall at the assisted living facility, but I saw that a purple-yellow bruise above his eye had bloomed across one entire side of his face.

He was so thin, so frail, so alien. His body was skeletal, with skin transparent as cheesecloth, like he was already draped in a papery shroud. I could almost hear his bones knocking together as his body jerked with the gasping, labored breathing that is a sign of imminence.

We muttered our goodbyes, lent reassuring touches to his blanketed hands and feet, and thanked him for a long life well-lived. In the movies, this is the part where the heart monitor would spike or a final, belabored sigh would escape his lips. But there was just the stuttered inhale, the same slow, steady beeping. We knew it was just a matter of time.

***

It’s been less than twelve hours since time of death. How we are expected to sign contracts, to make informed, finite decisions, when we haven’t even fully absorbed that George, Dad, Pop Pop is just… gone? How are we expected to grasp that one of the urns in this pamphlet will be where our family’s patriarch will rest for eternity? How are we to even understand what this all means?

But we are, and we do. Right now, death is a business. Who has time for emotion when there is money to be made? I swallow sour saliva as we discuss how many death certificates to order. The banks will each need one. As will the University, so my grandmother can continue receiving benefits. The VA will need one when we eventually bury him. And we should probably have a few on hand, just in case. They’re only a few bucks a piece, after all. Do we need a dozen?

My mother flips through a catalog of caskets. I pick up another full of mementos; apparently they are going to take and keep my grandfather’s fingerprint, and we can call back to order rings, money clips, dog tags, paperweights, and a whole host of other tchotchkes with it embedded in gold, silver, or glass. I can’t decide if this idea is creepy or transcendently beautiful.

Moments later, we send him to the crematorium in a wooden box with a golden oak tint. We do not pick an urn; that can wait. We fill out a page in the growing stack of papers for an obituary but decide we should write our own. After all, how do you distill ninety-six years into what looks like an elementary school worksheet? How do you boil down multiple World War II deployments, two lifetimes worth of employment, three sons and two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren and a dozen nieces and nephews and all the memories that come with them into one fill-in-the-blanks form, as if this trove of love and pain and wonder is a Mad Lib?

I swallow the lump in my throat and look over everything, double checking with my father that we haven’t missed any signature lines or forgotten any questions we had prepared on the way over.

I pat my pocket for the hundredth time that morning to make sure my car key is still there. I know it is, but I have to be sure. I have to know it is there when I reach for it, even if I don’t need it.

***

It has been a few weeks. The urn has arrived, and what is left of my grandfather is inside; it sits in the center of the table next to a lovely bouquet of flowers that my boss has sent. A tri-fold poster board with almost every picture of him we could find (he always hated the attention of the camera) is propped up on a chair. We sit around the table like we’re waiting for a toast to be given. I’ve chosen the readings, the psalm, the prayers. Sandwiches have been ordered. My grandmother is on her way to the private room we’ve reserved just outside the memory care unit where she now lives alone. I feel anxiety crawling up my spine. I’m worried my grandmother won’t understand why we’re all here (or who we all are), or my niece and nephew will ask questions we aren’t fully prepared to answer. The top of my head is hot.

But then Michael begins the memorial, and I suddenly feel an overwhelming sense of satiation, of calm and stillness. I exhale deeply and look around. Almost everyone is smiling, and I wonder if they feel it too: the awe that has come with realizing we are four generations gathered to love and honor and remember the kindest, gentlest, and quietest amongst us.

The passage I choose for myself mentions how, if we are lucky, we are given, at most, seventy years. I laugh through the verse; my sister joins me; my mother nods; my uncle looks up at the ceiling. When seventy years seemed impossible, we got ninety-six. My grandfather survived emigration, the Great Depression, the warfront, a handful of heart attacks, a stroke, a pandemic. When he wasn’t supposed to live to see his grandchildren be born, he got to see them both graduate from college; he got to hold his great-grandchildren.

There is an understanding that sweeps through the room. We have little to be sad about and everything to be grateful for. The air conditioning kicks on. A car horn sounds out on the street.

And when the short service is over, we eat. We talk, we reminisce, and we fill ourselves.

________________________________________________________________
About the author
John Boccanfuso received BA and MA degrees in English from The College of New Jersey and has been a writing professor at Mercer County Community College for nearly a decade. He was previously a staff writer for Out in Jersey magazine, with poems published in Glitterwolf (Issue 6, 2014) and Love is Proud (JMS Books, 2016).