THE CROFTON CHRONICLE # 20
The sun has a habit, when the air is biting with Canadian winter chill, of pretending it doesn’ t know how to leave. It lowers itself until it rests on the mountains’ spines, a patient little thing crouched at the edge of disappearance, holding its breath as if worried I may notice it if it moved. There is an explanation for this – angles, tilts, equinoxes – nothing I care for. What I did care for was how the lingering light that gilded the horizon later returned as a pale echo in the moon, as though the day had folded itself neatly away into a refrain. As though the light wanted to be certain it would be missed.
It was winter when my grandma died. I remember the kitchen more clearly than the news itself: the drone of our aging fridge, the slick cold of the floor seeping through my slippers. My ma was crying on the phone. What a foreign sound it was! Thin and snivelling and unpracticed, like a language she never expected to speak. When my ma noticed me watching, she hid her red blotched face, and I turned too quickly, suddenly enamoured with washing baby bok choy, on separating the dead leaves from the edible bits. The selfish half of me wanted her to stop crying so we could return to the shape of things before. Mop up grief like a mess to deal with before dinner.
It was only later when my uncle would tell us that my grandma, lying in her bed, had mistaken someone else for my ma. As if, at the very end, hope elbowed its way past memory. But I didn’ t know that at the moment; I didn’ t know much.
I’ d soon come to know the sun keeps setting for everyone. No one, not even the blazing knot of flames in the sky, can escape Time’ s conscription. I keep growing – out of sneakers, out of jeans, out of my Baba’ s mind.
Once, he could lift me without thinking. I remember being hoisted onto the kitchen counter, my feet never quite the cabinet doors, as he peeled apples with a paring knife, the skin coming away in one long, unbroken ribbon. His hands were steady then.
I noticed when he started slowing before a curb as we walked together, when he hesitated before my name, testing it syllable by syllable. I noticed the white threading through his hair, how it gathered at the temples first, the way snow collects where the ground dips. That’ s how I knew so much of us had slipped away into that place where memories go when they no longer belong to anyone, that cavity where I was too young to remember and Baba is too old to recall. There are photographs from my childhood that feel more like rumours now – me perched on his shoulders, my fingers knotted in his charcoal hair, his grin wide and unguarded. I look at them the way an art student studies Renaissance paints: reverent, nihilistic, aware that the witnesses are long gone.
I didn’ t realize I had already grieved him until my sister called me to tell me he’ d been hospitalized. I was sitting on the floor against a locker at noon, the hallway loud and full with lives that were not unravelling.
Hospitals have a funny way of somehow feeling simultaneously busy yet empty. I tried not to wrinkle my nose at the smell of chlorine when I took a breath to speak.
“ Is it bad?”
HOW TO MOURN THE LIVING