-->
After I left the Segue
reading I was co-hosting on December 7th, I checked my phone for the first time
in hours. The last time I'd checked it, Monica had sent me an email
reminding me that the deadline for the blurb I was writing for her second book
of poetry was due January 13th. This time, under her earlier email, was a
strangely entitled message from Cornelius.
I have some bad news. Monica
has collapsed.
*
My grandfather was a guru. In
his nineties, he had a following of young white hippies in Central Florida who
lovingly called him "Raj" -- short for Guru Raja Bahari, his yoga
name. They came to his house for meditations and afterwards, one dad with a
daughter named Autumn had us ride in the bed of his pickup truck while he took
my grandfather on some errand or other. Will and I got nervous when it
started to rain, but Autumn just smiled and pivoted around with her back to the
cab window. She waved us next to her and we watched the rain magically pass
over our heads and hit the rear of the truck bed past our feet.
Wow, said Will, who never said
"Wow." He reached his arm out and up, and raindrops spattered to his
elbow.
What are you doing? Autumn grabbed his
wrist, laughing. Your granny's gonna be mad if you come in wet.
Now, I know the pickup truck
magic was the fluid of the air accelerating around and then downward as the
truck moved through it; in the front, the windshield hit rain and the wind
both, and the heavier rain won through and confused the glass; but in back,
once the body of the the truck tore through it, the wind gained enough speed
that it swept the raindrops away in its downward path over the roof and
sheltered us from the storm.
*
At the end of his life, my
grandfather ceased to see his students, ate little, and meditated all day long.
My grandmother banged pots and opened and slammed doors shut in the quiet of
the house, though she never actually dared open the door to his room. When he
went for his evening walk, and she went into her back vegetable garden, I would
quickly enter his room to study its single cot, seven-day candle, and black and
white pictures of Parahamsa Yogananda on the dresser next to a photograph of my
grandfather in his Rosicrucian robes. In the photos, Yogananda and Grandpa's
faces were smooth and evenly brown, as though they were simply boys in the same
grade school class, their bright eyes lit from inner depths. On a low table lay
a Bible and several copies of Autobiography of a Yogi, which
Grandpa kept to give to everyone who visited. Compared to the rest of the
house, which was floor to ceiling multiple patterns in green, pink or yellow,
the blue room where he spent hours in silence was stark and bare.
He won't even talk to me, Grandma whined to Mommy when
she called from New York. He shut up in the room all day, all day. She
sucked her teeth and passed me the phone.
Is that true? Mommy asked me. Is
she exaggerating?
I hesitated. It
wasn't all day, all day, but it was more than he used to, I avowed.
Is he eating?
I don't know.
Have you seen him eat?
I hesitated again. No.
Thus, my mother swept down
south like an angel and moved them into assisted living.
*
My grandfather was so happy
then, so sweet and friendly. His tiny frame was gossamer from daylong
contemplation and lack of food. When my mother arrived to check on him --
He is so frail! -- she took us to the store. He greeted
everyone with brilliant smiles, Hello! Hello! His few white
hairs were wisps of cloud, his quick, gentle steps, rain on concrete. She tried
to make him eat, but he was too happy, he returned to his room to become
nothing. When the fever began, my mother took him to the hospital, while my
grandmother fretted. Don't worry! He told her. Every
day, and in every way, I am getting better and better!
We Caribs are more susceptible
to pneumonia, Mommy
told me tearfully. I had it, you had it, and now my dad has it.
But he's so weak.
I was sure she was
exaggerating, like her mother. But she wasn't. Native people are more
susceptible to, and four times more likely to die from, pneumonia.
*
When Grandpa died, my brother
and I came down to Florida early to help my mother with my grandmother and the
arrangements.
Where is Ano? asked Grandma. My
brother and I exchanged panic-stricken glances.
Dad died, Mom, said my mother, shuddering.
Oh my God, no! cried Grandma, just
like she had the first time, and could not be consoled -- until she forgot,
again.
Quickly, my brother and I
learned it was our responsibility to remind Grandma and spare Mommy the chore
of saying over and over again, Dad died, Mom. Dad died,
Mom. Dad died, Mom.
Somehow, when we said, Grandpa died,
Grandma, a few times, it seemed to stick.
The next time she asked, Where
is Ano? she paused, and then her face crumbled. Oh my God, he
dead, he dead. But why, God? Why? she pleaded. He was
so young! He was so healthy!
My brother was incredulous.
Grandpa was 96 years old, Grandma! But she would not be comforted. She wept, asked for him, declared him dead, declared him
young and in the peak of health, and wept again.
I guess she's right, in a
way, I
told my brother, he's two years younger than she is.
*
Like a cemetery meditation,
my grandfather's relative youth and lifelong vigor (that did not so much
decrease as become transformed into light by the force of his meditations)
threw my grandmother's mortality into stark relief. She was the one whose knees
were kneaded nightly with varieties of tiger balm and Epsom salts; she the one
who took handfuls of pills a day to control blood pressure, glaucoma, and
arthritis; she the one whose mouth was crooked by stroke; she the one
whose uterus was torn out without hormone replacement to brittle her bones and
wrinkle her cheeks; she the one who prayed in the kitchen, out loud, over
dishes, Sweet Jesus, please take me, Jesus, I cannot wait to be with
you, my Lord and Savior!
She lived to be 102.
*
In cemetery meditation, I
contemplate my attachment to our bodies and the bodies of others, the
inevitability of that loss, and the suffering that loss engenders.
My own life does not seem
hard to let go of. I am not glad the dead are not me. I do not wish to be immortal.
My ideation position went from fatal to neutral and I am still holding,
holding, holding.
But others, other bodies --
they are the once invisible air around me that suddenly has a force, a
mass. They were so young. Why?
When Sandra Bland was murdered,
I was enraged. There was an enemy, the state, and I knew, as black women know,
who kills us. I have been trained in that logic by my ancestors.
When an elder goes beyond
past, present and future to the timeless land of the dead, I have been trained
in that logic, also. Say, Ibae, bae tonu, and offer water, food,
fire. Look for the spirit in the eyes of a new child. Know the burial
places: La Peyrouse, Plainview, Forest Glen; but, do not visit. It is not our
way. We see the dead, the Egun, when they visit us, instead. Sitting in
the kitchen, in a dream, a shape on the wind, or a voice in the mind,
saying, Go.
But when the soft hand of a
friend slips away, I lose my bearing. This, I have not learned.
Only to say their names.
Oh my God, why? Why.
They were so young.
CJ.
Kelly.
Pariss.
Constance.
Gideon.
Phebus.
Akilah.
Monica.
Our às̩e̩ flows
through us, as through all matter, and when someone dies, the dimensional
moorings come lose in our skins. If we grasp too hard, they cut our palms.
*
Like the physics of the pickup
truck which in mechanical encounter with the fluid that is air transforms said
air into a protective barrier, thereby ensuring that as before not so after,
when I slammed into the storm that was my mother's death, the rain hit my face
so hard I nearly drowned. While my life reverberated from the impact, the
liquid filled my nose and mouth, the horizon became a foul dark mass, and I
could not see how time bent and sped beyond me, accelerating to form the shield
that held future me up while I gazed at the lifeless face of my friend.
Everyone you love will die.
*
Monica slept in the bed next
to mine in the small room in the monastery. She warned me about her
snoring and tried to get me to be tidy, nodded when Sister Sonia said to make
our bed every day if we wanted to be poets, and made me eat breakfast. I went
to sleep much later than she, and her sounds were fluid in the room between us
as we shared the night air and the dawns. Later, she was always trying to get
me to plan something, to go to Paris, to come to Columbia, to do a panel, but I
was the butterfly to her tree, forgetting because of flowers. I made a book she
taught me. She sent me poems. On the phone she said, I feel like
an imposter, and then she wrote it to me, again, in her last
email: I feel like an imposter.
*
When we step into an
accelerated stream it may feel like we are trying on another coat for size,
that we misstep, are pretending, where, really, this is simply the house that
forward momentum designed. As we push forward, the universe reshapes itself
around us. Às̩e̩.
*
You are not an imposter, I should have
said. You are the future.
