Rites of Passage

 

Death is neither friend nor foe; but it can be a companion.

 

I awoke to the sound of my grandmother simultaneously screaming and crying as well as a loud, snoring-like sound. It was close to midnight in late February of 1989 (I was 13), and I was about to look at death up close and personal. I was in the bedroom with my grandparents and, as I turned the light on, I saw her standing over him in a panic. I moved her aside and felt my grandfather’s chest. His heart was beating, but tremendously fast. I remember saying something to that fact while calling his name and shaking him. But as the moments drained on, reality started setting in: The person who was a father figure to me was dead. For a brief moment, everything slowed down and stopped. I looked at his body and instinctively knew that that body did not contain my grandfather anymore.

As time sped back up, my grandmother went into the bathroom and vomited while I called my mother to explain to her the situation. I remember her voice sounding tired, as though she had been sleeping. She stayed up the street from us at the time, so it only took her a few minutes to get down to the house. When she got there, his lips were already starting to turn blue, and he had gone quiet. I remember my mother coming in and shaking him and calling his name, with the same response that I got: silence. In the blur of it all, an ambulance was called and the nigh drug on until I found sleep.

I stayed home from school the rest of the week but went back the following. There was a funeral. Familiar faces were there. None of them looked real to me. It all felt like a dream that I was ready to snap out of at any minute. But it never happened. He was really dead. A few weeks later, there was a snow day and so I stayed home from school. I was getting ready to go out and play when I noticed my grandmother staggering while walking towards the bedroom. She never walked normal due to her arthritis, but this was different. I tried to help her get to bed, but she was too big for me and somehow fell on my feet. I remember looking down at my feet because they felt wet and saw that where she had landed on them, there was a poop stain. Somehow, I got her to bed. But then later that day, she had to go to the hospital and quickly slipped into a coma.

The next few months were filled with my mother moving into the house that was my grandparents’ house and she brought with her all her friends. They all seemed fun. Every night was filled with parties that involved drinking, puking, and the sounds of people behind closed doors making a lot of snorting/sniffing sounds. There were also mumblings of my mother having troubles with a lady she ha known for quite some time. It got so bad that at one point, she pulled me out of school because they had threatened my life.

To me, that just meant more free time! So, I would stay up with them every night and watch as they would go from cogent, to excitable, to slurring, then finally to puking and passing out. Sometimes, I remember being surprised by outbreaks of arguments and fighting. And that’s because it seemed like everyone was having such a good time. This went on for some time until we sold the house and moved to St. Charles.

My Aunt lived in St, Charles with her husband and my two cousins. I really thought this was going to be the big turnaround my mother and I needed. We were both going to reinvent ourselves. I was going to be popular, and she was going to be a full-time working mom. I was close to 14 at the time, so me being alone by myself wouldn’t be a big deal.

Well, as some people know, our past follows us no matter where we go. In this case, the ghosts she and I both carried. Pretty much from the start of school, the bullies found me. It was almost like sharks smelling blood in the water. For her, the party never ended. She filled her nights (at first) with bottles of bourbon. We had a lot of many from selling the house, so she used that to pay for the mortgage as well as other monthly payments.

A couple months into being there, my grandmother came home from the nursing home. She had finally woken up from her coma but was bed-ridden. At first, we had a nurse who came and tended her during the day, but that ended due to costs. I remember many nights waking up to my mother getting me so that we could change her diaper. I was able to do about a year and a half of this, but sooner or later, it all caught up to me and I wasn’t able to go to high school anymore. A mixture of changing diapers in the middle of the night with trying to sleep with my mother’s music blaring at all hours of the night made sleeping difficult indeed.

I remember though, quite fondly, the morning my grandmother passed away. At the time, my bedroom was in the basement and my mother and grandmother each had rooms upstairs from me. One morning, very early in the morning, my grandmother’s dog (she had a little dog) started howling over and over. I remember waking up to it and, without doubt, knew that she had passed away. So, I silently whispered a goodbye to her and wished her a peaceful transition into death. I turned over and went back to sleep for a short period when I heard my mother sobbing ever louder as she came stumbling to my bedroom door. She came in and I just looked at her and told her I knew that my grandmother had passed away. She didn’t seem to hear a word I said, so I went upstairs to check on her. By the time I got to her room, she was in the state of turning blue. I reiterated to my mother that she had passed away, but she was having none of it and yelled at me to try and wake her up. I went ahead and went through the motions, all the while quietly apologizing to my grandmother for bothering her transition. When reality set it, my mother finally called an ambulance, and they took my grandmother away.

I remember thinking how peaceful her death was and how it could have been a time for reflection. I remember thinking how this was an opportunity for us to grow. But then those thoughts transformed when we went to the store, and she bought a big gallon of bourbon.

“Maybe,” I thought, “Reflection will come later.”

It never came. The only thing that came from her was loud nights and the occasional waking me up in the middle of the night via random beatings.

For me, the next year marked a time of expanding on the myths of my inner world as well as reading more about things related to the occult and notions of power.