Tag: death

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 236

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Hi.

Coffee: Americano, Caribou Coffee

My upstairs neighbor’s son passed in a car crash yesterday. She came by crying and told us to forgive her for the family commotion upstairs. I told her not to worry, that I was there for her, but I didn’t mean it – not because I didn’t want to mean it, but because there’s nothing I can really do. I only learned her name this morning. I baked the family brownies and brought them over. She had hair rollers and was smiling.

This is the second son that’s died in our apartment building this year. I didn’t know them, but I’ve been thinking about them both all day. That’s all I’ve got for the Coffee Log. Tell your friends you love them.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 231

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Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

Part of my job is making people think hard about how they’d like to die, and what they’d like to happen after. If you’re going to help someone look at their whole financial picture, you can’t help using a wide-angle lens.

Everyone’s got a different comfort level. Often, I’m the most uncomfortable one in the room. I’ve met old men who tell me they can’t wait to kick the bucket, and young guys who say death isn’t even a thing. I work with one 93 year-old on the regular, updating beneficiaries, getting everything straight. She’s told me she doesn’t particularly want to die, doesn’t expect it’ll happen any time soon, but figures she might as well get things ready for when it comes to introduce itself. Right now, she’s giving full-time care to her younger sister who’s suffering cancer.

I had an old man in my office today. He can’t hear well so I was shouting. He’s a nice guy, very friendly, everyone knows him. I asked how everything was going. He said it was going fine. I went through his accounts, made sure we were doing the best we could for him. We were. Then he said “I don’t know if it matters, though, because, you know, I might not get to next year.” And he wasn’t happy about it, he looked down. I told him that, if he wanted, I could help him with the planning, but that we didn’t have to, whatever made him comfortable. Then there was this moment, a long moment, and then we switched subjects. He talked about the first car he bought in the 1950’s, and how beautiful it was to drive.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border  – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN

Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

William S. Burroughs

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 197

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Hi.

Coffee: Pike Place Roast, Apartment Lounge Coffee

A 4-year-old girl drops a rock a few feet in front of me. “That’s a rock!” she says, then picks it up to show me. I tell her it’s a good rock, the best one I’ve seen, and she drops it again.

“You dropped your rock.”

“I don’t care!” she says.

I know this girl’s story. She moved in a few months ago. She’s my neighbor. Here’s the questions I don’t ask out loud: Are you old enough to know that your father died because someone put a bullet in his head? Are you old enough to have known you ever had a father, or is grandma and grandpa your now and forever? Do you have sly dreams of Pittsburgh in the winter, the city under five feet of snow? Does that same bullet sit inside you now, passed down, inherited like your pigtails, or pink lips, or small fingers? What do you remember? Maybe it’s better if you don’t remember anything.

Five kids came down and now they live below me. I’ve only see them with bright smiles. The only bleak is what sneaks into the faces of their grandparents who had to bury a father, a son.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border  – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN

Snow is…a beautiful reminder of life and all its quirks. It makes me pause. Think. Stay still. Even my mind takes the hint. It makes me feel giddy. Like a kid. I bring my hot cocoa to the window and simply sit and reminisce…It brings me back to days of school cancellations and snow igloos and King of the Mountain games in my childhood neighborhood…That for this one moment in time, I’m not an adult with all the headaches that can accompany that responsibility, but instead, I’m still the girl in pigtails with the handmade hat and mittens, just waiting to build her next snowman.

R.B. O’Brien

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 160

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Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

I saw a pair of shoes I liked and was going to buy them until I looked at the label: leather lining. I put the shoes back. Can’t be both a vegetarian and a hypocrite, but when I got home and told this story to my roommate, her response was ‘leather is better for the environment.’ And that’s true. I know a guy who bought a $400 pair of leather loafers because they’re hand-crafted and able to be repaired, less lifetime waste. And even my mother – the first vegetarian I knew – bought leather shoes, for similar reasons.

But I can’t wear something else’s skin again. I just don’t have it in me.

I read a story about artificial eggs and dairy. The newest entry in the trend of impossible meat-free meats, biochemists isolated the whey protein producer and egg compounds and got a bunch of microbes to produce them en-mass. They sold their secrets for top dollars and now one company – Perfect Day – sells dairy-rich ice cream that never touched an udder. Pretty amazing. One of the scientists says ‘It’s a lot cheaper and more energy efficient than keeping a bunch of animals alive.’ I feel like there’s a dark lining there.

So I stick to my morals, I don’t buy the nice leather shoes, and I choose almond milk alternatives to dairy nine-times out of ten. But I still eat eggs occasionally, or a bit of cheese. What happens to the animals when we don’t need them anymore? A cow makes a poor pet.

Is there no way out of the violence? No, probably not.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border  – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN

A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see ‘just leather’, he saw the beast – perhaps one of his own – and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing.

Dorothy Hartley, The Land of England: English Country Customers Through the Ages

Coffee Log, Day 244

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Coffee: Cafe Pajaro Extra Dark, Trader Joe’s Brand

I got Chinese with my roommate then went home to watch Haunting of Hill House. Everyone’s been talking it up. We popped the tops on plastic quart cartons and ran the first episode. They filmed it with a filter that makes everyone look jaundiced. All the actors and actresses looked the same. We stopped the show three times just to figure out who was who.

So anyway, I’ve got lukewarm first impressions of Hill House, but dinner was great. The lady at the restaurant always smiles when she sees me. That’s nothing special, she smiles for everyone. I ordered the Sichuan tofu. It was piping hot. At home, halfway through the show, I had a moment where I got a bit of onion and a bit of sauce, dipped it in steamed rice, and realized I’d die someday.

I’ve been thinking ‘death’ since birth. In 3rd grade I used to imagine I might get reincarnated as the lead singer of the Goo Goo Dolls. I’d picture myself in his body playing shows. He was the coolest person I could think of. I imagined this every night as I was going to sleep. If I didn’t, it was all cold sweats and heavy breathing, the black wall of inevitability. Like I said, I’m an over-thinker.

So it wasn’t too unusual to think about dying when the slick, red, acidic stuff touched my tongue. But the way it felt tonight was more of a ‘maybe this is okay.’ I’ve been stressed lately. Taken in full, 2018’s done a number. It’s like the third week of school: first is exciting; second’s a breeze; the third is when the tests come, and no matter how you do there’s no going back from the bright red branding of the grade. I’ve been considering next year, and the year after. I feel stretched like good leather.

After the first perfect bite I took another. Some broccoli, dipped. The rich sauce got caught in her green perm. It tasted like something that shouldn’t be so good for you. The stem snapped in my jaw. I washed her down with tapwater.

“I’m gonna die someday,” I thought, “but this is nice for now.”

We finished dinner and the episode. I feel pretty full.

Currently Reading: Autumn, Ali Smith; Cherry, Nico Walker

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“…food that can burn you down to a charred, smoking little stump.” – Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown, Sichuan episode

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Coffee Log, Day 179

garethlivesayLeave a comment

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Coffee: Cafe Pajaro, Extra Dark Roast, Trader Joe’s Brand

1:00pm, before all last night’s clouds are gone, I sit outside. I’m reading LaRose. The book’s worked me over. I know Snow and Josette; I’m afraid of Landreaux; Romeo reminds me of the old man who got evicted down the street from my parents, though a few decades younger.

I made a batch of E’s barley tea and let it take the edge off summer. She’d swept the deck but left the spiders. They baby their eggsacs, welcome the corners. A crane fly sits on the glass door behind me. Can’t figure out how to get inside, or maybe can’t accept it’s never going to.

Twenty, thirty pages… kids are carefully rambunctious by the creek, school starts next week, fall takes the bark out of the dog days of summer. Occasionally, I look across our building at other decks, stacked like cardboard. Our third-story neighbor has made a mess. Shelves collapsing under boxes. Six potted cactus. A menagerie of dreamcatchers that probably smell like last night’s rain. Put too many things together and you can’t tell what’s what.

Sometimes, I wish I could have obsessions. I’ve tried collecting: beer bottles; plastic models; foreign currency. Lost a lot of it, packed the rest. Instead, my apartment’s got bare white walls and a bursting schedule – if I’m not working, I’m thinking about the next best way to work.

Accomplishment – the trick, I’ve learned, is that you never get there. That perfect soft hand you fell in love with in first grade, running track, two to three steps and always behind. When they bury my neighbors, some son or daughter will take detailed notes on graph paper about this and that cactus, vibrant wall-hangs, store-bought stories.

What sorts of things will be left to make sense of me?

Currently Reading: LaRose, Louise Erdrich

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“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.” – Margaret Atwood

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Coffee Log, Day 167

garethlivesayLeave a comment

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Coffee: Fair Trade Five County Espresso Blend, Trader Joe’s Brand

I met a lady and her mother. The lady says: “Guess her birthday!” Her mother says: “Aha,” a bit embarrassed. The lady’s glowing so I throw out a number. “Wrong!” she says. “It’s September 1921!” I was off by 20 years.

A century…

My grandfathers died in their 70’s or 80’s, grandmothers did the same. My mother’s mother lived with us before she died. She had hospice. I got the call in 7th grade and my Dad came to pick me up. My mother was too torn up to drive. I remember sitting in the back of Lit class not telling anyone why I was leaving. I was scared of getting bullied; I was even more scared of pity. You’re a weed in the garden, something that doesn’t fit; death has stiff burrs.

Last year, I knew a woman in her 90’s. She had soft hands, I remember shaking them. She told a lot of stories then told them again; she’d become disconnected. We talked about Burlington. We talked about Greensboro. I knew her through a partner, we sat together in the winter-white bedroom and watched old family tapes. Those were nice moments, but they were just lace on the larger tablecloth of care-giving; winter-black nights trying to keep your hot, wet, scared, stressed, granddaughter’s body from shaking out of my arms.

I told my Dad I didn’t need to see the body. So he made the call, we drove a couple blocks, and came back to an empty hospital bed where her soul used to recline. My mother was crying in the living room, I wasn’t ready for that. Instead, I took five minutes with the empty bed. The last few months before she died, my grandmother had become disconnected. She called me by my uncle’s name; told unknowable stories to my mom. I’d seen her sweat, shake, and piss herself. Now, there were clean white sheets. Hospice had spirited away every trace of her. “Better place, better place,” but sometimes she’d seemed happy in her delirium. Didn’t know my name or maybe her own but she was still my grandmother. You’re never lost completely. Otherwise, why would the care-giving hurt?

The lady and her damn-close-to-100 mother drove off. They were beaming and proud. They had each other, had full heads and strong bodies. You never know who’s shaking themselves to sleep, though.

Currently Reading: LaRose, Louise Erdrich

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star.
It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.” – Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
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