January 22nd, 1917 – July 3rd, 2009

This ritual of trying to process our own grief by making media out of it.

~ Jay Smooth

My grandmother died over the July 4th weekend.

Before you get all ZOMG, she was 92. She had health problems, she suffered from dementia. Her quality of life wasn’t all that great at the end so while it was a shock to hear, it wasn’t unexpected.

But it was a hard phone call to get on July 4th. I had planned on spending the holiday at home, maybe with a case of beer and some barbeque but at the last minute I got the chance to fly to San Francisco and see some close friends I hadn’t seen in too long. And since I’m just stupid for any chance to get out of LA, I took the first flight I could book myself on.

Had I been at home, I imagine that I would have taken the phone call, hung up and spent a quiet day trying to figure out exactly what I was feeling. Maybe I would have focused on the beer more than the barbeque but all in all I would just watched some TV, maybe caught some fireworks over the city and gone to bed.

As it happened I was standing in the dining room of a friend’s apartment, probably in my boxers and a dirty t-shirt, probably smelling like something that had just crawled itself out of the bottom of a whiskey bottle. I had one of those hangovers that makes it hard to look directly at people. The kind that leaves you feeling anxious for no reason, like you owe the world an apology but you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong. I kept tripping over my words, barely able to complete a sentence, and just holding a conversation was leaving me out of breath. When my cell phone rang and I saw it was my dad, I assumed he was calling to wish me a happy fourth. I had to stop and ask myself if I could make it through the conversation without bursting into a nervous verbal diarrhea.

Twenty-four hours earlier, we’d wandered into a tourist bar on the edge of Union Square to grab a drink and see where the day would take us. With no definite plans, I should have known that we were headed nowhere good. Instead I let myself get caught up in the flow of things. A few drinks here, a six pack at someone’s house down by the stadium, then a quick ride over to a club where we drank until close and then piled into cabs to head to an after hours spot. It was one of those nights where I’d lost all sense of time. One moment I was sipping a whiskey coke with the whole night in front of me and the next, as if by magic, I was sitting on the back deck of this bar, watching the sun slowly come up over the city and thinking “fuck me, it can’t be dawn. I’m not in any kind of shape to face a new day.”

If you’ve never stayed out drinking until sunrise, it’s an awful feeling. There’s nothing in this world that can make you feel like more of a degenerate than watching the sun come up and being hit with the realization that you’ve got nothing but a long, painful day ahead while your liver and kidneys try and undo whatever damage you inflicted the night before.

It was just a few sweat soaked hours after catching a cab back to my friend’s place that my phone rang. I found myself yelling “Hey Dad! Happy Fourth!” into the phone in an attempt to keep ahead of the conversation. I hoped to hell that he wouldn’t ask why I was shouting like a lunatic. As it turned out, he wasn’t calling to wish me a happy fourth.

No matter how expected, no matter what kind of forewarning, that phone call is always a shock.

It was six years ago, this month I think, my grandmother on my mom’s side died.

That was the year that a friend and I packed up my Honda civic and with no clear plan or idea of what we were getting ourselves into, moved from east coast to west. The trip across the country had been successful in that we’d made it to Idaho where he was staying with, ironically, the same friend whose living room I’d be standing in six years later when I got the call from my dad. And while he was in Idaho, I was staying with my aunt in again, somewhat ironically, San Francisco and looking for an apartment so that I could get the three of us out of Idaho and to Santa Cruz.

I was just pulling up after another unsuccessful day of apartment hunting when my mom called to tell me that her mother had had a stroke. I must have been just getting out of my car when I answered the phone because all I remember is standing barefoot on my aunt’s front lawn as my mom told me. I’m not sure why, but for years I’d feel like a real asshole for not taking that call inside where the neighbors couldn’t watch me pacing back and forth, kicking at the grass underfoot.

Because my mom’s side of the family is Jewish, the funeral had to be held within forty-eight hours. And so what followed was the sort of logistical action that usually accompanies proclamations of war. Flights had to be booked, bags had to be packed, houses had to be sat, pets had to be looked after. For my part, I had to dig my suit out of the trunk of my car from where I had carefully wrapped it into a ball and wedged it half under my spare tire.

This need for hasty action left little time for thinking. All I had to do was stuff some sort-of-clean clothes into a backpack, lock my car and get on a plane. By the time I slowed down enough to take a sort of internal inventory I was three thousand miles away from my aunt’s front lawn and sitting in my grandparent’s house in Northeast Philadelphia surrounded by a family whom, having arraigned this complex movement of people around the country, were left with no good outlet for all the emotion and nervous, anxious energy that had been fueling them for 48 hours.

Six years later, my dad would give me the news calmly. My grandmother had died, there would be a memorial service at the end July or the beginning of August. We’d talk again later in the week when he knew more of the specifics. His calm smashed through my hangover and left me stupidly repeating “I’m really sorry” over and over again, not knowing what to say, what I wanted to say or if I had to say anything at all. He assured me that he was doing ok and hung up.

In that moment I wished I was home on my couch, door locked, no one around. I didn’t know what to feel and I really just needed ten minutes to figure out what was going on in my own head. I could see my friends in the dining room, talking as they waited for the first pot of coffee to finish brewing. I didn’t want to have to tell them. I didn’t want to be the asshole who ruined what was shaping up to be a great weekend with this news. I didn’t want to deal with the sudden flood of memories that I had to push as far out of my head as possible. I wished I had let the phone call go to voicemail.

As I walked back into the dining room, trying to paste something approximating a smile onto my face, I wondered if I even had to tell them. It was my pain right? My life and my family and maybe they didn’t need to know. Maybe all I needed were a few beers and a few laughs and I could essentially just push pause on the portion of my brain that knew – hold it suspended until the weekend was over and I was back in Los Angeles.

But I must have brought it up because the next thing I remember, I was being handed a tall boy from the fridge and asked “were you two close?” I shrugged off the question, not really knowing where to start.

The whole processing thing was easier when my mom’s mom died. That felt like a proper death. Like an emergency. There were a lot of people asking each other how they were doing. A lot of very serious phone calls made where nothing of consequence was said. I knew what was expected of me: drop everything and get on the plane. In its own way that was comforting. I didn’t have to think about my feelings because my job, along with my step dad, was simply to be there for my mom.

This time, there was no sense of emergency. Just the news of what happened and instructions to wait for the next phone call. With no one telling me what to do, I found myself confused. Did I fly back to Los Angeles early? And what would that accomplish? Did I gut it out in San Francisco?

So I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I slipped two fingers of rum into my coffee to help with the hangover, finished my eggs and toast and got ready to head out to the barbecue like we’d planned.

In a way of I was proud of myself. I kept thinking on the drive over to the barbeque, “this is what you’re supposed to do. You deal with it and you get on with your day.” Like it was a simple inconvenience but nothing that should actually interfere with my day.

And that feeling lasted about ten minutes. I wasn’t through my first serving of potato salad before I had a giddy, almost unstoppable need to laugh. I couldn’t stop thinking, “this is really how you’re going to spend your afternoon? You really think you can just turn yourself off like this? You’ve lost your goddamn mind.” Luckily, I don’t think anyone noticed when I slipped out and walked back to the apartment.

On that walk back I was angry. Angry that I’d get something like this dropped on me without anyone telling me what I should fucking do about it. Angry that I couldn’t seem to nail down what I was feeling. Angry that one moment I was praising myself for “handling shit” – that’s how I’d thought about it in the car, as “handling shit” – and the next moment I was sneaking out of barbecues because I thought I was about to crack.

I wanted the memorial service to be that day, not a month away. I wanted someone else to tell me “ok, be sad now and when this service is over you can go back to your life.” I wanted someone else to feel what I was feeling, so I wouldn’t feel so goddamn alone.

That week in Philadelphia six years earlier was so charged with tension and anger and sadness and hurt that by the time I boarded the plane to return to California, I was exhausted by the intensity of what my mom and her siblings were going through. Boarding that plane was an escape, like I’d been standing too close to a fire for too long and even though the soles of my shoes had melted, I could finally move away and find some relief. And it provided its own sense of closure. By the time the plane had hit cruising altitude I had put the whole week behind me.

This time, I found myself buying a six-pack of beer and a microwave pizza at five in the afternoon on July 4th. Even the guy working the counter must have seen something in my face because he took one look at me and asked “Hey man, you doing alright?” with a concern that went beyond simple politeness.

Now that I’ve been back in Los Angeles for a few weeks, I’m not sure how necessary the memorial service is. I’ve had enough time to find my own sense of closure. I’ve had enough time to deal with the shock and with the flood of memories and with everything else that comes with losing a family member.

I’m still going to the memorial service. For one, I bought the tickets back when I was looking for someone to tell me how to feel and what to do and I figure that getting on the plane is probably easier than trying to explain this to a Southwest representative and get a refund.

But I’m also going because it’ll be nice to see my dad’s side of the family. And without needing them to tell me what I’m feeling, maybe this trip can be about more than just losing a grandparent.