Death and coffee tables

The coffee table in my living room was, at one point, my grandmother’s. It’s no longer hers for the very simple reason that you can’t take it with you. And if you could, most people wouldn’t bother with a coffee table. When people come over for the first time, I introduce them to the furniture because I feel it’s important to know what you’re sitting on. So I tell them about my five dollar drug couch, my roommate’s $20 dollar couch that cost $40, and my dead grandmother’s coffee table. The last one strikes many people as unnaturally cold, and I guess maybe it is. People, normal people anyway, don’t describe furniture by listing their deceased owners.

I’ve always handled death a little strangely. I guess I’m writing this to clear the air around that a little. I don’t like people walking around thinking I’m that cold or that heartless. I’m just a little different, that’s all.

I was in high school when my grandma died. I can still remember the morning that my parents told me and my siblings. It was a pretty normal morning, all told. I woke up, stumbled into the shower, and then stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast. My parents were standing there looking like someone had died, which, in this instance, was appropriate.

I can’t remember which one said it, but one of them said, “Grandma’s dead.” There was no need to specify which grandma as my mother’s mother died before my memory started to keep a firm track on the years. I think my little sister cried. My little brother didn’t say much. But he’s a pretty quiet kid.

I said, “What’s for breakfast?”

How’s that for cold? There I was, surrounded by grief, and I couldn’t even bring myself to fake being sad for the sake of my mourning family. In my defense, my Grandma lived in the faraway land of Seattle, and we only visited infrequently. But that defense is weak at best. I knew her, can still remember that she smelled like I imagined the 1950s smelled. I can even remember the way her voice had that cracked timbre that made her sound a little like a beat poet.

I loved her as much as I could given our time spent together. I loved her, and she died. So why wasn’t I sad, why wasn’t I crying like the rest of them? They felt grief. I was hungry.

Days slipped by in the way that days do. My dad left for the funeral. He left alone. At the time, I didn’t understand that. But looking back, I guess there are things that a man has to do by himself. There are times when even family can’t help you. I can only imagine that burying your mother is one of those times. When he came back, life slipped back into its normal routine. In the end, routines will kill us all.

My family finished mourning. I never started. I looked at them and didn’t understand. Was I really so different? Was I really missing the part of myself that made me human? After all, humans mourn. Humans feel pain when loved ones die.

I was taking a ceramics class at the time. After finishing a collection of pots that can only be called hideous, we were given the opportunity make a sculpture of whatever caught out fancy. It was the freedom of expression that all high school students desire but don’t know what to do with once they have it.

I don’t know if I ever consciously decided what I was going to make. I think it just happened. Have you ever randomly started drawing lines on a piece of paper only to discover that, unbeknownst to you, you were making a recognizable shape the entire time, that there was nothing really random about your lines after all? It was like that with my clay.

Eventually I realized that I was making a bust of a man. As I shaped his bust, I imagined a picture of him to help me along. In my mind, the image that drove the creation of the bust was this: A young man on his knees in a puddle. His arms were thrown back, upturned palms collecting rain. His face was turned toward heaven with eyes rimmed red with grief. I could see that his vocal cords were drawn piano wire taut. You see, he was yelling, screaming with agony, screaming until I thought his throat would start to bleed. He was a man in unimaginable pain.

It was in that image that I made my bust.

I put a white glaze on it because poets tell me there’s a purity to white and a purity to grief. I’m not a poet, so who am I to argue? Then I took it home. My parent’s said it was nice and put it on a shelf. What else can you do when your son brings home pain in ceramic form? For all I know, the bust is still there, tucked back in some corner somewhere, screaming at God in solitude.

In a weird way, that screaming man did my mourning for me. He did what I couldn’t do. He’s still doing it.

So if you come over to my place and I tell you to use a coaster when you’re setting your drink down on my dead grandmother’s coffee table, please don’t think I’m taking her passing lightly. I just mourn a little differently than most people.