Grandpa Died An Hour Ago.
Grandpa died an hour ago.
I’m not sure how I feel. Hearing my father cry over the phone before he abruptly hung up puts the whole situation in a more acutely verifiable light than did my mother breaking the news, which simply put me in shock. And shock, though immediately jolting, is actually quite a numbing sensation once it settles.
In a patriarchal society such as China, the death of a father’s father is a deeply transformative ordeal. The family unit is central to Chinese culture, philosophy and political science. Everyone is now looking to my father, the youngest of his siblings but the only brother to his three sisters, to lead the family into mourning.
My father is grieving in a way that I can’t understand because since I left China at three years old, I had only a cross-continental relationship with my grandparents. To me, my grandfather was an obstinate man. That’s what I know him for primarily. He survived nearly 10 years on dialysis when younger victims of acute kidney failure maxed out at eight on average. After he was hospitalized a week ago after partying too hard at my cousin’s wedding banquet, he repeatedly tried to escape.
But then what made my grandfather human to me was a story my mother once told me about him when all I personally knew of the man was his short temper and his illness.
When my grandfather was young and his mother passed away, he had been presented with the challenge of finding a place to bury her. Back then, Chinese families were buried in clan plots. My great-grandmother was either a divorced, illegitimate or second wife to my great-grandfather, but in any case she was not an actual member of the Du clan. She could not be buried in the Du plots nor her maiden family’s plots because she had technically married. Thus, my grandfather personally begged each household of his father’s family to allow him to bury his mother on their land, carrying her ashes from door to door.
No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard my father cry, but what unsettles me more than that are my dry eyes. I don’t want to over-analyze my feelings toward my grandfather. There are lots of things I don’t understand about him, such as his feelings toward his American granddaughter for one.
Respect is all my family asks. This is where the etiquette of mourning comes into play. Ritual covers for awkward, ambiguous feelings.
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Self-help
This is another installment in the short story I've been working on. It's an attempt to create a feel-good intermission in a tragicomedy.
***
The day after being released from her duties at Wine and Dine, Mona did as any strong, independent woman would do and practiced yoga on her balcony before the rising sun.
At eight in the morning, Miami traffic drowned out the songbirds, and the scent of orange chai brewing on the tabletop was overwhelmed by remnants of yesterday’s Gulf Coast catch rotting in back-alley dumpsters.
Yet Mona smiled as she performed salutations to the sky, her heart beating in tandem with the mp3 mimicry of ocean waves crashing upon the beach. Nothing should be quite as cathartic as sudden unemployment. She thought about jogging in the park, dancing in the dark and spending hours at the record store, just browsing. She imagined the world unobstructed by deadlines, and shuddered, unsettled by a sudden excess of freedom.
According to Guru Choudhury, the five steps to Creating a Better You includes identifying the toxic elements of one’s life, making reparations, wiping the slate clean, setting clear goals and visualizing success.
Thus in making a serious bid for DIY soul-searching, Mona first acknowledged her hunger.
Since she began to headline Wine and Dine nearly a decade ago, she ate little more than morsels in between sips of citrus water. In her prime, Mona could leave multiple-course dinners with her appetite piqued and her stomach empty, yet the maître d’ would watch her receding back with bated breath because gauntness in a critic was testament to her authority.
It was acceptance of this hunger which drove Mona all over the city in search of food, to the Chevalier Wine Cellar and the midtown Cheese Course. It led her to the fish farm on South Beach for shrimp and sashimi, then down to the farmer’s market on Sunset Drive where ripening fruits overflowing from their crates fermented in the street. She spent days filling her fridge with the delicacies of the sea and shore, ran her heels down to the sole hauling grocery bags alive with angry lobsters.
Step two entailed cooking and eating. Mona spent the next several weeks crushing tomatoes on the vine into caramelized onions, barding filet de bœuf with bacon grease and simmering capon breast in virgin olive oil while shaving white truffle over sautéed Mediterranean vegetables. She gained a healthy twenty pounds in the course of a month, elevating her BMI to an only moderately underweight status.
Besides cooking and eating, Mona even went so far as to blog about freelancing food. Some supporters of her old column made the transition, though other cyber anons preferred to bring up the reasons for her termination in ill-natured jest. In the meantime, the good Guru published Turning a Blind Eye to Anger, which she ordered. After that, she terminated the blog and seriously considered starting work on a memoir or throwing a plastic-ware party.
Hi. I study at Northwestern too. Small world. I figured you probably follow me because you know that though. Just saying hi.Also, I'm sorry for your loss. I read through the post about your grandfather. Hope you and your family are doing well.
Yeah I admit that's how I found you. Thought you were an alum however...
Thanks for your kind thoughts.
Thus, by studying the abundances of radioactive elements, we are led to a remarkable insight: Some 4.56 billion years ago, a collection of hydrogen, helium, and heavy elements came together to form the Sun and all of the objects that orbit around it. All of those heavy elements, including the carbon atoms in your body and the oxygen atoms that you breathe, were created and cast off by stars that lived and died long before our solar system formed, during the first 9 billion years of the universe's existence. We are literally made of star dust.
Universe by R. Freedman, R. Geller and W. Kaufmann