the habit of being

I was hiding behind my plastic blue street vendor glasses, trying to distance myself from the beginning and middle of the day. They were kindof smeary, and I had to take them off to write. I never could be that girl, created in New York with a thin red leather collar, for long, and I certainly couldn’t be her for the writing I wanted to do.

I have this stuff I want to write down - my grandmother’s funeral, things like that. The whole time I was home, seeing these things and feeling these things, having these sad hilarious conversations, I was looking for a chance to write some of it down. But see, I was just too busy living it, and crying and laughing and holding hands. I’d left my journal at my desk at work. There was no paper, no pen, anywhere. I mean, they were everywhere, but not in my hands. I’d go to bed at night exhausted in Betty’s Egyptian cotton pajamas with her name on the tag, and I’d half-sleep, just under the surface, still listening to everything. I couldn’t ever find any time to write and nothing ever got written.

I try to do it now, but the feeling is gone, the details are dying by the second and here it is next weekend, the weekend after that, some random Tuesday, and I’m writing about writing it, meta-writing it, because the other options are gone, and those sentences I might have lived in for years may as well have never existed in my head. Did they ever exist? Was there ever a string of words in me without an “I”? Could I have portrayed my mother’s love, my grandfather’s guilt, the veins that run through our family like the veins on her brittle porcelain dead white hands?

And besides that, I’ve become increasingly aware that there are these people out there that write about the South - that Southern literature didn’t just die with Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Some of these people are inevitably doing it all wrong, and I’m just sitting around with this distinctly Southern history, a Southern upbringing in a Southern family, and a Southern way of thinking that turns on automatically when I get home. My voice patterns change and I talk Southern and I think Southern and that’s my real self. If there is in me a Southern identity, shouldn’t I be thinking about that more, and writing not just about my dead grandmother, but about a whole misunderstood culture? Because maybe, if I could think straight, I could?

For a week, I dropped so much of the affectation I’d built up around me in the life I’ve made, I stepped off a plane to serve my mother, to be present for her. For the first time I can remember I stopped thinking about my issues, about my ex-boyfriend and ex-pregnancy and ex-scholarship, and my life was only about me in so much as how I was a part of her, and how she was a part of Betty, and we were all the same. No beautiful pain and sexual suffering, no New York and Washington and everyplace in between, just a lineage I was born into, a story I had no part in writing but every part in protecting from the world.

I’m part of something that was there before me. I’m connected to people in ways I’ll never have to explain. I have a home. I had forgotten all these things, only to find them in a time of death and grief. I came home on a plane with a Dior handbag full of mascara-stained tissues and a lingering feeling of knowing where I come from. Almost immediately, I wanted to go back.

My parents are moving in January, out of my hometown and out of Georgia and out of the South. With Betty gone, my mother wants to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. They’re painting things that haven’t been painted the entire time we lived there, in the house we moved into the weekend I got my first menstrual period at age 12. Two hours down the road, my grandfather is self-medicating himself into oblivion. I’m putting masks back on by the day, and the rawness is scabbing over with the funeral-shoe blisters.

My mother and I came home from the nursing home to find my grandfather sitting in front of the computer with his hand over his eyes. I followed her into the other room.

“I think Granddaddy’s crying,” she interrupted me.

I turned. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry, though that hardly occurred to me at the time, when we were all crying, together or in shifts, quietly or in the midst of conversations.

“You go,” she said.

I went.

I leaned over the leather office chair and hugged him. He smelled pretty bad, which was weird to me. He was wearing mismatched blue pajamas (plaid top, striped pants) and his nose was running and he was sobbing.

“He never gets dressed anymore,” my mother had told me earlier, “no matter who’s there.” When I first entered the house that morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table with the funeral director, dressed in those same pajamas. It was a couple days later when someone finally told him there was a hole.

There was an email open on the screen, from my uncle Al. .. and I knew I was the apple of her eye, but you were the whole tree. That’s how much she loved you. He told me to read it, and after my mother showed up with Kleenex, he read it out loud. He called them Al’s words in a very reverent tone. We assured him that was how it really was, and it’s true, and I rubbed his shoulder and didn’t even cry.

When Al made it down from Delaware with his fiance, he wouldn’t let them, both over 40, sleep in the same bed in his house, because he had to “set an example.”

I edited the obituary, taking out her age and fixing the sentence structure as best I could while not leaving out any of the obscure names of survivors Granddaddy insisted needed to be there, to attract the most people to the services, none of which, not even interment, would be private.

The whole funeral was so wrong that if she hadn’t been dead, it might’ve been comic.

We didn’t argue with him for What She Would Have Wanted, only comforted ourselves with the knowledge that she’d never know, and came up with dream funerals where everyone took a long hot bath and then laid down on the couch or drank some coffee, had a cigarette and a good dessert. Her handbags would be on display, and we’d talk about when and where she got each one and how long she waited before she took it out of the bag and used it for the first time. We’d read her favorite passage from The Love Book, the one she wanted read to her all the time. She’d be buried in her best white nightgown and robe and slippers.

There would be none of this open casket stuff. There’d be none of these supposed relatives who made her nervous staring at her, with her hair all wrong and her face fixed up to look like some Ordinary Old Lady’s, while those who knew her best cowered in a corner trying our best not to see. (After she finally had to go up, when everyone else was gone, to leave a note and an origami crane from my little brother, my mom said into my hair with the most heartbreaking love “her fingernails are still the same, but one of them needs filing.”)

Making it through the wake was a nightmare for us, introverts like her, what with scary Aunt Peggy’s plastic shoes and red toenails, people who came up saying “you remember me!” rather than introducing themselves, as if it were some sort of test, second cousins once removed who’d never even met HER, let alone us, and others we did not want to be emotional around. Granddaddy, the extrovert running the show (or, “first class operation,” as he called it), glowed. All he needed was to get around people, tell them every detail of her illness and everything he had done for her, how much money he had spent, how much the pants she’d be buried in had cost so many years ago, how hard it all was, how he hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. It helped him, and he needed it, and who were we to interfere. (Let us have the most compassion for the one who has the most guilt.)

Mom’d overhear Granddaddy telling about six different people what a comfort I was, citing the email incident as proof, and he’d ask people how pretty I was, and call me his girl, and whisper in my ear that Betty didn’t love anyone the way she loved me.. except maybe him. I don’t know why he latched on to me that way, maybe because he thought I didn’t know the things that other people knew, or because he didn’t realize that everyone else felt genuinely sorry for him too. I don’t know what I did that was helpful, except listening, which my mother has been doing so much more of for so much longer and to so much more anguish.

We worried about whether we were acting right, and forced ourselves out of our seats to shimmy around the room with our backs to her corpse reading the names on the flower arrangements for thank you card purposes. Among them were the sunflowers we’d picked out, with the kitten I’d drawn on the card, and the roses that said they were from us, which we’d never seen (my grandfather had taken the liberty), and arrangements from Granddaddy’s old business partners in Delaware.

. . .

At the funeral, my great grandmother remarked “Katharine looks so sad… is she sick?” and my mother replied “No, she’s sad.”

Back in my own city, I’d realize it was the first healthy sadness I’d felt in years. At the time, I cried and held my mother’s hands and listened to some church lady friend of my grandfather’s mother’s sing some song about going home to the Lord, and some lady preacher named Katie talking about eternal life, saying “Betty” in a wrong tone, and putting in as much as she could (not much) about the life of a woman she’d never known, picked up from her husband and children, into a cookie cutter sermon. A very private person, entirely devoted to her family, enjoying the small pleasures of worldly life but always working on her spiritual life, not suffering now, definitely going to the good place. It didn’t matter what she said. It didn’t take anything to get us all teary, my mother passing tissues along the pew. She’d tell me that night she hadn’t heard much of it at all.

My stepfather made for a faulty pallbearer, showing up late for official pall bearing duties, when they’d tell him he had ten minutes and they didn’t really mean it.

They buried her in the wrong cemetery, in a plot right by the curb without even a tree, a plot my great grandmother had bought in her cheap morbid obsessions. Betty’s people are in a pretty place with hills and trees, where she and my mother had walked when Mom was a child, talking about the relatives buried there. This place was flat, with little flower holders poking out like bristly hairs missed while shaving - a match for the funeral home, not an old house with a wrap-around porch where the introverts could escape, but a bland square place with new-looking falseness, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, a place she’d be uncomfortable alive.

On the top of the vault that’d cover the coffin, “Berry M. Kemp” was engraved.

A letter in the mail from my father today, the first word of him in months. Last I heard he’d left treatment center X and was traveling along the east coast. My mother gave me strict instructions to lock my doors and call her cell phone if he showed up here. The letter says he’d stopped taking his meds and gotten “squirrelly.” There was a 4th month in my home town jail and now he’s at treatment center Y for a year. Let S. know I’m sorry.. not in my right mind.. manic spree from hell. PS. I apologize for being such a poor father.

How he says “I apologize” instead of “I’m sorry” and “poor” instead of “bad”….. he’s a lot like me.

Lately I really miss James. Not that I’m forgetting how bad things were or glamourizing good times so long ago, I just miss him the way you miss the place you grew up, the way you miss your parents. I miss the way his hugs were always comforting, no matter what. We could be in the middle of an awful fight, but that hug always felt good. We were, after all, really close. I just don’t have that kind of closeness anymore, with anyone. I’m lonely. I want a friend; I want a companion. I want someone I can talk to. I want someone I can be there for; someone who will be there for me. I want all the cliches, only I want the real thing.

I want trust. It’s been such a long time.

I also want that intense fragility tattoo. I emailed a Japanese calligrapher I found in a Google search.

In my kitchen I have these jars of green beans from my step-grandmother’s garden. She gives my family a year’s worth every Christmas; they’re amazingly good. I love them. When I disappeared, my mom just couldn’t bear to eat them, she said. Sent me three jars in the mail, wrapped in towels. I can’t get the lids off.

Some may believe that great suffering is simply melodramatic and religious, but honestly great suffering is at the heart of what life is. I have suffered unbearably and I have wrought unbearable suffering upon others, and in our bearing it out, we have stayed alive. To live this way is to have emotion, and our varied emotions are simply a rainbow projection of suffering through the prism of the mind.

(In my writing, I like to single out emotions. Single emotions are monochrome, they don’t paint the whole picture and they don’t capture the whole scope. I say I am not these words. I say I am not as good as they are and I am not as bad as they are. I say I am beyond this as I am beyond these motions I carry myself through day by day. I say I am beyond these violent outbursts, these wails and cries, and writing is nothing if not an act of violence against a serene blankness, an innocent page. Writing is a scream in the dark. I say all this in my own defense, when I find myself writing of my own cruelty and anger instead of the cruelty and anger inflicted upon me.)

What we call spirituality seems often to be a practice of taming our passions, leveling our heads, calming our cries and wails, reducing ourselves to the simple breath. But what if in truth even to breathe is to wail and cry? What if in aspiring to perfect unattainable stability we are denying all that is divine in us?

(Love is violent, and everyone writes about love! There is one rule: Record only what is true. And yet So much is true. Different perspectives hold different truths. Everything is transient. Today’s cruelty is tomorrow’s adoration. My life is a testament to this. I do not even understand trust anymore; did I ever? I trust that things change and that people are flawed.)

I have often wondered what beauty is. I have written about it and asked and given up. Out of spite, I told someone once not to confuse sadness with beauty. But maybe that is just it - sadness is beauty. Suffering is beauty. Either It is all low or It is all high. It is all the same. Freedom is not about moving beyond melodrama, it is about embracing it and realizing that these moments of great intensity - great puking awful realization that life is horrid and we ourselves indescribably cruel - these nauseous moments are the children of enlightenment.

Maybe It will never be easy. Maybe It will never be simple. We have all these spiritual terms we cannot define. Maybe we cannot define them because they do not exist. The moment is all that exists. In the moment, we are victims and we are murderers and we are divine. We are the energy that ignites the sobs, the wails, the love.

(I see a girl hunched up on the floor talking to a boy and there is nothing I can do for her. There was nothing anyone could do for me. We sleep our lives away in huge chunks, we work and fuck and dance. We suffer and go on. There is nothing else to do. Certainly, there is nothing else to say.)

If suffering is beauty, then maybe to move beyond beauty - to get over it already, to let go of it - is to move beyond suffering.