middle of the night

so lately, been wond'rin, who will be there to take my place
when im gone
you'll need love
to light the shadows on your face

remember that song? I could google it and write down what it is, but i wont botha.

too bad this household is in shambles right now. more than it usually is, even. but usually i am cool with it. now, because there is 9 people dwelling here overnight instead of the usual 4, resources are scarce, and sleeping options are limited. A Mad search for a pillow that began at 5 am ends now, with this pillow *cocks head towards pillow.* But who can sleep now? And where to sleep? And how can I sleep in this chilly atmosphere of expats who save money by not using heat in the dead of winter?

What is an expat?

What will today bring. I have a couple of things lined up in my head for landmarks/benchmarks, as I try to do for every day in order to maintain my steadily dwindling grip on functional productivity and overall action with a forward trajectory. The things I have lined up are less than something that is not so mammoth<

BLOODY HELL< the punctuation and caps lock are all of the sudden majorly fucked up on this ole compaq number reminiscent of a simpler time with more crude tools< (comma) sheepskin wardrobes, (ITS BACK!) and the third thing that was a sign of the times that served as the heyday of this compaq[t] [not] compy need not be written here because the point has been rendered moot by the reappearance of the comma after the blessed word 'wardrobes.'

The daughters of the deceased woman and the brave harrowing souled grandpa are bustling about the kitchen, making coffee, doing the dishes, wiping up surfaces in preparation for "later" (what happens later? Will let all of you eager readers/ voyeurs into my daily life know.) These are the vision of strength for us all, having come from a modest American home, vaguely Jewish, vaguely patriotic, vaguely vagabonds in Northeast Philly. I expect them to break down, the 2 girls, today they play 2 roles hand in hand: daughters and mothers. Organizers of the proceedings, whatever they may be, and mourners of a woman who has been a rock for me for my first 20 years.

A rock? now I can't remember hardly anything. So much of my time spent with her, I feel like, was sort of me trying to appease my guilt for perhaps taking her for granted my whole life, for not milking her for all of the information, posterity, and lessons that I could have been. So I painted this happy- go- lucky picture of myself for her, a spunky girl with a fiery drive, specific interests, and significant talent in some areas of note, and some of disgrace.

I overhear these women debreifing in the kitchen. Debreifing? The emotions are thick like soup sans water. The perpetual humming of a modern household, be it the deceptive heating system, the cieling fan above me, or the pipes and washing machine below me (Yup! I'm perched atop a whirring washing machine! Kewl) Every vocalization is made with that underlying wimpering waver that might as well provide subtitles in 3 languages "I am about to cry, and doing my utmost to hold in my tears till a more socially acceptable time"

luckily for us all, that time is in T minus 2.5 hours. Or something.

My mother, desperate for an entity to blame, to place her grief upon regally, is suspicious of the nursing home. Did they give her dinner that last night? Did they forget about her, in her catatonic state in her hospital bed in room 429 (yes I made up the number, but that's what gives tear- jerking memoirs like this one their street cred) as she used a steadily diminishing capacity of her brain and her body shut off its systems that were not needed or even foremost, silently, without warning any of us explicitly of their plan to close up shop later that night? Did they not pause to thicken her apple juice enough so she would be able to swallow it without choking on the transient, gurgly liquid that would never be enough to coat her innards or contribute to the human body's 75% of water?

My dear aunt, my mother's sister just gave me a rundown of the proceedings. First funeral home, then quick car ride to gravesite. Solemn, respects, eulogies, local Chabad Rabbi as leader, as per the life change of my cousins family roughly a decade ago. All this interspersed with and accented by seemingly arbitrary Jewish customs of misogyny like the fact that despite our families lack of able- bodied males who will be present (my father will watch from an undisclosed panoptic location, the priestly gene pool coursing through his veins detectable only in the teltale surname grounds for a life on the outskirts of cemetaries, graveyards, funeral zones. Back to my run-on: we need 6 "pallbearers," they must be male. The 2 children and 4 of the 5 grandchildren are female. Out of the running. We women may very well sit idly by while my family and the Rabbi try their durndest to find some migrant workers, perhaps a deaf-mute dwarf, a gravedigger's Cretian apprentice, anyone with a penis 'n scrotum to help defy gravity as they steadily lift the wooden box which contains my grandma's body wrapped in a shroud. Her soft soft skin, once wrinkled by old age, she was past that point. Beyond the wrinkled skin stage is a sagging, windblown facade. Weathered and leathered were her arms and hands, they once witnessed the ivory keys of concert pianos up close and personal, pounding, tickling, and pressuring the polar colored yet integrated keys of the upstanding instrument slash furniture item. Her teeth: light green and brown, yellow and off- white, the subject of a minor tragedy she once told me about- "the dentist made a mistake" she said simply. I haven't seen her teeth as anything but puffy- cloud white since the day I learned my colors and was in her presence. Her body is one thing. But where is the rest? If there is some sort of communion with god in an afterlife, or limboland, does it feel to her like it has been forever, or for never, as time as we know it probably holds no meaning 'out there'? Does she even feel. I don't want to ask these questions because I formulate the questions within the limitations of our world of time, space, emotions, apologetics, rhetoric, and mixed metaphors, sour grapes, and paralysis, orgasm and overdose married in a union so precious that no proposition number 8 would consider approaching it with a 200- tefach pole. cubit pole.

All of a sudden religious practices are at the forefront. As if they were about to transmit all of the sacred truths that must be passed on to the newer generations, they flesh out the details of the Jewish mourning process. In the face of fear, loss, and as we are forced to make lingering eye contact with the morbidity of those who concieved us, vowed to never decieve us, which is what brings us here today, humbly before those who we live before, but blindly, naively, not until it's too late. In the face of the above, we cower and cling to ritual. I am sure someone like Rene Girard, Rene Descartes, Joyce Kilmer, or some other god forsaken famous stuffy man whose 'work' has been widespread for it's academic clout, no by coincidence sporting the blatant name of a female, has written on such human phenomena before. Fuck them. I see it right here, so they may have been born first, but I am me. Can anyone blame them? They consider the garments they wear, which should be torn first, the outer or inner shirt? Are these chairs too high off the ground for us to sit on for the next week, and how do we convince dad/grandpa that this is not an occasion that deems fasting an appropriate response?

This lurker of a thought wants to be typed up here: What if my grandpa can't take this unspeakable anguish and he submits to natural forces and causes, as a preemptive measure to avoid the upcoming weeks, months, maybe even years, that he will be forced to live in solitude while being surrounded by the other elderly who he is unable to shoot the shit with. He is just too wound up in his retired- aeronautical engineer world of reviewing the rules and regulations that allow the nursing home to run without a hitch: the way the residents choose their meals for the next day on small blue slips of paper. The morning, afternoon, and evening routine with medicine, hygiene, futile socialization attempts, and sleep patterns. The heating system, the new fangled technology of remote control television, a box that is both a clock and a player of the classical music compact discs my mother incessantly borrows from the library for him/them/just him now I guess...



So I guess I won't be getting to sleep before the funeral. I am kinda glad I wrote this though. Would be kinda sour if the compaquter croaks right now. We could stage a double funeral.