Years ago, I sat by my grandma Gaol’s hospital bed as she slipped into the eroding orbit of a one-way delirium… It should have been a somber, sentimental final rite of the living, but the brilliant old bat had other plans for us hapless few keeping vigil there. A rapt cabal of witnesses, a captive clotted audience, mere spectators before the bespectacled spectacle of her Grandmausoleum Theatre!!! All the years we’d known her – still no clue…
Even under the soft, heavy paw of hospice-phase anesthetics, despite levels of what I was lead to understand approached Marlin-Perkins-vs-Rutting-Bull-Water-Bison-level sedation, Gaol Dørmur Smythe, age 89, kept fretting, frowning, huffing, learing, pouting, snorting, jerking around indignantly, jaw set, brow knitted, demanding to know where the HELL that cabaña boy had got to with her damned daiquiri already!!!
I should have been overwhelmed with helpless, desperate grief… (I felt the seeds of a strangers remorse squealing that To Permit Anything Else Would Be Sacrilege!) Too bad, dummy. Instead of playing the attentive, heart-sick grandson, you get Hunter S. Thompson meets Steel Magnolias sandwiched between two halves of a cosmic contraction cast in the ridiculous role of my extended family: Sunny Hill’s Fawning Faithful vs. The Isla Vista Raving Atheists… #killmenow
So, kid. Enjoy forging the inky tides of a deathbed segue, clinging to Gaol’s bed-rails when you should be preparing to bear her pall. Relish your whimsical failure to emerge from that bizarre gauntlet with any shred of your scripted, reverent poise intact. None of your preconceived bullshit will survive the blast furnace of filial psychedelia that gets stoked to melt a hellhound when grandma’s mixed drink CONTINUES to be a no-show. Nope.True to form, my maternal Matriarch remained a dedicated disciple of discontent and dissipation till the very end. There is a certain dignified elegance in that, even though I couldn’t stop myself cracking up – still can’t…But on balance, an island paradise afflicted with slightly tardy beverage service is a damn sight better than a punctual but hopelessly teetotaled hospital staff. Oh that the rest of us knew how to bow out with such a flare of stubborn genius.
That’s my tribute to the slice of flux we’re all living into, within, thru, again, and again, still until still becomes no longer.Loved you Gramma.
Bye forevz.
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