I am an atheist. I make no effort to hide this—in fact, I’m rather quite brazen about it, going so far as to sport apparel that declares as much both subtly and far from subtly. But as an atheist, death is. Well, death is an issue. A fear. The Fear in my life. More than once I’ve had panic attacks mid-shower at the prospect of oblivion, nothingness, the quiet erasure of my existence and consciousness that waits for me. Trust me when I tell you that it is an unnerving fate that sends something far more tremulous than shivers down my spine and rattling through my nervous system. I hope to beat it, but hope is just a word, an idea—nothing we can latch on to with a solid grip.

A few years ago, my grandmother, Tracy, died. A few years before that, my uncle Tony, father to the blood-relative I am closest to, also died. Was, as far as I’m concerned, murdered in a DUI-related car crash (in which he was not the driver under the influence, but rather the victim. Naturally, the piece of shit who got behind the wheel all hopped up and twisted on meds that night survived). These are the only two deaths in my family close enough to affect me. And I never got to say goodbye to either of them. In the case of my uncle, neither did his wife or children. All we got was a phone call that grew into a chain of phone calls.

My grandmother, unfortunately, suffered through the very worst final stages of a cancerous death. She was, like her daughter—my mother—a woman unaccustomed to showing vulnerability. She developed a membranous armor over the course of her difficult, colored life. She was not emotionally detached, but she could weather the worst of storms. But when my brother, Jason, and I went to see her in the hospital she sent us away. We never got past the curtain that hid her from us. Never caught a glimpse of her. Only heard her plead that we not see her “like this,” that we not see her weak. Vulnerable.

I can never decide if this was noble or selfish on her part. On the one hand, I’m somewhat. Grateful. That the lasting image I have of my grandmother, from whom I suspect I inherited many of my traits, is of her at our kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi on one side of her, a book on the other, and a Scrabble board laid out in front. As odd as it may sound, this is a beautiful image to me. I’ve tasked my sister to sort through the considerably large collection of photographs—classic, developed, physical photographs—that my mother has amassed to find a picture of her like this image, or at least one that’s as close as possible to that image. I suspect, how it was introduced into my life aside, that my newly developed smoking habit is on some subconscious level a nod to my grandmother—a means to keep her alive in whatever you want to call it. In spirit. In my spirit. I suspect I owe her much more than I’ll ever fully realize.

But I never got to say goodbye. And now she’s gone. She’ll never read my ramblings. She’ll never read my fiction, and she was quite the avid reader. So is my mother. It’s why I’m a reader, and why I’m an English major and a writer. This much I am certain of. There is on some genetic level a tenuous link to a writer on my father’s side, but to a man I never knew. A man I never met, but whose name I was given and by sheer coincidence also share a passion of his.

I apologize for the heavy-handed emotional gravitas of this post. It’s a tad uncharacteristic of me. But after a phone conversation with a friend who is more than just a friend, who, for good or bad, did get to make contact before losing someone forever, I found myself compelled to write about the importance of saying goodbye—perhaps without even saying goodbye—as a means of catharsis. The last attempt at connection, conversation, interaction is especially important to folks like myself, who don’t believe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. No heaven, no hell. No nothing. And please don’t espouse some hokey religious bullshit to me. I don’t subscribe to it. I don’t take comfort in it. I don’t believe in a “better place,” I believe in no place. Respect that.

This diatribe is raw. Unrefined. I’m not going to comb through it with a meticulous eye and repair sentences and tweak and revise and edit. This is stream-of-consciousness, laid out on the table, stripped down and laid bare. And so is the poem that follows, written on the fly, a writer at his desk sipping on green tea (a tad early for rum, despite the need for it) watching a cigarette smolder and decay into ashes like some discomforting and ill-timed metaphor for life. Continue Reading…