(or How I Came Full Circle on Benji)
I got the word Wednesday that my grandmother might die that day. My flight to Denver was moved up from Friday night to Friday morning, I emailed my professors and one said she'd pray. I thought about my mom already there, she landed in a blizzard and drove the long drive from DIA to the home. She said Maga recognized her, and we both wondered if I'd see her again.
That night as I worked I don't know what came over me but I felt the need to listen to Benji. I don't know why but I was tired and wasn't going to bed until three. I've said how much I've hated that album before but I couldn't help but fall for it's charms now. Mark sang about his dead family, doing his best Townes Van Zandt impression, and strangely I felt the same. He had different family but he knew them the same, he didn't see them much but that didn't mean he didn't care. But somehow he couldn't separate their death from their life.
My grandma was a nurse and gave her back to her career. She spent the last six years barely walking, if at all, since they botched the surgery. She used to go to my birthday parties, she didn't miss one until I was around fourteen. She'd stay in the empty bedroom next to mine and we'd read books and play with my toys. She was there when I was born and when I got reborn in Christ.
Friday morning I caught an early flight. I listened to The Van Pelt, and The Cure, but most importantly to Benji. Carissa burned to death in a freak accident fire, Jim Wise mercy killed his wife, and I hoped at thirty thousand feet for a grandmother waiting for me when I landed. Mark Kozelek could watch The Song Remains the Same and have it speak to him as it once did, but he couldn't watch the scenes of John Bonham and Peter Grant without thinking of the dust that fell upon them. And I knew the next time I went to the lake in Evergreen and thought of her marriage there I would not be able to separate it from the slow deaths that followed both of them.
My mom picked me up at the airport as Mark's words hung over me still. She talked a little of my grandma and me, and we turned out of the airport and I saw the mountains. The nervous tension I'd felt for days suddenly broke and I wept.
My grandma laid there, occasionally opening her eyes. She'd play with the muscles around her mouth like she wanted to try them one last time. Her arms were bruised and grey. She tried to pay attention to my mother's words but twice she just looked away at me, and winked and smiled. It was only a little over a year ago we sat one floor down and learned that my dad's dad had passed a few hundred miles away.
My grandma's friends visited, some older than her. They sat with her and talked about things they did in the 70s. A family member I didn't remember ever seeing before came by for a while. He asked her how she felt and I thought she said she was going to die. He asked if she was ready. She nodded.
My grandma had a rare moment of lucidity while my mother was outside on the phone. I talked about when I was little and would collect miniature pinecones for her. She kept them in pillboxes on her sink. I talked about the big old boiler in her basement that used to scare me and the dominoes she kept down there. I remember the 60s wallpaper in her kitchen, and her California king-sized bed. She kept VHS copies of cartoons in her closet that I'm not sure exist outside of that house. We'd sit and watch the same ones each time I visited. She smiled at me and looked to the empty half of the room and I swore she said "hello."
My grandma died about an hour ago, one day before my twentieth birthday. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket in class and I knew it could only be my mom calling me. As I left I called her back and she said "Carter, Maga's left." She looked at the ceiling before she went, she said, and then five minutes later that was it. As I walked home it started to snow.
I suppose it's a matter of circumstances that Benji was here for me this last weekend. I found the beauty in its ugliness, and I find beauty in the ugliness of the last week. I can't know for sure but to me Mark's stories happened every bit as much as mine did. I thank him now for what he's given me, for showing me how to deal with all of this misery. I wish I could write a song like he did, but to say it at all is at least minor therapy. My grandma lived and died and I don't have to separate the memories.
This is the first in what has accidentally become a series on Sun Kil Moon. Read the second here and the third here.