A good year I’ve been saying I have a feeling, a Reaping Year I named it. The idea basically comes from the psychological paradigm of full functionality, which is not the same thing as happiness, and within that paradigm misery and cynicism and alienation are all necessary so that unlike the slogan “depression is never normal” (you can find that at mentalheath.org etc) actually the lack of it would be a marked hindrance. It’s not as if I want to be unhappy because God knows I do not. But it is necessary to be willing to be unhappy is the thing. Emotional risk. Ability to choose among bad choices and to calculate feeling into decisions wherein there is inherent pain. An integration of the full range of feelings into rational assessments and subsequent actions. A person who is unwilling to be unhappy cannot be happy, is the thing. He or she cannot be whole. So. It is day one of the reaping year after a hard sewing year, wherein I made the instinctive decision to be unhappy since I was anyway. (duh)
Tonight my grandfather has part of his foot removed because he has diabetes related gangrene. The wound will be left open in hopes that in the next 48 hours the infection will drain away from the leg. This procedure will be done with local anesthetic because he is a smoker and has perpetual pneumonia in the one lung he still has. If the infection does not drain away but continues further into the body, he will have the rest of his foot removed. He has end stage spinal stenosis, so an epidural will be unlikely given the conductivity of his nervous system through the spine.
My grandfather, like every girl’s own daddy, stamped and formed how I love men and what for. I was the first grandchild before a slew in subsequent years, the first child (after the death of my brother) of a favorite eldest daughter. He doted on me and I loved his ways that made my grandma grim, his convertible orange karmen gia. She doted on me too, the early reader, because she had given up college in the 30’s for his 8th grade education and his ways that made her grim, so we shared words and similar weaknesses. His hands like calloused claws smelled (sensually) of earth smoked something and machine oils. I was like orange juice concentrate with too little water added, and he would rub roughly the side of my face and twinkle at me in his eyes, and to my incessant “can we can we can we” he would calmly say “Wait Awhile” again and again, bemused. And he poured me Pepsi and fried me a pork chop with black pepper. My grandma glowered at him for his skirt chasing, but then would look at me, our matching blackbrown almond eyes locked, and she would laugh.
Book-ended between them on one side and my daughter on the other, I have done whatever I managed to do because they were watching. I understand the mixed blessing of (a community’s) eyes intently upon me. I understand mixed blessings, generally speaking. My girl just passed her (re)cancer check. My grandfather will not live out this year or maybe this week, and then neither will she, my grandmother Shirley, who is not loved better than he is by anyone but me, because she will follow him and for reasons I could not put language around but I understand. So I pack the bag with my new clothes. I thank in my head FaintedInk and CapitalofIndustryGuy for inspiring me to upgrade my professor girl look. Doctors don’t scare me. I scare them. General anesthetic. He cannot die by inches. Before the week is out, I might do my best to kill him. Douglas Ott will share my son’s name and, I hope, this weekend will look at my feet and call out my name before his eyes reach my face and he will say “god I wish I were young”, eyes sparkling at me.
He taught me, and she did too, to never have on my tongue and in my nose the smell and taste of someone for whom I would not be unhappy if asked. Would I be unhappy for you? (Thank god they told me about that question. Thank. God.)
