Granpa's Dying

“I’ll call you when I finish driving, I don’t like to talk in the car.” I was parked in my parents’ driveway, but that doesn’t make my statement any less true. I collected myself, pulled out, and headed towards the freeway. I enjoy talking on the phone with very few people. Who is interesting enough to hold my attention with just their words? I realize the irony, but I will try to be. 

It’s fun to think of most people in public as playing characters. Wow, this mom at Starbucks makes a real convincing bitch. Then I’ll give her a score like 8.5/10, She’s kind of overdoing it, no one has that little self-awareness. If she could dial it back a little? Super convincing. How does anyone pass the ripe age of 20 and not come to the realization that there are other people in the world. 7 billion of them in fact—each complete with their own pet peeves, myths and kinks. I’m an infinitesimally small part of the universe. A part of the whole—the universe moves on within and without me. In fact, I don’t even exist. “Me” is just a story I tell myself—residue from the process of linear thought. I exist because I have memories of yesterdays and abstracts of tomorrows. In reality, I have died and been reborn countless times. Fact: only certain cells in your gut live up to 16 years. All the others died long ago and were reborn to die again. The elemental fabric of my existence has been entirely replaced multiple times over. How can I claim any moments beyond the present? Maybe, I’m not the physical matter that makes up my body. Maybe, me is the spirit or the mind. Well, maybe my spirit has died and been reborn even more frequently than my physical body. I cannot begin to fathom the phenomenology of my thoughts 10 years ago. Each morning is a little birth. Every night my mind dies, goes to hell in my nightmares, and conquers death when I wake up sweating three hours later. No, the egregore that fabricates those lowlight reels is not me. I’m only me when the pretty girl laughs, or when the audience claps. When I get so anxious that I mispronounce my own name after rehearsing my Starbucks order in my head for two minutes, I’m just not being me. Damn, I knew they were going to ask my order, but I forgot about the name part. So, we agree; I don’t exist. What a comforting thought. Anxiety requires an uncertain future, but there is no need to be anxious if you don’t take ownership over your future self. There are only two good reasons to ever be—. I just went 6 miles on the freeway in the wrong direction. How did I not realize I was going South? Oh, and it’s 4 o’clock so Northbound is a parking lot. 

This is the same on-ramp I take every day to work.

What was I saying again? Some Zen mysticism I don’t even believe. Conviction is one thing I don’t understand. Do I get to choose what to believe, or do I only believe something once I am convinced of it? Is belief in my head or in my gut? I know that the moon is a 2,100-mile-wide rock orbiting the earth from 238,900 miles away, but I don’t feel like the moon is a very giant, very distant rock. It feels more like a 3-inch-wide sticker pressed upon a backdrop. So, which do I believe? Sometimes, if I stare at the moon long enough, I feel a glimpse of its magnitude, but I am unable pin it down. I wonder how long I would have to stare at death to pin it down. Can you imagine dying for an ideal? What an outlandish concept for a generation that looks at death even less than we look at the moon. They say that “to die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely”, but today we all live in a health cult. It’s as if death is the only sin. Die? What about your portfolio? What about your clout? Your 1.5 children? What would the half kid say?

Like I said, I do not even hold onto a static sense of self long enough to finish this sentence as the same person. However, death is not in the future; death is in the present—just not this present. I would hate to be the iteration of myself that gets born into the moment of death. That is, unless death is an adventure—I really hope so. I have heard from random internet sources that death is the ultimate psychedelic experience. All of your endorphins, hormones, and latent bio-chemicals firing off at once—a beautiful cosmic transition into the greatest unknown. If that’s the case, I hope I live long enough to be there for my death. 

I apologize if morbid existential thought is off putting, but it is actually the reason I am writing. My grandfather passed away last weekend, and I need to write about him. He was the most interesting man I had ever known. He fought in 3 wars and spoke as many languages, started a biker gang when he was 24, and ran an underground boxing ring in Houston. He had friends still in jail; he had friends still on the battlefield; but really, he had very few friends at all. 

Grandpa was a hardened, domineering Navy Seal who served in Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan. I distinctly remember the way he described being drafted in high school for Vietnam: “Like a 17-year-old going to a bad-ass amusement park and strapping into the mother of all rides.” I guess the Extreme Scream ^TM was a lot more guttural for that generation. He looked at me and said, “can you imagine getting to shoot a Gatling gun from a helicopter?” as if I was supposed to respond, “Yeah, wow the Vietnam generation sure did get lucky.”  Of course, I couldn’t relate, and he had to have known that. I don’t even like rollercoasters; I find them patronizing. You know how your ancestors used to go hunting with their entire community? One wrong step removed an entire genealogy from the history books. Each tribe member’s training since birth finally ritualized into a sacred performance. The fire of adrenaline coursed through their blood, searing the great myths into their minds’ eye as they danced around death. Well, now we have stripped the aura, the risk, the community, and the narrative. Above a sterile lever there is a laminated placard with the words “almost death” printed in Calibri (Heading) font. A fat, acne-ridden high schooler will pull that lever as many times as you’d like. A true marvel of engineering. I hate engineering. I prefer to exercise my urge to scream and puke when I am waiting in line for the roller coaster. I tell people that I’m practicing being afraid. They don’t think it’s funny; they are probably right. 

All this to say that my grandfather was a hard-o. He simply loved war.

Someone just cut me off on the freeway. Honestly, it never really bothers me. What, I’m going to get where I’m going 15 seconds later now? I hate dweebs that get behind the wheel of a car and all of a sudden, they become some ogre. You only have to listen to my thoughts for about 10 more minutes, I’m getting close to the funeral home. If you are a slow reader, I’ll do a few laps around the parking lot. I would play music, but the last thing I need now are distractions. It all started with the elevator—background music is eating away at your mental health, baby. Throw on music to shower, to study, to drive, to cook, to clean, to exercise—anything to prevent yourself from being alone with your thoughts. Elevators needed background music because the awkward silence with three other people in a 10 ft x 10 ft box must have been too much, but not all silences have to be awkward. “Only boring people get bored”, or “only boring people do not feel boredom, so they cannot conceive of it in others.” There are two types of people in the world: those who get bored and those who are still reading this.

I had a professor in college who said that “boredom was the mother of psychology”. I thought it sounded profound, so I was just going to pass that off as my thought, but I don’t think it’s very profound anymore. All I can say, is boredom was a real crack-whore of a mother because psychology is a dumb bitch. Psychology is philosophy for stupid people, and philosophy is literature for nerds. Psych students are all crack-babies, the worst of which read Freud and pathologize all action through psychoanalysis. Actually, the worst of which have not even read Freud, they just regurgitate the lectures of someone who believes Freud is a genuine authority on the human mind. The most well-intentioned crack babies study psychology to understand themselves better and leave everyone else out of their experiment. Well-intentioned does not mean smart. I want to figure out who I am, so that I can live authentically. Authenticity seems like a good aim. The first and most obvious layer is my ego—the filter of my consciousness. I have to control my impulses; I have to “be myself”; I can’t let the mask wear me. Here comes the ego death, what a sensation.

 But of course, the ego never dies and if it does, the superego waits to fill its shoe. All anyone can reach is some ego-death-lite—all of the revelation, now, with 30% more ennui. In reality, ego-death is just a cover up. The second that people realize they are less important or permanent than they believed, they will take more pride in that epiphany than they ever took in themselves. All of these people walking around not realizing how trivial their problems are. All of them caring about the wrong things, trying to piece together an identity from illusory and abstract notions of self... I get it. I’m probably one of the few who gets it. I do not take myself as seriously as them—that makes me special. Ah, now we are back to feeling important again. Humility is overrated. The ego does the most damage when the individual hides it effectively. (How is that for sounding like a psychologist?) Please don’t take anything I say seriously; I have friends with psychology degrees. Psychology is my guilty pleasure. I only know that it’s philosophy for dumb people because I don’t understand philosophy.

Actually, you should take everything I say seriously. Now that I think of it, telling you to not take it seriously is incredibly patronizing. Why should you not take it seriously? I am afraid your feelings will get hurt, or that you won’t be able to discern which things I say in jest. You won’t be able to tell what’s write from wrong among all of these brilliant musings. You shouldn’t even be reading this, or I should just fill the rest of the space with fart jokes—maybe elevator music would do. 

Sorry,Sometimes, I get too much in my own head. I am writing to tell the story of my grandfather’s death. I promise it’s a story worth hearing.

You can tell when a guy believes he just got a bargain because he will repeat the agreed upon price over and over out of fear that the other party might renege. That’s the way my grandpa used to tell war stories. Just want to make sure war crimes are still on the table, last time I said something racy no one objected. I later came to realize that he truly did not care. He didn’t care if anyone cared. He knew he was right about everything. Anxiety was just a word to the man who repelled from helicopters and got married at 20.

Most of his horror stories came from his time in the USSR or Bolivia. Lyndon Johnson’s administration had deployed him undercover as a Polish diplomat to Leningrad before it was renamed St. Petersburg. He used to tell me the same joke every time he mentioned Russia.

“The KGB stops a man at a checkpoint in Leningrad and questions him on his passport. "Raskolnikov! Where were you born?"

"St. Petersburg" he replies.

Not amused they ask, "Where did you study?"

"Petrograd" comes the answer

Getting quite annoyed, they ask where he lives now.

"Leningrad"

"Ok asshole, would you like to live in Gulag?"

He replies "I'd like to live in St. Petersburg"

Yeah, I didn’t get it either. When my grandfather would tell jokes, he would not even crack a smile, so you never knew if you had arrived at the punchline. I responded by slowly chuckling through the entire joke so that I didn’t miss the punchline, but I could tell that kind of pissed him off. The first time he told that joke, I just started laughing after he said, “would you like to live in the Gulag?” which led to an hour-long lecture about how the Gulag is not something to laugh at. 

Jokes were rare, however, when he brought up his time in the USSR. Once, he told me about a time he dined with bureaucrats in Moscow. He prefaced the story with “don’t tell your parents” which made me finally tune into his never-ending rambling.

“The entire restaurant was reserved for a party of aristocrats”, he said. “Not the officials who actually pulled the strings, but the ones just close enough to real power to receive the spoils. A few of the elite brought me downstairs—what seemed like VIP dining. The luxurious winding wood staircase slowly transitioned into an industrial-looking cement ramp as we reached the bottom floor. Live animals filled the corridors which stretched below the restaurant. I followed my accomplice, a military official from East Germany who had secretly defected, into the first room on the left. Inside stood a tall gray and white-spotted horse standing in a 9 ft x 6 ft industrial-sized bathtub. A few men started pouring rice into the container. Thousands, possibly millions of grains of rice emptied into the tub as the confused horse shuddered. Bag after bag, thousands of pounds of rice were dumped until the horse stood past its shoulders in tiny white specks. Then, my only friend in the room handed me a knife and fork. He looked at me threateningly, ‘The horse can no longer move from the neck down, and live meat is considered a delicacy. To not eat would be considered very rude.’ We dug into the live animal, and then I found a $5 bill on the ground.”

 Grandpa used to end all of his worst stories by finding loose change on the ground. He told me, “It’s too mundane to make people forget the horrible stuff but distracting enough to change the mood anyway.” That’s when I knew his story was true. There’s no need to soften a lie, especially if it is meant to scare someone. When I told him how inhumane I thought the Soviets were, he just laughed. “People only ever uses the word ‘inhumane’ to describe things explicitly performed by humans.” I guess he was right. No one ever says, “it’s so inhumane how the tiger stalks his prey”. It’s always “my coworker fought dogs in his basement? How inhumane.” Often, it was hard to tell whether grandpa was a mysterious sage, or just fucked in the head. 

It used to be a sign of great strength and wisdom to live long enough to be considered old. Now everyone does it. Such an impotent threat compels our generation: you must live to be old or else you’ll die. If I decided right now to stop moving completely, and I never moved again in my life, I could probably make it past 85. By the end of the day, my family would find me. When they realized I couldn’t or wouldn’t move, they would take me to the hospital. The hospital would hook me up to a feeding tube. I wouldn’t even have to open my mouth. They could breathe for me, eat for me, shit for me, wipe for me. My parents would take out loans to keep me alive. Even if my family weren’t there, friends would crowd source my healthcare, and the government would eventually take me on their dole. It’s hard to die; you really have to try.

 All these folks alive at 80+ have it so hard. I’m sure the folks who are dead at 80+ have it much easier. They only have to roll over every once in a while, when their grandson writes some humiliating attention grab about familial death to share with his friends. I feel bad for old people; their lives seem so disjointed. People frequently talk about being “born into the wrong generation” because they romanticize another era. It’s always the same complaints: no more drive-ins, too many smart phones, no more chivalry, too many drag queens. They see a decaying social structure and lament. Oh, how tragic to be born as the iteration that faces death. What a burden to be called upon for the great adventure. For those of us with contempt for society, we have the opportunity to twist the dagger and still show up to celebrate the funeral. The only people who lament societal decay either don’t know how to fight or don’t know how to party. How much more tragic it must be to grow up in a time that makes sense and watch as debilitating diseases slowly eat away at your friends and institutions until you are too old to change or resist change.

One of those debilitating diseases caught up to my grandfather. He was diagnosed with leukemia after it was too late. Leukemic cells had already invaded his central nervous system making him prone to migraines, seizures, and the possibility of going comatose. The doctor told him he had 6 months to live without treatment, and 3-4 years to live if he sunk his life savings into radiation that killed his will, his mind, his soul and his sex drive but left his heart beating. The doctor didn’t phrase it like that, and I have no idea if those are side effect of radiation; I am just cynical. He was heavily exposed to Agent Orange in the jungles of Vietnam, and he took pride in having seen a medical professional outside of war only two times since Korea.

The first time my grandpa went to see a medical professional after the Korean war, he had contracted an STD. I will spare you that story, but it is true that grandpa got around. The second time he received medical help was after being run over by a bus, and I will get to that story. I would love it if I could show up to the hospital and have the doctor pull up my medical history only to show times that I have been hit by busses or contracted STD’s. It wouldn’t be worth the broken legs or the burning piss, but it sure beats SSRIs and ADD medication. “I see here you have had a general problem with being human?” My grandpa had a problem with Leukemia—he couldn’t shoot it in the face or call it racial slurs. All he cared about was dying with dignity, honor, and his religion intact. I’m not sure if he would describe the way he died as “dying with dignity”, but I thought it was a hell of a way to go.

Each morning he would take the bus down to the local park and ride 4.5 miles on his bike. He timed these bike rides with the sunrise so that each day, he would finish at the water just as the sun broke over the mountains. In the Seattle summertime, that meant getting up as early as 4:30AM to finish by sunrise at 5:21AM. One day in late June, he nodded towards the driver and stepped off the bus at 4:50.

He assumed that the man had seen him hoist his bike onto the bike rack at the front of the bus only 15 minutes earlier, but the driver was too nervous about his first week to think straight. Drive, wait till everyone gets on and off, then drive to the next spot. Just don’t get into an accident and be friendly with the passengers, you might make some friends. The bus driver was an elderly veteran as well—Staff Sergeant Joshua Cohen. He spent 10 years on and off unemployment after being deployed to Baghdad as a part of the Army reserves in 2003. As a 54-year-old infantryman, Staff Sergeant Joshua Cohen lugged 80-90 lbs of weight every day in the heat of the desert amidst heavy on and off fire from the mountains of Afghanistan. By the time he got his job as a bus driver, he had one less leg. Funny, they let you drive for the public transit system if you are missing a leg. Funnier—the good-humored bus driver used to make up stories for the people who stared at his nub. “I once found a genie in a bottle, and my last wish was to lose 50 lbs—instantly regretted it.” Less funny, he didn’t lose his leg until two years after returning from the war in Afghanistan. Least funny—he lost his leg after jumping from a 6-story building in a failed suicide attempt. Can you imagine how hard you have to hit the pavement to lose a limb clean off? How do you hit the ground that hard and not die?  Not to sound to crass, but I can’t imagine becoming less suicidal after losing a leg. I guess it becomes harder to jump. I’m sorry that was an ugly joke included for cheap laughs. I sincerely do apologize. I have been trying to tone down my complete irreverence for just about everything—a product of my generation, I guess. 

Staff Sergeant Joshua Cohen pulled into traffic smoothly and safely as Grandpa held onto his bike frame with a death grip known only to old military men. The bus driver slowly sped up to 5 MPH, then 10, 20, now 25MPH as my grandfather barked from the bike rack, “STOP, I’M ON THE FRONT! STOP! STOP THE BUS! FUCK YOU!” He yelled loud enough for anyone seated in the front half of the bus to hear. The problem was that no one was seated in the front half of the bus on that Thursday morning in Seattle, and Staff Sergeant Cohen’s hearing was completely shot from artillery fire. That older gentleman has always been friendly to me, and he looks like a military man himself. I should say something to him the next time I see him. Maybe I’ll tell him the genie joke. My grandfather continued to slap the fender with one arm, hold onto the frame with his other, and scream with both lungs. The bus had reached its cruising speed of 30 MPH and grandpa was beginning to think he could hold on until the next bus stop when they hit a pothole—slip, crack, crunch. 

The headlights didn’t flinch, and the engine didn’t stutter, but a wave of horror ripped through the bus driver. The question of what potentially may or may have not been the object or person that bumped or crunched under the wheels, held Staff Sergeant Joshua Cohen’s stomach above his head. The crack was grandpa’s helmet whipping into the ground, but the crunch was his legs slipping under the back right wheel. The bus driver parked the city bus in the middle of the road and ran out speechless towards grandpa on the ground. My grandpa grunted “give me a minute, just give me a minute” every 10 seconds through his gritted teeth until the ambulance arrived. The sun began to peak over the mountains as Staff Sergeant Joshua Cohen directed traffic around my grandpa’s body. As cars whizzed by like bullets, both men instinctively felt like they were back on enemy territory—an unparalleled feeling of brotherhood resurfaced.

Actually, I have no idea how they felt or if the accident resembled a war scene, but it is true that my grandpa got ran over by a bus. I have to think there was something in the urgency and chaos that opened space for friendship between two old, hardened vets as the sun rose on grandpa for the last time.
My grandpa had the will to live great and the chance to die great. What is left for me? I don't want a 6-figure salary, a good credit score, an adjustable 30-year mortgage, the perfect elevator music, or a larger rollercoaster. I've been on the highway for far too long now. I always forget my exit. I never get hit by cars. Every time I look around, the landscape is blurring as it rushes towards me or fading as it passes. All I want is one still shot of the sun rise; I don't mind if I have to lay on the pavement.