It Could Always Be Worse

No matter how dire your current situation, people have the tendency to offer this helpful platitude. It could always be worse. Yes, but I find the reverse is often true as well. It could always be better. I suppose this is the old "glass half full/glass half empty" test. In the words of my dear friend Rob, the glass is half full of piss.

As I write this, the vessel of my body is full of all sorts of things. Blood and guts, obviously. Half a raisin bran muffin from the Coffee Bean. 70% water, apparently. A 17 week old female fetus. And some kind of lurking presence inside my head that is gradually destroying my hearing and my balance and causing me strange neurological impairments. 

My grandfather died in January of 2004 and we were devastated. He was 92 years old, but it still came as a tremendous shock. He had lost none of his mental acuity and though he was legally blind, he was still physically strong, walking every day and doing some kind of weird calisthenics that had been recommended by his doctor and resembled Richard Simmons-type activities without the music or the fagulosity. Anyway, he had lied to us for who knows how long about the colon cancer that was killing him. He entered the hospital at the beginning of January for surgery, and the surgical site quickly became septic, killing him within weeks.

I saw him after his operation and before his death. He was white and papery and suddenly so very old as he lay in the narrow hospital bed. He held my hand and told me that he loved me and that he and my grandmother were very proud of me. One time, not long before this, he said "Sometimes we wonder why you do the things you do, but mostly we wonder how you can be so daring." He died a couple of weeks later, surrounded by his wife and his children and their children while I was back home in LA. 

I flew up to the Vancouver the day before the funeral so fucked up by grief that I couldn't regulate my body temperature. My mum, my dad, my sister and I arrived early to the service and decided to have a drink at some horrible sportsbar with incompetent bartenders, badly poured drinks, and slackjawed locals desultorily poking buttons on video poker machines. One drink somehow took much longer than it should have, and we got to the church just as the service was to begin. We were told that we had only this last chance to "view the deceased," and for some reason I felt compelled to look. My mum came in with me, although I knew she had no desire to look at her father this way. He was so tiny, so pale, and so corpse-like. I'm not sure what a fine example of the embalmer's art is supposed to look like, but this seemed like a sick joke. His face was waxy and skewed in some way, as if put back together along a bad seam. At least we could tell he wasn't there any more.

They wheeled him  out, and the priest proceeded to deliver a sermon touting the benefits of intolerance. He admitted that he didn't know my grandfather very well, and then suggested that we all go and see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." We weren't allowed a eulogy (not enough time, he said, and not in keeping with Catholic funeral tradition), and the wake at my uncle's house afterwards was a pretty grim affair. 

The next morning, I woke up partly deaf in my left ear. The tumor, which had been there for who knows how long, had announced its presence.