Normal Gets You Nowhere (13 page)

The morning after we lowered him into the ground, I was a little shocked to find her standing in the kitchen, impeccably dressed from head to toe. It was the day the cannolis and pepperoni finally stopped flowing and the relatives left, and there she was, looking like Jackie Kennedy going to a luncheon.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“I’m going to see Billy,” she replied.

She hadn’t realized that the viewing was over—she thought maybe she could go see him in the casket again. I knew right then that if my grandmother could get up every day for the rest of her life and go visit her dead husband, she would. She was all dressed up like a sixteen-year-old girl waiting for her new boyfriend to take her to the dance.

Even then, I meant what I said, so I showed up for my grandmother. In fact, I moved into the upstairs apartment in her two-family home in Syracuse. When you are in your truth, good things happen to you. So although I was technically looking after my grandmother, the laws of reciprocity were in full effect. I now had cable TV, a chef downstairs, and a human alarm clock who would wake me up for school by simply banging on her ceiling with a broom! On top of that, I had my grandmother’s love.

I don’t want you to think of my grandmother as a frail, incompetent human being. She was actually very strategic. There were lottery tickets to buy and specials at discount grocery stores to take advantage of. One day when she was attacked by a purse thief while strolling to the bank to deposit her Social Security check, she promptly slugged him with her purse and screamed for help! Luckily, the police apprehended her attacker.

This was a great day for my grandmother, most of whose excitement came from naps, cable TV, and gossip she received while attending her friends’ funerals. (At one point she said to me, “It’s no fun getting old. The only time you see your friends is at funerals.”) She went to court, and when the defense attorney questioned her ability to ID the suspect, she scolded him: “Now you listen to me, young man, when someone tries to steal your bag with your Social Security check in it, you’re going to remember his face!” This performance landed her a feature in the
Syracuse Herald-Journal.

Years later, after I’d moved out of my grandmother’s and started my business in New York, there was a period of eighteen hours that no one could reach my grandmother—which, in Italian American life, is a long time to not be in contact with your mother. My mother called my grandmother’s friends and ultimately the police, who busted down her mahogany door and found her sleeping in a white nightgown, her arms crossed. At first, they weren’t sure she was breathing. Of course, she shot straight up in bed and demanded, “What are you doing in my home?” For months afterward, she made it really clear that you’d better not try to take a nap in the middle of the day in this family, because they’d try to bury you!

There eventually came a time when it was no longer a false alarm, and my grandmother was about to pass. My mother and I decided to meet in Syracuse and be with her as her death coaches—just as I’d later hire a birth coach for the arrival of my daughter. So there we were, three generations of women, the younger two encouraging the oldest to push and move, not to welcome a new soul to the planet, but to see one on to its next phase.

I’d hastily stuffed my rental car with file folders as I left New York, and I proceeded to run People’s Revolution North out of my grandmother’s over-the-top dining room for three weeks, surrounded by bright turquoise walls, a cream yellow Louis XIV table, and an imposing, crystal-encrusted wall piece that was somewhere between a sconce and a chandelier. In the meantime, more cannolis and cold cuts arrived, and with them, relatives.

For days, I bathed and fed my grandmother, who had since my grandfather’s death been living mostly in his bathrobe, which she tied with one of his neckties or a hot pink curtain tassel (it was her version of a smoking jacket). At one point while I was bathing her, I saw that her breasts looked like thin, flattened fruit roll-ups.

“Grandma,” I said, “we’re going to have to get you a boob job!”

“Honey,” she replied, “these boobies fed your mother, and they made beautiful love to your grandfather for fifty-four years. I don’t need them anymore.”

Forget Keats, forget Emerson; this was one of the most poetic and beautiful things I have ever heard, and from a woman who’d never graduated from high school!

Just so you know, most people choose to die alone. When my grandmother passed, I was sitting in the dining room. My Uncle John, standing in her doorway, saw her leave her body and came to tell us. My mother recoiled and was adamant that she didn’t want to see her mother in that state, and in fact she didn’t want to leave the kitchen at all, so I immediately called my mother’s cousin Donny, owner of Pirro Brothers Funeral Home, and arranged everything. Sometimes when we’re adults, we need to allow our parents the opportunity to be children—we need to become the parent of our parent. Yes, it’s moments like these when it’s time for you to suck it up and take care of shit.

When the end came for my grandmother, I was a different person than I had been when my grandfather passed away sixteen years earlier. I had significant life experience and, more important, my belief system was in place. I’d lost several friends, had a couple abortions; I’d met The Mother, discovered Eastern meditation, and knew that death was not the end, but merely a snap, blink, and great transition—a leapfrog jump into the known of the unknown, if you know what I mean.

As I watched my cousin Donny’s men carry my grandmother out of the house in a splendid purple velvet body bag toward his new Mercedes hearse (being family, we got the VIP funeral treatment), I waved good-bye to her from the same window where she’d stood and waved good-bye to me for thirty years, tearing up each time like she’d never see me again. I remember that moment like it was yesterday.

It’s times like these when tribal life and ritual—these concepts that humanity, despite ten thousand years and countless different civilizations, religions, wars, and scientific advances, still holds on to, such as taking care of the dying and discarding our loved ones’ bodies—bestow teachings we simply can’t explain, not in English or even French or Sanskrit. People can write millions of books analyzing their ideas about life and death, but we can only talk
around
the most profound moments; we cannot speak
of
them. I didn’t know at the time that my mother would become a grandmother herself within a year, since I would soon get pregnant with Ava as I weathered my second divorce. But I did know, as my mother did also, that she was now next in line—that we’d all taken one more step down the plank.

I had the foresight to perform one last act of service for my grandmother. I marched over to the funeral home, where I demanded to meet the hair and makeup people and proceeded to terrorize them. “Do you hear me,
no orange blush
!” I insisted. “I do
not
want to see any teased hair!” You have to understand, in upstate New York you have to be very specific about this. I demanded a nice simple chignon. Then I brought fabric swatches to the funeral home to ensure my grandmother’s final look matched her coffin lining. At one point my husband, who had come up right after she died, took me aside.

“This is not a
Vogue
shoot,” he said.

“Oh, I agree,” I said. “This is something far more important. It’s my grandmother’s last visual moment on this planet, and I want to make sure she goes out looking great.”

S.O.U.L.: Sparks of Understanding and Love

I would like to tell you that my grandmother’s death was the last hard-hitting death I experienced, but it wasn’t. In 2010, I buried my father. I’d heard mixed reviews on what it was like to lose a parent. In yoga, to not have parents is to be free. But it’s still undeniably disconcerting to go back to the house you were raised in as you get older and see your parents with new eyes. When you’re young, your parents are everything: your government, your God, your food supply, your bank. Over time, they become actual complex and fallible human beings, which can seem very confusing and very Dada (pardon the pun). It’s almost as if the Wizard of Oz becomes the Lion or the Tin Man.

In the last years of his life, my father went from being the omnipotent, all-knowing Leland Level Blanding III, the person who took care of everything, to the person who needed taking care of himself. Instead of calling the shots, he was now
getting
them, from my mother, who did not take her marriage vows lightly. (Another word to the wise: you’d better be really nice to your partner when you’re young, because if you’re not, your later years will be hell!) But one thing I also realized at my father’s death is that people are people. We might call them mother, father, brother, sister, lover, husband, or enemy, but at the end everyone’s just a person, a fleeting incarnation of a soul that will someday disappear as suddenly as it arrived. One way to think of a soul is as a Spark of Understanding and Love.

All of us are sparks, and the whole global universe is a fireworks show. How does your spark manifest in the world? Is it progressive or effective? And what will it leave on this earth when it has moved on?

It could be a child, a company, a book, a piece of legislation you wrote, some other legacy of your creativity, or maybe just the granddaughter who grows up feeling loved and special because you took the time to call her every day. My father was one of six children. Placed in an orphanage at the age of nine, he was a noncompliant, bad-ass, truth-telling punk (sound familiar?). But he ultimately became a loving husband, and his spark with my mother produced three children. Here was a man who had no reason in the world to hope for a relationship—but my parents always loved each other as much, if not more, than they loved us kids, and they always had a healthy sex life. Ultimately, my dad got a lot right. I realized at his death that if you die in your own, noninstitutional pajamas, whether they’re designer silks or Target flannel, in your own bed, whether it’s a hospital bed or the most expensive Swedish mattress, and you have at least one person who loves you and is not being paid to be there, then this is a high death. No matter how rich or loved you are, there is probably no better way to go.

For me, the experience of losing my father started when I was invited to speak at the Savannah College of Art and Design, a very prestigious art school in Georgia. As my visit to Georgia drew near and the demands on my time intensified, I considered canceling. Why had I agreed to give two talks in Georgia—one at the Savannah campus, and one at the Atlanta campus—for free?

Not long before I was due to depart, I got a phone call from my mom. My dad, who had been battling emphysema for eight years, had taken a turn for the worse; they weren’t sure he’d live through the day. All of a sudden it made sense. I’d psychically agreed to take this terribly inconvenient trip to Georgia, so I’d be a quick one-hour plane flight from Virginia when my father’s time came. On the Saturday night before my trip, I called him to tell him I felt like I may not see him again.

“You know what, honey?” he said. “I’m proud of you. Your show is great, your book is great.”

He sounded upbeat and lucid. Then seventy-four, he’d been bedridden since Ava’s birth in 2002, when he’d made it to New York to meet his newborn granddaughter. Soon after that he’d been given three months to live, and we’d dutifully attended his “last” Christmas for seven years, shipping Ava’s presents down to Virginia and then hauling them back up to New York. Through it all, my mother, Beverly, had been his devoted caretaker, even though it basically confined her to the house too. (FYI, you know how they say, “Smoking kills”? Well, they mean it.)

When I left my office to catch my plane, I told my staff, “You watch. I’m going to get to Georgia and my dad’s going to die.”

The morning of my talk in Savannah, I was told that 475 students were gathered to hear me speak, one of the best turnouts ever for a speaker. As I sat at a faculty lunch before the talk, my mother called again.
Here we go
, I thought. “Your father isn’t doing well,” she said. I told her there were nearly 500 kids waiting to hear me speak. “Do what you have to do, and call us afterwards,” she said.

I walked onto the stage. I have no memory of what I said. I just remember being conscious that my dreams were attacking me. That’s the weird thing about dreams—as soon as you start to manifest them, they turn on you, forcing you to rebuild and fortify your belief systems.
*
By now I had so many of the things I’d always wanted, both professionally and personally. But all these things I teach, about the soul, about the physical body being just a cage, were about to be
really
tested. Did I fucking believe in all of my shteeze?

I finished speaking and called my dad. “You need to go,” he said, urging me not to cancel my second talk in Atlanta. “Finish your work. I’ll see you soon.”

I did as he said and then caught the next flight for Virginia. When I arrived at my parents’ condo, I offered to take the night shift. For nine days, I sat up with my father, hoping he would die. I’ll be honest. I wanted my father to die when I was sitting with him, since my grandparents hadn’t. I even contemplated killing him myself. It would’ve been
so
easy to step on the oxygen tube that was keeping him alive. When you’re dying of emphysema, you can’t breathe on your own. And it seemed like the right and loving thing to do. His eyes were silver, he was no longer communicating, and I’m sure that nurses and loved ones do it all the time.

But I stopped myself, because, despite what I could see happening on the outside, I had no idea what was going on in his inner world. I didn’t know if he was still processing things or why he was still here. (I could also see myself, on my future talk show, accidentally confessing my crime or, worse yet, having a psychic as a guest. I could even see the headlines: “Talk Show Host Admits Killing Her Father!”) Instead, I just sat there and watched and listened as death stalked him and he said funny things like, “Sergeant Blanding. Sergeant Blanding, reporting for duty!” (He’d served in the Korean War.) When I started laughing, he said, “Miss, if you don’t mind me saying so, you have an infectious laugh and wonderful breasts.” I mean, I’ve always wanted to talk to guys about my boobs, but my dad has never been one of them.