In Grief

I was fourteen the first time I had a funeral to go to. My father kept his face still, preserved his posture, tightened and loosened his fists, cracked his neck, exhaled loud as a whoosh of a street sweeper. My mother’s face was pale and still, her eyes half shut, cried out the night before. Little Lola, at eight years old, stood alongside her stoic mother, Tatiana, and watched her father sink into a rectangular hole in the ground. Serge’s brother Pavel was predictably hung over and the only one crying, his enormous shoulders shaking like a tent in heavy rain. That’s how I imagined the five of them as I waited in Serge’s old minivan, looking the other way at rows of gravestones in the flattened grass.

I sat quietly, breathed onto the cold windows, rewound a few years to when Serge, having joined a local basketball league for overweight, middle-aged men, was showing off by attempting to spin a watermelon on his finger. A beautiful watermelon that went crack and splat onto our patio, seeds shooting out like beetles. Lola cried – she’d been looking forward to it all day. She plopped down next to it, stuck her hands in its bright, pink insides, cried even harder. It took Serge close to an hour to hose it all down. He started up the sprinkler, threw Lola onto his back and ran through it at least a dozen times. She squealed and laughed with her eyes closed and her hands wrapped around his neck. Serge was just one of those people who knew how to make things right again.

Tatiana and Lola approached the car first, my mother and father followed, Pavel trailed behind with an unlit cigarette. My mother gave me a nasty look, shook her head, motioned to Lola. That brave little girl can handle it and you can’t, she seemed to say. I never really gave her a reason for staying in the car, just a simple “I can’t,” after each “But you have to.” At the time I wasn’t quite so sure what made me so sick about funerals, made me reject them with my whole body – a glass of whole milk to my lactose intolerance. I suppose I should have left the car, been there for the sake of support as is customary. I wonder what they thought of me – a disrespectful teenager who’d rather not waste time on supporting those in grief, who’d rather text her friends to meet up for a movie or get giddy over uncensored hip-hop. Maybe they thought it bored me to stand and watch and say nothing. I didn’t dare defend myself; it wasn’t a thing to be discussed, just for everyone to silently mull over, to judge me. It all felt very wrong to me, to have the funeral as the last thing to remember about Serge (or anyone, really) – I couldn’t bring myself to see it.

No one says that misery loves company and means it as a good thing; it comes to unsettle us, unhinge us, and we hate to feel it alone because it makes us feel unbearably human, mortal, weak. And so we bask in it, hold hands, pat shoulders, apologize for the lack of adequate words. Death is personal for everyone and therein somehow turns into the least personal thing in the world: when it resides in our proximity, it is instantaneously ours – ours to fear, to imagine unto ourselves. We sit at a funeral and wonder what it must be like to die, what happens afterwards, whether we’ll drown or crumble at the hands of some disease, escape the vision of a drunk driver and at a crosswalk, fail to escape a fire. We are consumed by this – we think of those who’ve wronged us, imagine how they’ll feel if we die, picture the objects of our unrequited love doused in regret. But one can’t dwell too long on this because the truth sets in: you can’t come back from this; the price of seeing people react to your death is, after all, death. And here dying loses its appeal. But the allure is always there – to die without dying, to die and come back, and perhaps, for the more twisted of us – to stage it all and see what happens. We sit, a slew of selfish passengers, and think away without a scrap of guilt because it’s fine to grieve here, to grieve in silence, to keep our thoughts from others. Maybe we really do all grieve equally, maybe I am heartless to despise funerals so much. But I refuse to accept them nonetheless, refute the notion of collecting around a corpse, allowing it – not “him” or “her” – to channel all our darkness, to remind us of our own mortality.

After Serge passed, my father had to get an Ambien prescription. Tatiana sold the house and moved to New York to finish medical school, which she had abandoned for marriage and a child. Last I heard, she was dating a pediatric surgeon who was sleeping with half of the staff. After a while she and my mother ceased to be friends, divided by the jealousy that arose at the presence of my father. The unifying powers of the funeral meant nothing, were sucked dry the day of, lingered vaguely through the remainder of the week. To this day I’m glad I never went, never had to see Serge motionless, pale, descending into a pit of dirt. I still have a t-shirt he gave me – it has a photo of a pickup and says “It’s all about truckin’” which never ceases to make me laugh. I remember the watermelon scattered across our patio in the summer sunset, Lola’s joyous shrieks as the pair of them plunged through the sprinkler, the way he would drink champagne at the close of a party "to sober up."

Grieving the loss of those close to us is one thing – we are left with a palpable gap, obstacles to overcome – but grieving the loss of an acquaintance or a stranger is an entirely different animal.

The night of Jake’s death, every single family in our class got a phone call from Ms. Jenkins or Principal O'Connor. My best friend Marnie and I stayed on the phone for three hours, looking at bird’s-eye-view photos of the accident, his little white car crushed like a balled up piece of paper between the road and the woods. We wondered what to do, whether to relay our condolences to his family, his girlfriend, his friends, whether to write “R.I.P.” in our Facebook status. The next day we shuffled into the assembly hall in silence, listened to the principal tell us how it all happened – no seat belt, music blasting, turkey sub in hand, speeding on that one road behind the school where all the seniors tried to go airborne over a bump as some messed-up rite of passage. He’d been trailing another car of students, who saw him in the rear-view mirror, smacking into a station wagon about to turn into a driveway. A mother, a boy our age, two little girls, the younger of whom broke a finger – the rest of them made it out just fine. The father was pulling in minutes later, and, quickly assured his family was safe, ran to Jake, who was past saving, mangled in the back seat.

We went to class and sat in silence, people who knew him sat with their heads on their desks, asked to be excused, went to his locker. Cookies were laid out in the common room. The clerks in the mail room printed photos of Jake in his bright red soccer uniform until their printers ran out of ink, stapled them to every bulletin board, taped them to lockers, windows, walls. The morning after Jake died, I left my history class to stand in the hallway by his locker, watched his girlfriend collapse on the floor. I recall wanting to cry more than anything. But crying seemed wrong, too, as if only those who were truly close to Jake had the right. I just watched everyone else, held hands with Marnie, knowing full well that both of us were at a loss for adequate emotions.

The next day buses lined the parking lot, ready to take everyone to the service – a spot for single student and teacher in the Upper School. I didn’t know one thing about Jake except for that he wore a diamond stud in each ear, loved Donnie Darko and took his girlfriend’s virginity on the varsity soccer field. His English teacher read a poem he wrote for class. It was awful, but everybody cried and deemed him a literary prodigy. I looked around at faces of people who were and weren’t close to him. I guess we were all close, in a sense – a hundred or so people per class, down to ninety-eight in ours after two kids lost their scholarships and went to public school. We all knew each other’s names, who was friends with whom, who kissed at the Halloween dance. I hadn’t had a single class with Jake, knew him peripherally, and it filled me with a ridiculous amount of guilt – it felt completely morally wrong to be there. But I had no choice, it would have been disrespectful not to – the same way it was disrespectful to sit in the car at Serge’s funeral. But I could handle my family’s disappointment more so than that of the whole student body – I didn’t want to be that one girl who didn’t go. No one cried too loudly; we just gaped at one another, realizing the frailty of life despite our youth, feeling sorry for his parents, who had no other children, and wondering if we’d have any homework due that week.

Throughout the service I was anxious, restless, hating the small town church we all squeezed into, hating the people who, like me, didn’t know Jake at all, weren’t his friends, barely acquaintances. I was so unbelievably angry, outraged at Jake’s stupidity. Who drives without a goddamned seat belt? As far as danger goes, it’s not “cool” the way it can be “cool” to have a cigarette. How proudly, upon turning eighteen (something Jake never got to do) we’d all head over to Wawa during lunch to buy a pack, flash our license, feel adult. We all speed on occasion, but who’s dumb enough to do that with no seat belt and while eating and blasting music? As reckless as it gets. What if he had killed someone in the other car? It was as if he had to die to demonstrate that innocence trumps teenage recklessness.

On Jake’s locker, someone wrote “An Angel Got His Wings,” which became the caption for Jake’s page in the yearbook. Suddenly, upon dying, Jake had become angelic, someone for the rest of us to look up to – a soccer star, a poet, a perfect friend, a perfect son. It unsettled me to think that someone need be idolized upon being gone – as if we’re putting on a show to demonstrate the way we see the best in people, as if we’re eaten at by the guilt of not being as close or as kind to someone as we could have been, tormented by our own shortfall to the point of being able to produce words of pity and praise alone. It would seem cruel to suggest the caption for his yearbook page to be “Be careful” or “Drive safely” but those seem infinitely more relevant and sane. Perhaps we’ve learned his lesson, are all more careful when we drive, but I have my doubts. We used the death as our own vehicle for gloom, for deep thought. I’d like to think it matured the lot of us, but within a short time we were all back to stupid pranks and dares and recklessness.

The night of the funeral I went home and thought about the father, who immediately ran to save Jake but couldn’t and, finally, I cried. That was something to collect ourselves around, to dwell on – a man’s heroic practicality, something in the present, something to live up to, to thank the stars for.

It has struck me as odd the way death can string together strangers, negate all lengths of distance, serve as a magnet – a multiplier, even – for sadness. I suppose there’s nothing odd about it, really – it’s just one of those things the whole world has to share – we arrive, breathe, eat and all leave. Why not, when we’re presented with an opportunity to share, let such a thing bring us together?

Last summer my grandfather passed away just two weeks before we were supposed to fly out to Moscow and visit him. My father packed his bags nervously, called U.S. Airways, took the next flight. Everyone knew – it was in the papers, on the television. Everyone called at odd hours of the night, had forgotten the time difference. He was everyone’s to share – a public figure whose portrait, always with a pipe, was everyone’s to know, to remember. My father dreaded the funeral, hated formalities just as his father had, hated all the hands he’d have to shake – professors, politicians, maybe even Medvedev. A telegram arrived from Putin three days later – his “condolences to Viacheslav Glazychev’s wife Elena, their son Leonid, and his granddaughter Sonia.” Elena was my grandfather’s second wife, not my father’s mother. But what did it matter when we had received a telegram from Vladimir Putin himself?

Elena never spoke to anyone in the family, and, upon seeing me for the first time ever that summer said “Hmm…what an odd combination of genes” and “You’re shorter than I expected.” I was at once the best and worst thing for her grieving process – she saw in me her nonexistent motherhood, a thing that never bothered her before, perhaps, but suddenly was relevant. But in me was an inevitable part of him, and for that, she was thankful. She had alienated everyone, lived the life of a hermit. My mother says it was because she was so beautiful when she was young, she wanted to be remembered as her youthful self, didn’t want the world to see her age, to see her gain weight, to hear her struggle with an inhaler. My father told me the two of them, having had very minimal contact prior to the funeral, bonded quite well in their mutual distaste for official procedure, the impersonal routine that someone with no will and ties to academia and politics was subject to. At the viewing, Elena approached the open casket, gazed briefly inside, whispered “That’s not him” to my father and walked away while hundreds of attendees offered endless condolences as she went.

So who, then, was the funeral for, if not for those closest to my grandfather? What purpose does a formal framework serve in regard to grief, to death? We each let go in different ways – we cry or don’t, make casseroles, consume them ravenously or stick them indefinitely into a fridge. If we don’t want to dress in black or stand and stare blankly at the empty vessel of a former loved one, we should not. And we should not feel guilty for not wanting what has been culturally prescribed to us as adequate closure. Let us each decide what to write into the end credits: perhaps we want to write “The End” redundantly in block letters; or maybe we would like to fade into a lush landscape, a sunset; or, perhaps, we simply want to play the highlight reel on repeat.

Greta

When, in young adulthood, I find myself restlessly dissatisfied, there is little that is quite as indulgent as the slow retracing of my roots and revisiting of the traumas of the past, which is, of course, inevitably ingrained in my present character. My mother, a thriving therapist, taught me all too well the effects of childhood trauma. This is where Greta comes in.

I should speak of Greta in the past tense, given that her life began and ended within the bounds of my single-digit childhood. However, Greta recently resurfaced in a strange and somewhat disturbing revival.

I should clarify: this elusive Greta character is not a ghost.

I suppose since this is a story about beginnings I will begin just there: Greta was born in the Moscow countryside – the 73rd Kilometer, to be exact – in the heat of summer and the confines of the kitchen house, where we were frying chicken thighs and mashing potatoes with enough butter to turn them gold. My grandfather, having built the main house with his bare hands, due to some act of defiance or miscalculation, did not make room for a kitchen. And thus was erected the kitchen house – a square, one-floor wooden structure with a veranda intended for sitting but used for hanging laundry in case it rained.

In the mornings, the downstairs floorboards of the main house began to creak with my grandmother’s sleepy waddle to the outhouse. Within ten minutes, my grandfather and I would be seated at the kitchen table, waiting for hot porridge or an occasional omelet when my grandmother forgot about her husband’s high cholesterol.

At the ripe age of five, I had reached an inexplicable surge in annoying behavior. I had suddenly become a horrendous little conglomeration of neediness, rudeness and impatience. On the day Greta came into existence, I was very insecure about a haircut my grandfather had given me – rightly so, might I add – and had a headache from being in the sun for too long. Earlier that morning, my mother, who came by for a rare weekend visit, had attempted to console me about the misfortune which had descended on my head by way of dull, slightly rusty large scissors, by drenching my head in lemon juice and telling me to run about in the sun and wait for gorgeous highlights. Hair always grows out, she reminded me.

My mother and my grandmother shuffled around the wooden floorboards of the kitchen with feminine purpose. I asked to mash the potatoes, I asked to core and peel apples for juice, I asked to watch water boil, but all in vain.
 

"Two women in the kitchen is already one too many, and this kitchen isn't nearly big enough to have you scurrying around at our feet!" my mother barked, and waved me away with a frustrated sigh.

The incredible burden of feeling useless quickly put me in a blind rage and I circled the kitchen, fuming and scoffing, pursing my lips, narrowing my eyes. I tugged at my grandmother’s apron, tried to snatch a wooden spoon from my mother’s hand, stuck my feet in front of theirs, asked questions I knew the answers to, even threatened to run away.

With a quick turn, my grandmother left the stove and faced me.

“Who are you?” she asked, leaning toward me, hands on hips, right brow raised.

“Me?"

“Yes, you." 

"It's me. What do you mean? It's me, Sonia!"

“I figured you might say that.” She glanced toward my mother, who looked equally suspicious of my identity. “I, however, am certain that you are not, in fact, my lovely little granddaughter.”

“Yes I aaaam,” I pleaded. But I was no longer sure.

“No, little girl. You are not Sonia. You are Greta," she said in a near-growl, "and I'm afraid that Greta is just not welcome in this house.”

“What!? Why not!”

“Well, Greta isn’t a very nice person. She disrespects her elders, she whines all the time, she makes a mess of a perfectly lovely dinner preparation. She’ll simply have to go.” With this, she nudged me toward the door.

I was baffled. I felt Greta’s horribleness running through my veins, plaguing me,distorting me, locking little Sonia up in the deepest centers of the body she used to so easily call her own.

Greta and I struggled in our chaotic internal brawl on the veranda. We questioned each other in the clean maze of dripping pillowcases and sheets, secured with wooden clothespins along a thin laundry line. Greta was evil, that much I knew, but she was mine and I was hers and we were in a deadly tangle of conflicting authority. Everything I thought sent Greta into an angry, spiteful tirade. She was relentless! Greta mocked me, Greta yelled out curses! And worst of all, I couldn't even tell my mother or grandmother about it!

Greta had, in minutes, sucked me dry. I couldn't argue, could hardly think. And suddenly, after my plunge into an oblivion of the lost and soulless, I was left alone, my hands mindlessly clasped around my grandmother's beige brassiere. Greta was gone.

I walked into the kitchen, smiling so wide that my cheekbones nearly forced my eyes shut.

“She’s gone!” I proclaimed.

“Are you sure?” my mother asked, looking me up and down.

“Yes, yes, yes! I am – yes. I am sure.” I smiled again to confirm Greta’s disappearance.

“Alright then, come and add some butter to these potatoes. I haven’t had a taste, but by the look of them – ”

She paused, lowered into a squat, cupped my face between her hands and looked me right in the eyes. “You're sure you aren’t Greta?”

“Mom! It’s me! Me! Sonia!”

“Yes, well, I suppose we’ll just have to see if she blows her cover. Hard to tell if it’s just Greta being sly or if it’s really our Sonia,” she said.

“I know, Mama, I know.”

Despite her disappearing act that summer, Greta did visit on occasion for several years to come. She once hid in an empty box on the veranda for so long that everyone thought she was lost in the woods! And she was around in ’97 for what my mother called an “extended attention-seeking phase”, during which Greta occupied herself with unplugging phones mid-call, filling near-empty toothpaste tubes with water.

In 1999, Greta vanished.

Now, I sit across from Dr. Cole and an unopened box of tissues and watch him scribble with his left hand. He peers at me over his little rectangular glasses and hands me a lithium prescription. "It’ll help with the ups and the downs."

I tell Dr. Cole again that I don’t feel like myself anymore. He nods.

“You’ll feel better, honey, you will. Your brain chemistry's a little misaligned, that's all. Nothing we can't fix.” He sounds sweet, sympathetic, paternal.

“I trust your judgment, Dr. Cole, I do...but I don’t think it’s chemistry.”

“I see. What, then?”

“That bitch Greta is back.”

Agatha

She was a sleek, dark kitty named after my grandmother’s no-guilt favorite – Agatha Christie. Found in the winter of 1990, Agatha was hidden in the ground floor utility closet, next to where the residents retrieved their mail. Agatha had two sisters and three brothers, and my grandmother had originally intended to give them all away. She stuffed them all into the front of her large fur coat and gave them away for nothing at the outdoor market by the metro. Agatha was the last one left, warm and still against her chest, little heart beating out quick thumps as she slept. Though my grandfather would be angry with her, she was going to keep this one and that was that.

Agatha loved, more than anything else, to sunbathe on the window sill. When my grandmother propped open the window on an especially warm day, she would climb out and wedge herself into the rain gutter, slowly opening and closing her eyes in a bed of dead leaves and debris from past seasons, and stayed there until my grandmother tapped her bowl to signal a feeding.

Agatha often had uncontrollable bouts of energy and ran like mad around the apartment, hopping from the window sill in the living room, shooting down the hall, past opening doors, my grandfather’s dragging feet, into the kitchen, and onto the kitchen window sill. It was important to shut all the windows during this time, or else Agatha would fly right out of them and into the street. Which happened once and resulted in my grandmother getting a stern talking-to from a few neighbors about animal abuse.

Agatha and I never quite got along, which was mostly my fault, I was quite the sadistic young child who occasionally attempted to ride her like a horse to dispel excess energy before bedtime. Her fur was long and soft, and fell like pine needles from her narrow spine in a blue-black slant. Perhaps I was jealous of Agatha’s seniority – our half-year age gap and her infinitely wise face made me feel inadequate.

When Agatha got especially angry with me – for a less-than-gentle tug on her tail or another effort to ride her through the apartment like an entitled royal – she chased me maniacally from room to room until I managed to climb onto the back of the living room sofa (which she knew was off limits), clinging to the wall for support, red from sheer terror and tears. She crouched on the carpet, yellow eyes fixed on my feet, waiting for a clumsy misstep to drop me to the cushions, just low enough to reach with an outstretched paw.  “Agatha, I'm s sorry! I promise won’t do it anymore! I promise! Please forgive me, Agatha!” I yelled time and time again. My grandmother would lower the volume on the television, cease her dish washing, kneading or simmering, and storm in, armed with a wet rag and a clenched jaw, and feign hits at poor, wronged Agatha, who retreated to the master bedroom and hid under the bed until the next day.

I hadn’t always been out of Agatha’s good graces, and while I can’t remember the glory days of our cat-grandchild relationship. Apparently when I was about a year old and eating dinner in my high chair, I rocked a bit too hard and the chair began to fall. My grandfather, who was, at the time, quite agile, lunged for the chair. Agatha, however, thought my grandfather was lunging in attack, not to save me, and she jumped at him and bit his hand straight through. Her teeth met right in the middle of his palm, my grandmother recalls. And there they lay – my grandfather on the floor, Agatha latched onto his hand, and me and my high chair on top of both of them. That damned crazy, stupid cat, my grandmother still says with pity.

When Agatha died of either her ruined kidneys, which my mother blames on cat food, or simply old age, she was writhing on the floor for a whole day. My parents and I were long gone by then, across the ocean, but my grandmother called us once an hour with grim updates. Agatha wouldn’t let anyone hold her and suffered as quietly as she could by herself while my grandmother recited Pasternak through her tears and my grandfather watched TV in the kitchen with the door closed.

My grandfather vetoed getting another cat after seeing my grandmother in such grief. He did, however, plant a pine tree in the yard in her memory. It is nearly eight feet tall now.

Once Upon a Teenager

Bad hair days. Genuine, crippling grief and uncontrollable shame. So many bad hair days. Riding the bus home after detention and thinking I need a beer but not knowing what that tastes like. Nellie threatening to chug a container of Miracle-Gro if we dared to speak – I’ll do it, try me. She's in PR now. Hundreds of candy wrappers in the desk drawer. A lock on the pantry. Éclairs as kryptonite. Sticky, guilty, chocolate-coated fingers turning the pantry doorknob. Mothers annoyed and vacuuming and scowling after sleepovers, praising your polite girlfriends (or telling you to get better ones, whose parents aren't divorced, whose brothers aren't pot dealers). Password-protection at every corner. We still watched porn. Forged signatures. A crumpled C+ at the bottom of a backpack. Mothers always finding everything. (Grounded, grounded, grounded.) Mothers crying about all that intellectual promise. About all these inexcusable attitudes. About aggression, from the other side of the family, of course. Throwing shit and slamming doors and crying and yelling. Not coming home on the bus. Backseat of your cousin’s convertible, instead. On the lawn scoring secondhand smoke. Later – betrayal, what else? Dating each other’s crushes. Called to the principal for fighting in the hallway. Off with a warning. Later – pictures ripped, clothes returned. Later – no one to sit with at lunch. Need new friends. Who will come to the party now? Feel too old to trick-or-treat. Is this adulthood?