The first thing I heard on my alarm radio this morning was that Natasha Richardson had died of complications from a skiing accident. I had been asleep for five hours and it was still dark outside when the blare of the radio announcer reported her death. From that morose news he transitioned seamlessly into The Supremes.
I've never been in love with someone who died. The first dead body I ever saw was my grandmother's. She died in a small mobile home near my parents' house. Before the people from the hospital came to pick her up my dad asked me to come down and see her one last time. I had been with her two days earlier, when she was still alive. She was tired and in pain. She had a stress fracture in her spine that was a constant struggle for her.
I was scared walking into the bedroom of her flimsy little shack. The walls were thin and I could feel the floor bending underneath me. I was filled with superstition. A mobile of ghoulish imagery rotated around my mind: wrinkled and dangling flesh, toothless mouths, animalistic grunting. I was afraid my frail little grandmother, who stopped and pointed every time she saw a bird and made farting noises when she got up after dinner, had turned into some gnarled distortion of her former self. I was afraid she had been transformed into a monster.
Instead, she was just empty. Her face was neutral and quiet. Her body was lying flat along the plastic lined twin bed that she slept on. My father had folded her arms across her chest and put a few small flowers in her hand. She was the same as she had been, just a little bit colder and stiller. She was gone, but she was still there in almost every way that I had come to recognize her by.
Last April, I spent the weekend with the woman I was seeing. She was leaving in a week and we would have to stop seeing each other. The sun was starting to go down and the evening wind was gusting. We had spent the afternoon having sex but were going out separately that night. She had a going away party with some friends I didn't know and I had promised my boss I would come to his house warming party.
I remember lying next to her in bed, the daylight slowly graying and losing heat around us. I felt her warm, naked body against the length of my own body; a little envelope of heat where they met. Her head lay in the crook of my arm and when I looked at her face the first thing I could see was the curly line of small hairs running in an unkempt arc across her forehead. Her apartment was lined with stacks of half-filled moving boxes. We were drinking frozen sake from red plastic cups.
We went up onto the roof of her building to smoke. I put on one of her sheer silk robes, spilling over with paisley. We sat against the waist-high ledge that guarded the front of the building, looking south on the city. Everything was white and twinkling in the heatless light. The wind felt cold and kept blowing our robes open.
I put my arm around her and pulled her against me. I was shivering a little from the cold and the slushy sake. I teased her about something. She smiled and leaned in closer to me, pressing her arms up to her chest to hold in the heat. I felt like a ghost or an angel. Something inside me had switched over, a small floodgate was gushing out happiness. There was no urgency, everything was serene and far away, a composed miniature. It was cold, but the coldness kept pushing me closer to her.
And then—
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