Goodbye Gunka

My first memories of my grandfather are of building a lighthouse in the middle of a forest. Typing this sentence, my whole life makes sense. I am not the first of my line to lead an absurd life or to giggle at existence’s unwillingness to make sense, to develop an affection for the irrational and inappropriate. It’s in my blood, just like many other bewildering traits and mutations: my resistance to anesthesia, for example, or my father and his brother’s penchant for saving people from burning buildings despite their both lacking formal firefighting expertise. I was around four when this memory formed. My sister was even younger, and couldn’t pronounce ‘grandpa’; it came out as ‘Gunka’ once, and the name stuck forever. I’m told that I’d met him before that, but apparently my long-term memory deemed our interactions unmemorable until he showed me how to use a tractor; a four-year-old’s dream, that he nonchalantly granted. Perhaps being an artist gave him some understanding of children’s dreams.

He owned acres of land in Vermont, and he populated the forest his cabin was nestled into with many wooden structures. When I visited him, the lighthouse was one of many such installations: there was one half of Noah’s ark, protruding from the soil as if it had just sunk a few months ago, one in the shape of an egg, and a small wooden cabin equipped with an indoor waterfall. I remember him fitting me for a bob-the builder type tool belt—it was like a giant utility diaper on me, and I loved it so much. I stuck a hammer in the belt, which he taught me how to use—I learned to line the nail up and slam it into the wood that would become a lighthouse, nestled between the trees of the endless forest surrounding his cabin. I learned a lot about life on that vacation to my grandfather’s house in the forest. He had two dogs, creatures I was unfamiliar with. They were so much bigger than me, but friendly, in that they did not eat me. Over a few days, I learned to love them to the point that I began waking up at sunrise just so I could walk them as early as possible. Lovely poodles, almost a species onto their own, trotting through the Vermont forest, trailed by me, just beaming at my good fortune, and very aware of their teeth. I learned how wood is stretched to make a boat, that bears live near people sometimes, that forests are some of the most beautiful places on this entire planet, and that embracing the absurd is a prudent attitude, given that life is under no obligation to make itself sensical to us.

Twenty years later, I got a phone call at an inopportune time. I was stoned, laughing, and wiping tears off my face. A friend and I had just finished doing one of our favorite things to do when we are in such a state: gazing into each other’s eyes until it feels like our nervous systems have been hotwired together. It was my father calling, so I picked up. Hey Ta, I said—I’m a bit busy right now, is it important? Yes, he said. It is important. Your grandfather is dying, can you come with me to say goodbye to him?We took the first available red-eye to Florida, where my grandfather lived during the winter. It was sabbath by the time we could visit him, and my father is a rabbi, so we walked to his father’s house. The walk provided an almost oppressive series of signs and portents. To get from our hotel to my grandfather’s house, we passed by a historic graveyard. On our way back, we passed a church with a sign that said: “celebrate your father’s love.”

My grandfather’s house provided some relief from such sense. It was surrounded by a garden he filled with strange flesh-like plants and decorated with a tiny bridge built across the narrowest swimming pool I’ve ever seen. The foyer was littered with the potpourri of my grandfather's mind. A pair of remote control cars on a bottom shelf, one fitted with a GoPro rig, the other with a small flat felted platform. On a table were two prints of lipsticked women’s lips, with a light-sensing mechanism that made them sing harmonies at anyone who passed them by. Apparently they were part of a larger set, that stretched through an entire art gallery at one point.

This strangeness was what I had come to expect. So, when I entered the master bedroom and witnessed the state of my grandfather, the bizarreness of it all was almost a relief to me, even as it stabbed at my heart and made me cry. My grandfather’s tongue had turned blue from the opiates, he was wearing a diaper, and he was sucking water from a sponge held by Jamaican hospice nurses dressed in white. I looked intently into his eyes. I told him they were beautiful and he, in a sudden flash of rare clarity and coherence, through the muck of dementia (by the way, fuck dementia,) he said “No, you’re confused, I know exactly what is happening to my body.” to which I replied, “I know what is happening to your body. But your eyes are still beautiful, Gunka”. I watched him consider this for a while, and then he replied, “Thank you”. 

He was half gone already. His once athletic body was now thin, frail; his fascinating mind was being eaten away by Louie Body Dementia. He himself hadn’t eaten in days. But he was still my grandfather. I told him about how much Vermont meant to me. I thanked him for helping fund the purchase of my first camera. This act of generosity truly changed my life. My most cherished memories from high school, a truly awful time, are of clutching that camera to my chest as I chased deer and coyotes in the hills that surrounded my campus. The skills honed then allowed me to pay for my own food as I had existential crises after crises on the other side of the world. When I decided to abandon my life plans and start over again, he was one of the first family members I told, and his approval meant the world to me. I felt bonded to him through art- my favorite photo of him is of him taking a photo (of a dancer, whom I met later). We told him that we’d help maintain his forest art- my uncle told him he planned to move a recent sculpture—a concrete snowman—into the middle of the Californian desert, which he responded to with hearty, painful laughter. We spent a few days like this, cherishing the occasional hand squeeze and soft kiss he was able to give, laughing sadly as he lost his mind, trying to interpret the half-wise half-gibberish sentences he’d force through his dying body, shmying around his house, waiting.

He kept more words in the house than I expected. Some were his—I wasn’t aware he wrote a book until it was in my hand—the cover depicted a skeleton, and it was full of ideas about how ideas aren’t enough; art must be embodied, and an intelligent artist must be smart enough to know that his art must war against his intellect. His library could have been mine, or perhaps my little brother’s... I ran my fingers along the spines, across names like Oliver Sacks, Wittgenstein, and Oliver Sacks again. A book on Hebrew poetry from 14th-century Spain- a copy of which he had sent to me years ago. These authors, the words, these ideas—all had been a central part of my shtick for the past half a decade, and now I was questioning whether I had ever chosen it. As I did, visitors arrived. They made a memorable entrance—barefoot, carrying a toddler, gliding—they moved through the house differently than my family: swaying, rocking, lightly hopping. They introduced themselves and informed me that they were professional dancers, artists my grandfather had photographed. Ok, I thought, it’s getting a bit heavy-handed now, Gunka.

As the days went by, it got harder and harder to see him in the state he was in. Some well-meaning nurse had shaved his 50-year-old mustache off, which rattled all of us. He still hadn’t eaten and barely drank, and we were honestly dumbfounded that he was still alive. We upped the morphine, which was on top of an already strong fentanyl dose regimen, and stayed by his side. At one point he asked us not to let him suffer, which hurt badly. Enough to make me wish I could help him along, with words or with drugs or with or even my hands. I’ve never truly contemplated ending a life before, and it was a last gift of absurdity from him that it should be completely motivated out of love. To be human is to be a contradiction.

After a few days of this, we began to let our guard down. The old man was clearly refusing to die, despite his body being pumped full of fentanyl and morphine, his lungs full of fluid. I was relaxing with my sister in the nearby hotel when I got a text from my father. “Come here now”. Was this ‘the text’? We weren't sure, but hurried downstairs and hailed a taxi. When we got to the house I saw my father's rental car parked lopsidedly by the gate, doors open, hazards still blinking. It was indeed the text. My aunt sat in the foyer, face ashen. “He’s dying,” she said as we rushed in.

We held him lightly and said our goodbyes. I sobbed silently. I could feel his body fighting underneath the sheets, holding on. We were done holding on, and we wanted to share that freedom with him. We played his favorite music—Waylon Jennings—by playing it on an iPhone on his death pillow. It was my atheist uncle, not my rabbi father, who gave him his ‘last rites'. It went something like this: “Pop, you can let go now. We love you and you can let go. You are about to embark on a wonderful adventure. I am going to open up a door for you, and you can walk right through it, ok dad? Ok. the door is open…”My grandfather’s gurgly breath slowed, and his body relaxed. Within seconds of these words, he took his last breath. A last cough as the remaining air escaped, and that was it. Except it wasn't, after a fatally intense silence, he inhaled again, exhaled and another inhale—a death chortle. My father conjured some words, a question of sorts, phrased like a statement—“he's back”. But he wasn't. I learned that day that you can breathe when you're dead. My father brushed his fingers over his father’s eyes, closing them forever. We couldn't get his jaw shut. The great change had come: my grandfather now knew the mystery of what lies or what does not lie behind that door.

Later, as we were going over the house and examining his belongings, killing time, waiting for the coroner to arrive, a box on a high shelf caught my eye. I stood on a chair to get it, took the lid off, and upon seeing its contents, said, “holy fucking shit”. “What is it?” came the reply. “IT’S WEED,” I said, “OUNCES OF IT.” It was years old, but it was weed. Subsequently, in the kitchen, I found some of my favorite smoke paraphernalia, items which I’d never before seen outside of Myanmar, or my own collection: palm leaf papers, corn husk filters. This was so shocking I had no choice but to simply accept it. There wasn’t anything else to do but roll it up and smoke my grandfather off. So that’s what we did. We grabbed Dr. Peppers from his giant stash—it was his daily drink, which we occasionally administered by the spoonful during his last days—and smoked the most meaningful blunt of my life.

When the coroner finally did arrive, by instinct, we forbade him from touching the body and wheeled it out ourselves—my uncle, my father and I, past the paintings and the GoPro RC cars, past the narrow pool and the palm fronds, out the gate and into the trunk of, well it wasn't a hearse, it was a RAV4 SUV. I rested my hand on his body and wept again, as my family held each other. We filtered back inside, and then back out again to find food—but my father and I stayed in the house. It just felt like the right thing to do. We searched around, for something to justify our search. And we did find it. A knife here, a photograph of an ex there, a ‘death package’ (not to be opened until the death of the sender- which was two decades ago)... but one object made my father yell across the house like a kid. A long, black bag in the back of a shelf above the bathroom. Inside was an ornate, heavy, expensive air rifle and a tin of pellets. I knew what had to be done. I grabbed shaving cream from the bathroom and led my grieving father out to the back, where we set up the can and took 50 paces back. Then we shot the shit out of those cans, watched them spin into the sky, spraying cream in three hundred and sixty degrees, grinning like maniacs.

We finished gathering the things from his house, and I went over the items carefully. Books—the last one he ever read was called ‘nothingness’—some lavender, the knife, some weed, a powerful laser pointer, but most shocking absurd and cherished of all were the seashells I found in his underwear drawer. I don't know where he got those. I know where the seashells above my underwear drawer are from—the best beaches of my life, the best days of life—and I wonder what they meant to him, what the sea meant to him. I imagine a lot. Perhaps that's part of why he built a lighthouse in the middle of the forest? Not for ships to know of the shore, but for us to know of the sea? What drove him to collect seashells, I think, is what drove me to do the same. A powerful force, one with no name, no sense, none at all. Goodbye, Gunka.