"I have no doubt by working together we can and will get through this"

That’s actually New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on the Transport Worker’s Union – MTA strike. A fairly resonant way to put things, considering.

Finally I don't mind
Worthless tries at finding something else
Best not talk to loud
You're not as smart as you require of them
Your body breaks
Your needs consume you forever
And with this lied the need
To be here together
Funny thing with blood
Try to stand but neither leg is awake
Just this side of love
Is where you'll find the confidence not to continue

That’s from Built To Spill’s “Else” (see last post). Everyone’s trying to find the right soundtrack to the Event.* My sister listened to Sixpence None the Richer’s self-titled album—yes, the one with “Kiss Me”, but I’ve always thought that it was a highly underrated album. My reasons for believing this are complex and I’ll maybe mount a more complete defence of its virtues sometime in the future for interested parties. And last night as I ran on the treadmill in the basement weight room, I put on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. This was a poem-worthy experience if ever I had one. Typically I hate to run indoors, and don’t listen to music as I run, but this album, this man Meat Loaf, was exactly the sort of overwrought orchestra Rock I needed to hear, such that before I knew it I was upping the speed on the treadmill to 8 miles / hr – not an excessively impressive speed, but still – just so my footfalls would align with the beat. I ran through the whole album that way. Given the bouncing of my head, the cord to the headphones I was wearing made distended playground jump-rope ellipses as it swung around and around.

E—, Jon’s girlfriend, called the family yesterday. Amid other details of the chronology of the Event and the fallout, there was this choice nugget: she described the Event itself as “a click and a pop.”

I didn’t write yesterday. I didn’t do much of anything yesterday, besides the run. There’s been a good deal of basic laziness in myself. Even getting up from the floor of the upstairs guest room last night at 1 AM for bed-prep purposes seemed beyond my powers, not due to grief, but due to the apparent pointlessness of doing so. I did write some emails, in fulfillment of my Communication resolutions. But I didn’t get any of my thoughts down. Didn’t write a poem. Late last night I finally sat down and tried to write the eulogy. I’ve been putting this off in a very conscious, but not quite a deliberate, way. The reason is not that writing it will make me cry or break down. The reason is rather that I know the eulogy will be a failed piece of writing. That there is no way given my proximity to the event and the time constrictions and etc. etc. etc. that this piece of writing will do anymore than shine a penlight on one small sliver of Jon’s trademark one-eyebrow-raised “I’m so beautiful, and I’m only half-joking about that” face. I don’t want to write it. And I here note with dismay that I haven’t been reading much of anything, either. Mark Doty’s Sweet Machine, which has helped friends of mine through tragedies of their own, and the composition of which saved Doty himself (to hear him tell it), sits on top of a stack of books I’ve pulled from my shelves and have yet to crack since the Event. I don’t find myself reaching to those words I thought I’d be reaching to. Which, well, whatever. I’m only noting the fact as interesting, although last night the issue about my apparently-increasingly-spotty relations with lit and personal composition seemed to knell a dire note indeed. I gave up on the eulogy at around 1 AM because I was sensing how inaccurate and not up to the task it was. Language was beginning to seem inadequate to the moments at hand. This morning, since I’ve begun writing even this update, that feeling has receded. I don’t want to lose my faith in words as a salve. I think and even know that they are my foremost aides-de-camp in this war.** The way to maintain this faith, I’m beginning to see know, is to not stop. To keep on. Keri B— has planted some of these thoughts in me, and has echoed certain thoughts I’d had in re: writing as a salve. I suppose I just wanted to thank her.

Speaking of thanking, Thank You, Jayne, for the banana chocolate chip cookies, which I just received a moment ago, 11:07 AM on Wednesday. Words don’t quite fail to express what I want to express, but they will have to be a start for the time being.

I need to know something from all of you who might be reading this. As a college student and grad student and starving artist gypsy type, I’ve been removed from the day-to-day of my family for a while now. Since the Event, I find myself edging around the exteriors of rooms in which Dad, Mom, Missy, and Baba and Pa are grieving. (See the VT issue for a prime example.) I’m not any longer inside of their dynamic. Which is natural and just the way it is due to circumstances. Fine. But when everyone isn’t grieving, when instead everyone’s sitting around with some vodka crans and Coronas, and telling long stories about Jon’s middle- and high-school escapades of malbehavior, complete with mimed action and imitated voices, it's then that I find myself emerging and taking a seat at the table and laughing as hard as anyone. I’ve even tried, partly through the loquaciousness vodka inspires in me, to maintain this mood. From the hours of say 5 PM on, there’s a glass basically taped to my hand, and while I’ve never been one to get drunk in order to hide grief, I have been trying to remain, let’s say, optimally medicated in these evenings. I’ve been a presence in these social mileaux only to the extent that those mileaux make me smile about Jon, and not sob. My question: Does this amount to a sort of selfishness? Is the whole “being there” and “being strong” obligation of the oldest son mean that I should force myself to be at the table for those hankie-fests that I don’t seem to feel innately drawn toward? Some might say that that last sentence answers my own question: that whatever I do is its own justification, and contains within itself its own rationale. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t want to be resented in a few months or years by Melissa or anybody for being physically present but emotionally way off somewhere else.

This morning Melissa and Mom, in full black dress that was wholly out of whack with their near-sunny demeanors, were looking at drawers of old photos. Much of their mirth came from how wretched they judged their previous selves to be (Mom’s lost weight and is the most attractive 40-something woman not yet on TV you’re like to encounter anywhere, and Melissa’s the kind of pretty I suspect men remember for years). There was one photo of a Geary Family Reunion—the Gearys being the main trunk of my mom’s family tree—with about 40 members of that clan gathered on the rickety steps of a house Mom called the Addams Family house. You know, wide steps, a wraparound porch. And apparently, there were so many members gathered on these steps, and some members of the Geary clan had become so, ah, ample, that shortly after the photograph was snapped the set of stairs gave, and 40 Gearys collapsed in a laughing heap of guts and scruffy cheeks and big Irish smiles. Mom and Melissa laughed to remember it: while they’d been there, Dad, Jon, and myself had not been. I don’t know why. But Dad’s reaction was to comment, with the tone of a reprimand almost, that someone could have seriously gotten hurt. It was the tone that one would use if a teen had jumped from a bridge into a creek, and yahooed and felt very much alive, and wanted to relive the memory by telling about it, not that they would ever jump into the creek again, and the parent of this teen wants to make it very clear that Damn right, they were not to jump into the creek ever again. Even though the Family Reunion was years ago, and no one was hurt at all, and the collapse was by all accounts a pretty fun instance of collective Geary weight and mass and constitutional good-humor, Dad’s tone was aimed toward the prevention of any such situation in the future: because although no one had been hurt, someone could have been hurt, and someone could be hurt. And strangely I began to think of my name, which is William, same as Dad’s. William’s Christian meaning, according to this just massive Webster’s Home Reference Library tome, is “Protector” and (funnily) “Helmet of Resolution.” Which got me to thinking that Dad’s expression of protecting is a literal, physical one. As in, Don’t ever again put too many people on a set of wide, rickety Victorian house stairs, because they’ll collapse. Whereas my take on protecting might be said to be a little more morale- or emotion-based. I see all of the humor in that story and for my part I think that it’s exactly these sorts of stories that need to be told ceaselessly in the next 36 hours. The protectorship I want to offer is that of the narrative that gets people laughing. That’s the sort of story to which I’m drawn, which I seem to need. But what about others?

This pretty clearly relates to the above “Is it better to be grave or better to be mirthful” question I asked way up above. And maybe what this has to tell me is that there’s no better / worse, there are only differing approaches that will suit various individuals differently. Fine. But again, the intersection of Individual and Group need here is an issue I still don’t know how to parse out. And moreover I realize that it might be well nigh impossible to divorce the stories from the reactions they’re going to garner, i.e. the gravity and the grief. Everyone’s going to react to the stories, no matter how entertaining and knee-slapping they might be, in different and unpredictable ways. And I need to safeguard / protect myself, but then at the same time I need to safeguard and protect others… it’s all way too much to figure out now. At least I’ve phrased the question, though.

The wake is at Buranich (pronounced BURN-ish, I’m 99% sure) Funeral Home in Camillus, NY. It’s right on West Genesee, basically across from the old Octagon House. 4 PM – 7 PM.


* I’ve started to use the Event in a more inclusive way, i.e. the Event as what Jon did and also what we now have to do as a result.

** War? With what, W? Grief? Normally I’d edit out or change these stream-of-consciousness-borne tropes. But that’s seems disingenuous toward the whole “Words will save me” idea. For them to so save, I’ll have to let them work as they will.