Obit Read online

  Obit

  VICTORIA CHANG

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  This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

  For my mother and my children.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  I

  My Father’s Frontal Lobe

  My Mother

  Victoria Chang

  Victoria Chang

  Voice Mail

  Language

  My children, children

  Each time I write hope

  Language

  Victoria Chang

  The Future

  Civility

  My Mother’s Lungs

  Privacy

  My Mother’s Teeth

  I tell my children

  I tell my children

  Friendships

  Gait

  Logic

  Optimism

  Ambition

  Chair

  Do you smell my cries?

  I tell my children

  Tears

  Memory

  Language

  Tomas Tranströmer

  Approval

  Sometimes all I have

  You don’t need a thing

  Secrets

  Music

  Appetite

  Appetite

  Form

  Optimism

  I can’t say with faith

  To love anyone

  Hands

  Oxygen

  Reason

  Home

  Memory

  II

  I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue.

  III

  Friendships

  Caretakers

  Subject Matter

  Sadness

  Empathy

  The Obituary Writer

  Do you see the tree?

  My children, children

  The Doctors

  Yesterday

  Grief

  Doctors

  Blame

  Time

  Today I show you

  My children, children

  Form

  Control

  The Situation

  Memory

  Doctors

  Obsession

  My children, children

  My children don’t have

  The Clock

  Hope

  The Head

  The Blue Dress

  Hindsight

  The Priest

  I put on a shirt

  Where do they find hope?

  The Car

  My Mother’s Favorite Potted Tree

  Similes

  Affection

  Home

  When a mother dies

  My children, children

  The Bees

  Victoria Chang

  Clothes

  Guilt

  The Ocean

  The Face

  My children say no

  Have you ever looked

  IV

  America

  I am ready to

  My children, children

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Victoria Chang

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  OBIT

  I

  Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak

  wispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

  —William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  My Father’s Frontal Lobe—died unpeacefully of a stroke on June 24, 2009 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego, California. Born January 20, 1940, the frontal lobe enjoyed a good life. The frontal lobe loved being the boss. It tried to talk again but someone put a bag over it. When the frontal lobe died, it sucked in its lips like a window pulled shut. At the funeral for his words, my father wouldn’t stop talking and his love passed through me, fell onto the ground that wasn’t there. I could hear someone stomping their feet. The body is as confusing as language—was the frontal lobe having a tantrum or dancing? When I took my father’s phone away, his words died in the plastic coffin. At the funeral for his words, we argued about my miscarriage. It’s not really a baby, he said. I ran out of words, stomped out to shake the dead baby awake. I thought of the tech who put the wand down, quietly left the room when she couldn’t find the heartbeat. I understood then that darkness is falling without an end. That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.

  My Mother—died unpeacefully on August 3, 2015 in her room at Walnut Village Assisted Living in Anaheim, California of pulmonary fibrosis. The room was born on July 3, 2012. The Village wasn’t really a village. No walnut trees. Just cut flowers. Days before, the hospice nurse silently slid the stethoscope on top of my mother’s lung and waited for it to inflate. The way waiting becomes an injury. The way the nurse breathed in, closed his eyes, breathed out, and said I’m sorry. Did the blood rush to my face or to my fingertips? Did he reopen his eyes before or after he said I’m sorry? The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can’t. The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

  Victoria Chang—died unknowingly on June 24, 2009 on the I-405 freeway. Born in the Motor City, it is fitting she died on a freeway. When her mother called about her father’s heart attack, she was living an indented life, a swallow that didn’t dip. This was not her first death. All her deaths had creases except this one. It didn’t matter that her mother was wrong (it was a stroke) but that Victoria Chang had to ask whether she should drive to see the frontal lobe. When her mother said yes, Victoria Chang had the feeling of not wanting to. Someone heard that feeling. Because he did not die but all of his words did. At the hospital, Victoria Chang cried when her father no longer made sense. This was before she understood the cruelty of his disease. It would be the last time she cried in front of it. She switched places with her shadow because suffering changes shape and happens secretly.

  Victoria Chang—died unwillingly on April 21, 2017 on a cool day in Seal Beach, California, on her way back from the facility named Sunrise, which she often mistakenly called Sunset. Her father’s problems now her problems, nailed to her frontal lobe. Like a typist, she tried to translate his problems, carry the words back in a pony carriage one by one. When the pony moved, the letters strung together to form sentences. But when the pony refused to move, the carriage disappeared. The letters tagged her and ran into the cornfields. The police came and shined their lights onto the field, started shooting the letters even though they had their hands up. Sometimes, they shot the letters twice, just to make sure. Sometimes, they shot them in the back. When we shoot a letter once, it’s called typing. Twice, engraving. When someone dies, letters are always engraved. When someone dies, there is a constant feeling of wanting to speak to someone, but the plane with all the words is crossing the sky.

  Voice Mail—died on June 24, 2009, the voice mail from my father said Transcription B
eta (low confidence), Hello hi um I may be able to find somebody to reduce the size of the car OK I love you. The Transcription Beta had low self-esteem. It wandered into the river squinting and came back blind. The Transcription Beta could not transcribe dementia. My father really said, I’ll fold the juice, not I love you. Is language the broom or what’s being swept? When I first read I love you, some hand spun a fine thread around my lungs and tightened. Because my father had never said that to me before. In the seconds before realization of the error, I didn’t feel love, but panic. We read to inherit the words, but something is always between us and the words. Until death, when comprehension and disappearance happen simultaneously.

  Language—died, brilliant and beautiful on August 1, 2009 at 2:46 p.m. Lover of raising his hand, language lived a full life of questioning. His favorite was twisting what others said. His favorite was to write the world in black and white and then watch people try and read the words in color. Letters used to skim my father’s brain before they let go. Now his words are blind. Are pleated. Are the dispatcher, the dispatches, and the receiver. When my mother was dying, I made everyone stand around the bed for what would be the last group photo. Some of us even smiled. Because dying lasts forever until it stops. Someone said, Take a few. Someone said, Say cheese. Someone said, Thank you. Language fails us. In the way that breaking an arm means an arm’s bone can break but the arm itself can’t break off unless sawed or cut. My mother couldn’t speak but her eyes were the only ones that were wide open.

  Tankas

  My children, children,

  there’s applesauce everywhere

  but it’s not for you.

  It is strange to help someone

  grow while helping someone die.

  *

  Each time I write hope,

  the letters fray and scatter.

  The hopeful poets

  never seem to have my dreams,

  never seem to have children.

  Language—died again on August 3, 2015 at 7:09 a.m. I heard about my mother’s difficult nights. I hired a night person. By the time I got there, she was always gone. The night person had a name but was like a ghost who left letters on my lips. Couldn’t breathe, 2:33 a.m. Screaming, 3:30 a.m. Calm, 4:24 a.m. I got on all fours, tried to pick up the letters like a child at an egg hunt without a basket. But for every letter I picked up, another fell down, as if protesting the oversimplification of my mother’s dying. I wanted the night person to write in a language I could understand. Breathing unfolding, 2:33. Breathing in blades, 3:30. Breathing like an evening gown, 4:24. But maybe I am wrong, how death is simply death, each slightly different from the next but the final strike all the same. How the skin responds to a wedding dress in the same way it responds to rain.

  Victoria Chang—died on June 24, 2011, at the age of 41. Her imagination lived beyond that day though. It weighed two pounds and could be lifted like weights. Once she brought her father to the arcade. He found the basketball machine and shot one after another. As if he were visiting his past self in prison, touching the clear glass at his own likeness. On the other side of the glass, words like embankment, unsightly, and heterogeneous lived. He tried to ask his former self for help but the guards wouldn’t allow him to pass notes. When the ball machine buzzed, he stopped, eyes deformed and wild. He called my dead mother over to see his score, hand waving at me. What happens when the shadow is attached to the wrong object but refuses to let go? I walked over because I wanted to believe him.

  The Future—died on June 24, 2009. A pioneering figure in the past, the future was the president of the present. You are sitting. But the future wants your chair. She is demanding. She is not interested in the spine but what it holds up. She is interested in award ceremonies. She is interested in fallen petals that look like medals. She is interested in anything with the word track in it, tenure track, deer tracks, tracksuit, but she doesn’t want you to get sidetracked or to backtrack. The future can be thrown away by the privileged. But sometimes she just suddenly dies. The way the second person dies when a mother dies, reborn as third person as my mother. The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What’s left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.

  Civility—died on June 24, 2009, at the age of 68. Murdered by a stroke whose paintings were recently featured in a museum, two square canvases painted white, black scissors in the middle of each, open, pointing at each other. After my father’s stroke, my mother no longer spoke in full sentences. Fragments of codfish, the language of savages, each syllable a mechanical dart from her mouth to my father’s holes. Maybe this is what happens when language fails, a last breath inward but no breath outward. A state of holding one’s breath forever but not dying. When her lungs began their failing, she could still say you but not thank. You don’t know what it’s like, she said when I told her to stop yelling at my father. She was right. When language leaves, all you have left is tone, all you have left are smoke signals. I didn’t know she was using her own body as wood.

  My Mother’s Lungs—began their dying sometime in the past. Doctors talked around tombstones. About the hedges near the tombstones, the font. The obituary writer said the obituary is the moment when someone becomes history. What if my mother never told me stories about the war or about her childhood? Does that mean none of it happened? No one sits next to my mother’s small rectangular tombstone, flush to the earth. The stone is meant to be read from above. What if I’m in space and can’t read it? Does that mean she didn’t die? She died at 7:07 a.m. PST. It is three hours earlier in Hawaii. Does that mean in Hawaii she hasn’t died yet? But the plane ride to Hawaii is five hours long. This time gap can never be overcome. The difference is called grieving.

  Privacy—died on December 4, 2015. My child brought a balloon that said Get Well Soon to the gravesite. This time Peter Manning lay next to my mother. A stranger so close to her. Before this other stone appeared, my mother’s stone was still my mother because of the absence around her. The appearance of the new stone and the likeness to her stone implied my mother was a stone too, that my mother was buried under the stone too. On the day of the burial, I hired a Chinese priest. I couldn’t understand many of his words because they were not about food. The men who had dug up the dirt stood with their shovels and waited. I looked at their eyes for any sign of drowning. Then I noticed that one man’s body didn’t have a shadow. And when he walked away, the grass didn’t flatten. His shovel was clean. I suddenly recognized this man as love.

  My Mother’s Teeth—died twice, once in 1965, all pulled out from gum disease. Once again on August 3, 2015. The fake teeth sit in a box in the garage. When she died, I touched them, smelled them, thought I heard a whimper. I shoved the teeth into my mouth. But having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier. When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words around my mouth, like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I pass the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.

  I tell my children

  that hope is like a blue skirt,

  it can twirl and twirl,

  that men like to open it,

  take it apart, and wound it.

  *

  I tell my children

  that sometimes I too can hope,

  that sometimes nothing

  moves but my love for someone,

  and the light from the dead star.

  Friendships—died June 24, 2009, once beloved but not consistently beloved. The mirror won the battle. I am now imprisoned in the mirror. All my selves spread out like a deck of cards. It’s true, the grieving
speak a different language. I am separated from my friends by gauze. I will drive myself to my own house for the party. I will make small talk with myself, spill a drink on myself. When it’s over, I will drive myself back to my own house. My conversations with other parents about children pass me on the way up the staircase and repeat on the way down. Before my mother’s death, I sat anywhere. Now I look for the image of the empty chair near the image of the empty table. An image is a kind of distance. An image of me sits down. Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.

  Gait—my father’s gait died on March 14, 2011. Once erect, light, flat-footed. Magnificent. Now, his gait shuffles like sandpaper. Once my father erected a basketball net, mounted it onto a wooden pole from the lumberyard to save money. With each shot, the pole moved a little, invisible to the eye, until I had to shoot from the side of the driveway. Now I avoid semicolons. I look for statues whose eyes don’t move with me. The kind of people who stand in place and lights can be strung on. The problem is, my father’s brain won’t stop walking, and my dead mother is everywhere.

  Logic—my father’s logic died on June 24, 2009 in bright daylight. Murdered in the afternoon. I hung up Missing Person posters of myself and listened for the sound of a tree falling. The sound of the wind through trees is called psithurism. There’s no word for the translator of wind. If the wind is words, the trees are exclamation points. The spears of moonlight, question marks. My father doesn’t realize his words always end in prepositions. I have a problem with [the moon], there is a problem between [the moon and me], the problem is on [the moon]. What if he can no longer find what is being modified, in the way snow would fall forever if there were no lip to die on.