You didn't know it, but an excision occurred. Reality was riven of something you never knew you'd lose.
You didn't hear their footsteps cease.
You didn't hear them when they called goodnight to each other.
“Ted? What was the…” and she'd ask him about some obscure sports fact from whenever. He’d call out the answer, from the kitchen, from the den. Perhaps he'd come in to argue about so-and-so from some movie you've never seen. After enough back and forth, she’d pencil in the crossword answer.
I remember the first time I came up with an answer. It was ‘ogre’ or ‘troll’.
“When are you going to stop reading that fantasy stuff and start reading novels?” Gammy used to ask.
Ten or fifteen years later, she's telling me on the phone:
I sent her Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. A fantasy novel. She read two of his books and would chat with me on the phone. A few months later, she's gone blind: macular degeneration (wet).
You didn't know it, because you never knew them, they were excised, riven, before you ever knew you'd lose them. You’ll never know what you missed, and I hate you for that. I love you a little less for never having known them.
Dawn and Ted Allan burned to death in the early hours of December 14th, 2024. I finally graduated from college, at 32, the same day. I would have called them that day- instead my mom called me on the way to the ceremony. She was so drunk, she forgot she'd done it, and called me again in the middle of the ceremony. “Gammy and Dandan are dead!” She'd shouted into the phone, when I answered. It sounds pitiful, but I'd answered hoping she realized I was graduating. I don't know why she would have: her parents had burned to death. The last time I’d called was in November. “We always knew you'd do it. We’re so proud of you, Joey.” It’s her voice, in my head, now, eight months later, August. I'm worried I’ll forget. I have her voice, on my answering machine.
“Jo? It's your grandmother, call me.” I have Bompa’s on a video: laughing as my uncle Mac drums to some Motown funk on my dog, Boogie. Boogie was surely named that way for Bompa, several times removed.
You didn't know it when they were torn from the fabric. I wish I could tell you, I wish I could replicate what knowing them meant. I wish it was because of some generosity in my heart: some need to share them. I really just wish someone knew the depths of what it meant to lose them. I want you to look at me and know what I lost.
The only people that do are far flung, absorbed within their own lives, unable to see past their own pain.
It's not our fault: the pain is just so great.
If you didn't know, you couldn't know, because as much as they loved the written word, it fails us.
If I could gather us all in a room with a keyboard, and put every scrap of history to paper, I would. I should, but my heart fails me. Even if I didn't, most of them can't stand to see each other any more. And why should they? The best of us is gone. Excised. Riven.
“I don't want a funeral.” Gammy had said. Like me, she didn't believe in God. “I'll be gone, and that will be that.” I remember telling her that funerals are for those left behind. “I don't care.”
I don't think she saw herself on the stairs, in the fire, when she talked about dying. I don't know if they died screaming, but they were on the stairs.
They died trying to get away. They died trying to live. They were robbed. By old age or fire, they weren't ready, and they died any way.
That's not something you lose sight of, even if you want to.
“It's as if the world reared up and bit us.” Mom said- and she was right.
How do I tell the dead who aren't there that I made it? How do I call them and tell them I graduated, that I'm still going to do right by them? How do I…?
They're gone. There's nothing there to tell, and yet there is. The fact is, they're there, in my head, and they won't leave, they never will. What we want, as atheists, is to vanish from being, because it's cleaner than an afterlife. We want Gods to leave us be and for our lives to be led cleanly.
Instead, we persist, in the hearts and minds of those left behind. Without a better story to tell, we become revenants of a past. Sudden death is different from a slow one. They call it ‘traumatic loss’, but really, what death isn't traumatic?
“I thought you were in Johnson City. My phone says you are in Johnson City.” It's my dad, on the phone. This is when I learn he's finally gone. He's been an addict my whole life, that's what my mom and stepmom tell me- but I didn't know that. He certainly was a jerk a lot of it, but he didn't come off as high. He surrounded himself with people who you could tell were addicts. By a vacancy, or dimness, or just the picking marks on their face. He got arrested for possession of meth, and still, he was my Dad. He made sense when you talked to him, and he was smart.
This year, 2025, I can't remember when, he thought I was in Johnson City, because his phone said so when I called.
“Let's do dinner this weekend.” This time I know better than to leap on the chance to see him. I tell him to text me where and when. He doesn't, because he's already gone by the time I hang up. Doing whatever. He's gone. I knew it happened, intellectually, with addicts; at some point they became stupid, fried.
For some fucking reason, I didn't think it'd happen for Dad. He'd been an addict my whole life, my mom and stepmom told me, but he'd always been just Dad.
But now he's gone. Like a fire took him. He was there when I graduated. Lost a tooth at the lunch table. Thought I was kidding when I told him about Gammy and Bompa.
It's like the whole world was riven, excised. But stayed behind, a revenant.
He keeps texting me his ideas for a new money making opportunity. Something to do with AI and tenant disputes.
He keeps getting evicted from his apartments. Something about AI and tenant disputes.
“You should think about turning this into an NFT. Seriously.” He comments on a painting of mine, a few years ago.
When did he start to die? I don't know. But I know when I realized; he thought I was in Johnson City.
Who do I tell? How do I tell them? They didn't know it, but three people were torn from the world this year, wait, no!- four. Grandpa Troy. My step-grandpa. He couldn't swallow over Christmas this year. He apologized to Forrest that they didn't get to speak much. He died in June. Esophageal cancer.
How do I tell people that I'm hurting? How do I tell people to mourn four souls? How do I express to someone the horror of listening to your dad speak like he's being controlled by a parasite, while you know he's already gone, hollowed out by a disease that people claim is sin?
“Happy Father's Day you cockroach, I can't believe you outlived my dad” texted my stepmom this Father's Day, to my dad. He responded with photos of my last surviving grandparent. She’d fallen for the second time that month (June, the same month Grandpa Troy died). The pictures were bloody, awful. She fell in her undies. He sent them to me first, even though I'd asked him not to.
I don't know how to tell people that I'm a soap bubble in the abyss. I don't know how to tell people that I'm alive while so many aren't. I know how to live, how to breathe, how to keep trying to move forward, but I've lost the plot, I've lost the me that had them in her life.
I don't know who I am, I feel like I just kept rolling once my engine was cut.
They died on the stairs. It was the last home I'd been a child in, and it burned. I remember what it smelled like, but I won't in a few years. I'll remember what remembering felt like, and that will be all.
That will be that, like Gammy said.
I’m selfish, I'm a child; I want somebody to look at this and say how awful it is. I don't need to know how awful everyone else’s lives are, I just want, for once, someone to recognize that this is awful. The worst. My grandparents were the last people in my family who really knew me for who I am. My dad was my last dad. Grandpa Troy liked to talk to me about chemistry, now nobody talks to me about chemistry. I want people to worry about me, to check in on me and treat me like I'm made of glass. I want people to tiptoe around things like house fires and addiction. I want people to look at me and see a cripple, someone who lost a part so huge that they're limping, rolling, riven.
But asking for it is poison, asking for it is impossible.
Instead I’ll just grow past it, over it, around it, and nobody will know. I hope it's not like an abscess, and more like when a tree grows around something, but I know I'm not a plant.
Instead, I’ll listen to my friends talk about zen, about philosophy, about meditation, and I’ll never try to tell them. When I try to tell them, it's like rolling by in a wheelchair- everyone looks the other direction, tries to change the subject. Some things you just don't say.
Haley, my cousin, had to send photos of them to the hospital. They said it'd be too difficult for a family member to come in to identify them. She has their ashes under her bed. Bompa's novel is on his computer, possibly in the house, possibly safe, but how do I go get it? How do I save his words?
My dad slept with her once. He's a piece of shit.
I want this nightmare to end. I want to wake up. I want them to come back and tell me something safe to hear.
Instead Trump is president, instead my friends are scared, instead our rights are being taken away and everyone wants to know why we haven't done something about him. I tried to find help today- I've been dealing with terrible pain when I use the bathroom- all tests come back negative. I stay on the toilet for an hour and cry. Nobody accepts appointments for that sort of thing without insurance. It's either this, or the hospital. How the hell are we supposed to handle this!? How the hell are we supposed to survive!? I don't want to die, I am happy with my life, and yet when I think about what's missing, I want everything to stop and bow it's head, like a funeral procession.
I want the world to stop and bow it's head.
Please, just stop, and bow your head.
You didn't know it, but an excision occurred.
