It's always too late.

I’m staring into the foot end of my my grandmothers sleek black casket.  I can hear my mother, kneeling next to me.  She asks me to come closer to pay my respects.  We’re in Maine.  We took the long drive up from New York the night before and I’m still tired from hardly sleeping.  A wide bouquet of loose white lilacs spread themselves out all around me on the floor.  I avoid them as I inch closer to my mother, unsure of what to say.  I don’t know where my father is.  It’s his mother.  For all the deaths in our family, especially the family on his half, he’s never shown me a single tear.  He has never cried, or sobbed, or let a single wet streak dribble down his cheek.

The closest it’s ever come to that is when I was a little boy.  We had a dog.  When it died, I didn’t know it.  I came home from school one day, backpack slung around one shoulder, and asked my mother where the dog was.  She looked at me in this certain way.  In a sort of surprise.  Like, didn’t I know?  Wasn’t I aware?  Over a week had passed since I bothered to look for the dog, and there I was, asking where it went.  Sweetie, she said.  He’s gone.  And I remember letting my backpack drop to the floor next to my feet, trying to render out the words, what they really meant.  I wasn’t sure, but I knew well enough that it meant the dog wouldn’t be coming back.  I remember kicking my bag towards the couch and pulling out the belly of my mother’s sweater, crying into it, and saying, why didn’t you tell me?  Why didn’t anyone tell me?

Years later, when I was much older, I heard my mother talking on the phone to one of her friends.  She said something about that time, the one I remember.  With the dog.  She wasn’t talking about how I reacted.  No.  At that time, our cat had died, and the family gathered around the kitchen table to pay our respects while the home-vet administered the euthanol.  Or whatever it is that they give to pets to sleep them out of this world.  I remember her saying, when my father’s dog passed he was distraught.  He wanted to be alone with the dog when it happened.  He sat in the basement with the vet and held his paw while he left.  And he cried.  He cried like my mother had never heard before.  A dog that first wandered onto our property, probably some hunter’s dog.  A dog that my father shooed away with careful stones but came up to him anyway with its tail wagging.  My mother said, and there he was, in the basement after the vet left, alone with the dog, and she could hear him crying.  She heard a pounding on the walls and such terrible wails that she herself started to cry, and it was the only time.

My mother scoots over along the foot rail and makes room for me.  I place my elbows up onto the side of the open casket and fold my hands in prayer above my head.  I see my grandmother for the first time since she was alive months before.  From what I remember, she was lively, if not entirely there.  She had forgotten my name.  Repeatedly asked who I was.  And I repeatedly reminded her.  I’m Michael, I said.  Your grandson.  Oh.  Oh, my grandson.

It was like that on the phone as well.  My father would hand off the phone to me saying, it’s your grandmother.  Now remember, she doesn’t remember much, she won’t remember who you are.  But just play along.  Try to remind her.  I reminded her.  I’m Michael, Gram, I’d say.  She’d quiet up for a moment on the other end of the line.  I’d hear her fidgeting with things.  Clinking glass, the television, a microwave dinner.  She’d mistake me for my father or my uncle, asking me about the kids.

One time, I heard my mother telling another story to her friend, over the phone.  Gram was talking to my father, she said.  My grandmother was confused.  She couldn’t understand why my parents were able to pass the phone off to one another.  Were they living together?  Yes, they were.  My mother tried to explain.  They were living together, in their home.  Living together?  Yes.  They’d been together for twenty years.  My grandmother scolded my mother.  Why are you living together?  Why are you living in shame?  My mother, on the phone with her friend said,  we’ve been married for twenty five years, Gram.  We’re married.

In front of the casket, my mother asks what I’m thinking.  I don’t know what to say to her.  A lot of things, I say.  I’m sad, I say.  My mother puts her right arm around my neck and leans her forehead onto my left shoulder.  It’s okay, Michael, she says.  I hear her crying onto me.  The left shoulder of my shirt is wet with tears and snot, and I’m upset by it.  Sort of disgusted.  But not at my mother.  Just the results.  It’s not Gram, I say.  She asks, What?

When my cat died, and we were all sitting around the kitchen table with the vet, I was the one that held her little paw and traced a finger around her little ear and stuck out my bottom lip.  My parents were behind me, probably watching me trying to be alone with the cat.  The vet put his hand on my hand and said, are you ready?  And I nodded.  I looked at my lovely cat, with her dark fur and beautiful eyes.  Her breaths were like wet crumpling paper.  Every inhale was my broken heart.  I said nothing out loud.  I only internalized my dialogue with her.  It’s alright, love.  It’s alright.  You’re going back, back wherever you came from.  And as I watched the yellow liquid travel from the syringe and into the carrying tubes, into the needle taped and crammed deep into her paw, I wasn’t destroyed.

She hurt, a lot.  She hurt more than I ever had.  You watch films with people coughing up blood and it doesn’t affect you, but when you’re at a pronounced window sill with your cat, and she’s sprawled out sideways on a thin layer of beach towels, and you hear that cough?  That is what hurts.  That hurts more than anything.  And when the blood froths out around her maw, your stiff heart crumbles and melts and drips away to where you can’t see it.  And you are destroyed.

It didn’t feel like forever, that time between the yellow liquid dropping into the plastic tubing and into her veins, where it would reach her heart and all of the tiny corners of her body.  It felt like seconds.  And as the cat’s breathing slowed, and her eyes began to roll back into her little head and shut, the entire family gathered around the cat.  Oh God, we said.  Oh God.  You were so good to us, you darling.  You beautiful thing.  Know how much we love you.  And both my parents pet my cat, and I pet my cat, and we loved her as her eyes shut completely.  And we loved her until her breathing became confused, and her little legs twitched in our hands, and she let out this sound like a clicking beetle, and we told her, oh Charlie, oh you god you beautiful thing.  You beautiful thing, you were so good to us.  So good to us, we love you so much, and she left.

And I’ll never forget, never, that the moment Charlie left, it hurt less.  Because in my hand, where her little paw rest without movement, that wasn’t her anymore.  It was if I saw something leaving her in the last breaths.  As she left, her body stopped.  All of the tense things, the hurt things, left her body.  Her whiskers twitched and stopped moving.  Her lovely little belly quit.  And then, on the table, it wasn’t my love anymore.  It wasn’t my cat.  It was just something.  Something on the table to throw away, to get rid of.  It was like a sentimental object that you know reminds you of your broken heart, but doesn’t break your heart anymore.  It’s just there, and so are you, and that’s the whole thing.

What do you mean it’s not Gram, my mother says.  I look at her, ashamed.  I can never explain everything that I’m thinking, but I wish I could.    I don’t know, I say.  It’s just not her.  She frowns at me.  Of course it is, she says.  This is Gram.  Of course it’s Gram.  Don’t you love her?  Give a little prayer for her.

I can’t, I say.  I can’t.  And I get up, and I walk to the back of the room, and out of the building, and into the parking lot, where I see my father, and I walk up and put my arms around him, and I start to cry.

Been living here two years.  Put a cigarette in a whiskey bottle near my bed for every time I brought somebody home.  I’m on about two a weekend.  I’m at the bar, he’s ordering me drinks, we get home, and I drop a butt into the bottle.  It’s a tally mark.  It’s a notch in my belt.  It’s a cigarette in an empty whiskey bottle.  It tells me how far off I am off the mark.  Because here’s the thing.  You might not be doing anything, but at least you know it.  At least you’ve got the scars to prove it.  That whiskey bottle’s about filled.  Funny thing is, not a single person has ever said anything about it to me.  Nobody complains about how it looks or how it smells.  And with so much time past, I kinda think of it as me.  Ain’t no one complaining.  But also?  No one’s taken the damn thing home for themselves.  It’s that easy, that simple to understand.  Guy wants a girl that will mess them up.  One that’ll make them confused and make them wonder about what’s really going on.  But it ain’t that hard with me.  See this cigarette?  Into the bottle it goes.  There you go.

You sure you want to do this?  I mean, you don’t seem like that kind of guy.  No, you’re good and all that.  But I don’t see this in you.  Don’t look at you and think, “there’s the fire, there’s the smoke,” and wanna toss this cigarette in.  But I will, if you want.  You sure you’re ready for that?  You sure, baby?  You sure you want all that?