This is the story of my grandfather’s death, but really it is about my grandmother’s death, eventually, and my father’s, inevitably. This all happened after my grandfather died, but before he taught us all about singularity and time travel. This all happened before my grandmother died, but after she stopped baking cookies. Above all, this is a story about cats, not dogs. It is about swimming pools, but only above-ground pools, pregnant with implausibility and rotting leaves. If you are the type of person to prefer your swimming pools heated, with a serpentine lagoon, you will not enjoy this story.
If this was a better story, I could tell you what parting wisdom my grandfather felt necessary to share on his deathbed, which was in actuality more of a death-driveway: unpaved but final. If this was even a marginally better story I could tell you about my grandmother’s face when she locked the peeling yellow front door of her house for the last time. Instead, all I have is the early imprint of a language interchangeable only with objects and ideas. We didn’t have cookouts or pool parties. We had mildew, mathematics, broken light bulbs. This was our language. Before my uncle lost his leg but after he won a Ford Taurus means more than we were happy. After my grandfather died but before he taught us about potentiality in quantum physics, we had nothing.
In plain English, he died of prostate cancer. My family never spoke English, not around each other. We knew the truth. He died of an overdose of memory, more specifically a protracted dose of tampered milligrams administered throughout the last years of his life, when he went back to work to support himself and they took away our fiery tongues. To give you a better idea of where we are, this is before my grandmother threw away her pots and pans but after she stopped sleeping again. This was before my grandfather died, but not much. If that’s not clear to you, you probably like lagoon-like swimming pools.