“Ba dies in the night, prompting them to seek two silver dollars.” ― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold
To not know grief or mourning in at least one of its myriad protrusions in the timeline is to live as an alien god, above all and connected intimately to none. That might be a bit aggrandizing. Wait. Let me try again. To not know grief is to not give a bead of sweat about other people.
I just finished reading “How Much of These Hills is Gold” in which the entire first section of the story revolves around death and a very long drawn out funeral rite of burying the dead with silver coins lest you incur terrible luck and haunting. You might say Zhang really belabors the theme.
“And silver dollars to lay over two white-swimming eyes, close them the proper way, sending the soul to its final good sleep.” ― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold
Coincidences can be creepy. I also just learned that my Uncle Bill passed away. He was almost 77. He died alone from a heart attack. His body was not found until almost a month had passed and his rent came due.
All my memories of Uncle Bill really just boil down to a repetitive iteration of his seemingly grandiose act in giving us (my siblings) silver dollars when we were little kids. Naturally, he became our favorite uncle with this annual generosity. The vision of my old cheap reddish pink plastic piggy full of his silver coins is almost a relic of imagination.
I knew very little else about him. I think he wore glasses. But yes, he bought our youthful esteem with one silver dollar at a time because that is a sound tactic to use on impressionable young children when you’re a distant relation such as an uncle across the border. Mostly, I just know that he is one of my mom’s brothers.
In Zhang’s debut novel, the main character struggles with her broken relationship with her newly deceased father as well as with her surviving younger sibling. She is stuck in a situation where not only is the entire known world biased against her, (read mid-nineteenth century American Born Chinese / ABC orphaned girl in the dregs of the Gold Rush wild west) but also where her immediate kin feels similarly distant and adversarial. Pure wretchedness.
At the core of the story are two very young ABC siblings that seem to both love and hate each other, and who shift as polar oppositely as one can. Each gravitate towards the personalities of their conflicting now gone parents who represent wild adventure and constant motion versus stability and practical sense. Both charge into their binary world which pits immigrants as lesser savages alongside privileged white families as well as females as singularly objects of desire for men. When they reunite, we get a depressing glimpse of how neither of them were ever equipped to find happiness. While I appreciated much about the novel and the interwoven mythologies, I had a pretty tough time with it.
Did I mention the foundation of the novel is built on death, bias and alienation? It’s a good thing I read more than one book at a time as I’ve also re-read “The ABC Murders” by Agatha Christie for a 5th or 6th time. Not a necessarily creepy version of coincidence, but certainly an inspiration, is the well named title and the plot’s not so subtle portrayal of a serial killer using the alphabet and the railway guide as a motif as well as having a disdain for foreigners. But I digress.
At some point, we all eventually experience the super emotionally charged state, that is never really only one thing, called grief. Not singular because grief is a portal. It pulls you across time and mind-space triggering all kinds of thoughts and feelings in multiple forms. Often, multi-faceted grief assembles into a blanket. Whether spacy-erratically woven or vaguely linear in stitches, this blanket can take away minor inclinations to leave one’s couch or domicile.
You know those scenes in films, where the protagonist is depressed or going through a break-up or something and a friend or family member has to basically call them constantly and eventually show up at their door to help them re-establish contact with the outside world? Like in Wedding Crashers, when Owen Wilson is a shut-in miserably pining for Rachel McAdams who is engaged to evil cheating Bradley Cooper. (I’m sorry, it’s the only example that readily springs to mind, please don’t judge me.) This past year+ of mostly self quarantine for the good of humanity kind of leads me to think that maybe there are many people out there who might not be found dead for weeks or months. Folks who perhaps live alone in their apartment or house who never developed the type of relationship with people where they check in daily or weekly. Folks who just sorta get used to their own walls, lose inclinations, mutate ideas of interacting with others into sort of nostalgic still life portraits and then fast forward into some kind of non-existence.
I crave blueberries which are at the shop next to my building. It’s been like five days. I get thirsty and hungry because taking the even shorter 20 foot walk to the kitchen seems far. I keep screens on constantly airing tennis, baseball, movies or shows I’ve already seen, sometimes multiple times, mostly just on mute but sometimes with the volume real low. The days get longer and the sun reigns with more and more length but I crave the dark because then I can feel less guilty about just zoning out into a book or on a screen. I just started watching the end of the latest Smurf movie mostly because I knew I would cry at the end even if I hadn’t seen the beginning or the middle. In fact, I think I only just watched the last 10 minutes...
…Finally, I will myself up and drink several glasses of water and get motivated to read a promising lighthearted mystery before attempting true sleep.
*SIGH* And lo and behold, a mere 6 pages in and yet another creepy coincidence.
“He reminds her of her Uncle Bill: younger than her parents, older than her sister or Theodore. He is wearing a tuxedo with a sort of wide belt the color of Smurfs.” ― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody
It then occurred to me that maybe the universe is trying to tell me to talk to my mom again. You may wonder how I got there. It might be the Smurf thing. Best not to read into it. Maybe the overwhelming sadness I’m swimming around isn’t about me but about someone I care about? I may not have known Uncle Bill very well but she grew up with him regardless of how distant they eventually became.
This poem is for my mom:
Writing to reach out
You are very far away
Decades build deep valleys
Barren from the rails
Inverting cast shadows at every hour
Except at night
Where the bleak is not so obscured
It’s just the same color.
I let the bulbs go out
My world aglow in screens
Wavering, shifting, dim setting
Death is not the flick of a switch
Nor is one’s heavy life so easily brightened
Perhaps a message from space
A vintage radio station crackles
And tells an old story
Nine cats with a mere nine lives
A pair of hands and the will to work
An older brother gazes outside
A younger brother still wets the bed
An older sister takes the reigns
A younger sister closes her eyes
Another brother counts the days
Another brother holds the door
Another sister sneaks out the back
Another brother finally cleans his room.