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{kentucky snowstorm} matt baker Grandma Alabama used to say the world would be a better place if we had evolved to a higher form of bonobos instead of branching off into homo sapiens. For years, I allowed her to repeat herself without inquiring as to what a bonobo was or why we would have been better off as this form of life. In high school I finally learned that bonobos are a group of primates that have all kinds of sex, all of the time. Females rub their genital swellings together and males play sword fights with their erect penises and there is a constant flurry of mounting, screwing, humping, copulating, licking and petting. Across the forest, meanwhile, chimpanzees, our closest genetic relative, raid other monkey clans, kill, torture, and sexually harass one another. It doesn’t take an imagination to see the difference, to see the connection and to understand why Grandma Alabama thought we took a wrong turn in our evolutionary Sunday afternoon drive. There’s not much to say about Grandma Alabama. She was born in Kentucky, was an elementary art teacher in Indianapolis, got married, and gave birth to my mother. Grandma’s husband died in a car accident and she lived by herself for many years until she moved in with my mom, sister and I after my parents divorced. Then she helped raise the two of us after our mother passed. She mostly kept to herself, reading books and doodling in her sketch book. She liked to draw birds and other animals. Sometimes she drew from memory, and sometimes she’d sit in the green and yellow lawn chair on our back patio and draw trees and fences. Grandma Alabama didn’t talk a whole lot, unless she was directly queried and only occasionally would offer to share a story. No one knows how she got the name Alabama. “Alabama,” she’d say, shaking her head. “Never even been to the damn place.” “It’s a mystery,” she’d say from time to time, usually later into the evening after a few bourbon and waters were running the show in her mind, “my name and all. I never did ask my mother about it. She died young, so I guess I never got around to asking her. I bet there’s a good reason, maybe she used to live there or I was conceived in Alabama or something like that. But I’ll never know. I’ll let it live and die that way, live and die a mystery.” Grandma Alabama was a proud Kentuckian. On her deathbed, she said, sipping a Kentucky Snowstorm (cranberry juice cut with bourbon), “When I die, which is soon I hope, take me back to Kentucky.” She’d been diagnosed with everything. In other words, the doctors had no idea what was actually wrong with her but could see that she was obviously dying. Her weight withered away, she struggled with breathing, she refused to eat, all the tell tale signs of impending death that we depend on doctors to accurately diagnose. “I hope I die soon,” she said. “I’m tired of this.” “Any day now, Grandma, any day.” “Well, make it today, god damn it, I’m sick of this.” “Let nature run its course,” I told her. “Run what course? I haven’t pissed in a week, haven’t shit since April, everything hurts, itches or is sore. Nature is a terrible, terrible thing, young man.” “Grandma Alabama, a friend of mine’s Dad has a bunch of morphine pills lying around. He’s supposed to take them for his bad back but he smokes weed instead. You want me to get some and give them to you to take, so that you can, well, put an end to your suffering.” “Go, go, go,” she said pointing to the door, “and hurry back. I’d love to not make it until tomorrow if I can help it.” A few hours later I came back with a handful of morphine sulfate tablets, enough I believed to stop the heart of an eighty-two pound human being. I carefully explained to her what they were, showed them to her and then poured them into an empty medicine vile and placed it in her hand. I told her that I loved her and thanked her for everything she’d ever done for my sister and me. I told her I wished she’d had a happier life. “Shush it,” she shouted, waving her arms in an effort to distract me from my bad introspective poetry. “I’m about to do the most important single thing I’ve ever done in my entire life and you’re sad-songing it about how things could’ve been better. Who cares, it’s over, now get out of here, my dearest grandson and get on with your life and forget all about mine.” “Grandma - ” “Get out and I love you too.” The next morning I got a phone call from the nursing home. She died in her sleep, they explained. “Okay,” I said. “I think we all saw this coming.” “She apparently died from asphyxiation.” “Right, like I said, this has been a long time coming.” “Mr. Mitchum, your grandmother choked to death.” “Uh huh, she’s gone now, the angels have picked her up.” “She choked on pills she had taken. It appears she tried to take a large quantity of pills at one time and choked on them. We are unsure how many exactly, as most of them have dissolved but at least ten and perhaps as many as twenty.” “She’s dead, I got it.” “We are recommending an autopsy and management wants to investigate whether this was a suicide attempt that inadvertently was successful, although not literally of course, since she never managed to swallow the pills or whether to consider this as an accident, for lack of a better word.” “Who cares, she’s dead. Leave it unexplainable, that’s fine by me.” “Mr. Mitchum, most families require certain facts to be ascertained as to bring closure to the loss of their loved ones, therefore ----” “Therefore nothing, no autopsy, no nothing. She’s dead. Leave it open, leave it a mystery, she’d prefer it that way.” |
