A failed epitaph
I tried my best and still don't have the answers
We’re telling secrets in the study today. Sit close. I’m feeling conspiratorial, and also willing to twist the knife of memory. We begin with an epithet.
“All women must destroy to create” ~ In my notes I ascribe this quote to Myra Jehlen, but I can’t find the exact source
I have felt the impulse to destroy, to be a destroyer — this impulse lingers, smoldering in the background… perhaps this is why I am drawn to fire and flame, and why I can so clearly imagine the nuclear consumption and explosion happening in the stars…
What follows is destruction and creation: destruction of silence, creation of memory put into words. Like memory, it is circular. Like memory, it is moth-eaten by time. It is not a whole story but it is a piece of a story. There is always more there if we go searching for it.
This is me remembering a failed epitaph assignment, or something like it. And this in itself is a failed epitaph.
Remembering when I was tasked with writing an elderly woman’s biography, as a teen, having been stereotyped as a writer. I was at a Catholic service weekend in a grand Opus Dei communal house. The grandfather clock told the fifteen minute intervals outside the chapel room under the stairs, and since it was a house of women, the priest who came for Mass every day would swish in through the back of the row of ducked heads, robes reaching the ground, pious and hurried after traffic. I could never imagine a priest driving in the long black gown, but he always arrived with his briefcase, which I imagine held car keys. He would often make direct eye contact with me during Mass. I could tell I was being scoped out for Opus Dei at age fifteen. We’d pass in the school hall and his eyes would burn into me. I learned to drop the eye contact, let my gaze skim away, neutralizing the burn, deflecting the energy into some corner, while studiously continuing my practice of piety. I remember asking him in the confessional why being gay was wrong, and I knew that he knew it was me. I had wanted to believe, to accept. I almost did.
…anyway I had been tasked with writing the biography of the elderly woman when I was at this Opus Dei house, over the course of an afternoon, drawing upon the notes of the other girls who had spoken to her that morning. This was all supposed to be a matter of service. We were supposed to capture this elderly neighbor’s life story and deposit it in writing. I did not know what she looked like. I cannot remember why I had not gone to visit her that morning as well. I suppose I had been tasked with another service, maybe cleaning the Opus Dei kitchen, or — I really can’t remember. I do remember the basement where we had been given tiny, dainty, mass-produced purple sewing kits after a workshop on useful skills to acquire, and where the Opus Dei woman had taught us we could wash our hands with salt and olive oil to keep them soft, feminine. These were workshops on how to be a lady mixed in with the service hours. (I still have the needles in their purple case, or rather, my mom does. She keeps them in her wooden sewing basket. My sewing box is a leopard-print hatbox.) Another woman presented a PowerPoint on what modest dress looked like in the modern age. The basement stairs led up into a kitchen where a maid did the dishes (so perhaps I had not been cleaning the kitchen). I always found it odd that a Catholic house of service had a maid. The front of the house had a square archway of dark wood, and a heavy banister heading to upstairs rooms. The other girls were sleeping in the same room. I slept alone in mine.
Anyway I remember I had been tasked with writing this woman’s biography. And I knew I did not know her. The Opus Dei woman who had taught me about the salt and olive oil had put me in a room with a desktop computer, in front of a Microsoft Word document, with the handwritten notes of the girls who had visited the elderly woman. I did not know what they were doing while I was alone in this room, where they went. The Opus Dei woman told me to put the notes together into a story that told this woman’s life story, since she evidently had quite a story to share, and would very much like to receive the gift of being presented with her own story in writing. The Opus Dei woman left. It was very quiet. I looked at the notes. They were sparse.
I tried my best. I got as far as recounting the elderly woman’s favorite color and birthday before realizing this was a truly futile task. The notes were very sparse. I did the best I could and presented the Opus Dei woman with my pages. She was rightfully disappointed. But what did she expect? My friend had just died. What was I to do?
Because of course I forgot to say that my friend had just died. It was cold. It had been warm and then it snowed that weekend. One of the other girls had cut her knee in the snow. One of the younger Opus Dei women was a medical professional, so she had taken her inside to give her stitches. I remember watching from far enough away to not have to say anything. My classmate had sat on the kitchen table (the back one, not the beautiful dining room table), and this woman threaded a needle through her skin. I am now questioning my memory that this actually happened. It definitely happened. My classmate had slipped during our snowball fight in the dark, and her sweatpants were black, and there was blood in the snow, like a dim grey shadow, and then we went inside and she got stitches. Or maybe the woman just cleaned and bandaged her cut. I remember stitches, a needle, antiseptic, something to numb it all. I don’t remember at all.
My friend had died a week ago, or recently, and this service weekend was happening anyway. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have gone. The cold had stayed. My friend’s wake was the evening we came back home. We came straight from the Opus Dei house to the church because my friend was my classmate and therefore the other girls’ classmate, as well, and their friend, as well. The line was out the door. It was so cold. I saw my mom. She had been standing in the cold for a while, enough to set her teeth on edge, and she was compassionate to me and my classmates but I could tell how the cold was getting to her. My mom always was struck to the bone by cold. She was one for walking, and moving, or else for lying on hot rocks in July. Standing in line in the February cold for the dead body of my friend was not good for her.
I had seen my friend’s face, plastic and crusted with morgue makeup. Her hands looked like dolls’ hands. Her nails had been painted light blue, or white. I remember that her nails had been brittle and yellow and purple-bruised when I saw her last, when we were leaned into each other on her family’s sofa, when she had been blind, when she had kept asking me if I was tired, when she would count her fingers in a litany. She leaned into me because she had no strength left in the left side of her body and I had chosen to sit on the left side of her body. I had wanted to feel her weight on me. She told me she had given up a while ago. She asked if I was tired. “Are you tired?” she kept asking, caught in a short term memory loop. I answered every time. “Not really.” “A little.” “Yeah, but I’ll be okay.” “Yes.” I think she asked it of everybody. I think she asked it because she was tired. I tried to tell her how she had been a good friend.
I asked her what her favorite color was.
“Purple used to be my favorite color, but I like green now because green is outside,” she had said. “I wish I could go outside and run around and roll in the grass and be immature.”
I got up to see the family in the other room. I went back to my friend. I sat next to her again. It was just us.
“I’m glad you came back,” she had said.
