The Hiccup Moment

During the September of my senior year in college, I went on a very disastrous date. The guy turned out to be a dog-hating conservative. I am, under exigent circumstances, willing to negotiate on the political front. Barring the excuse of a previous traumatic experience, though, I really just can’t get behind not liking dogs. To put it bluntly: that just ain’t right.

From the upstairs Thai restaurant, we gratefully went our separate ways after the date, just as it started to rain. I was in no way prepared for the weather and took shelter on the old-fashioned porch of the local inn, already soaking wet. It was then that I noticed I had a voicemail from my dad.

My dad seldom calls me just to check in. I have always initiated check-ins, so unfortunately, when I get a voicemail from him, it’s not often good tidings. I listened to his voicemail under the awning of the porch: more bad news about my grandmother’s health. Her decline was becoming more rapid.

In that moment, already starting to shiver from the rain, I had a very sad and very simple epiphany: there was no more good news coming. There was none left to be had.

In retrospect, that moment was one of the turning points for me in what turned out to be the last month of my beloved grandmother’s life. I think that was the moment when I truly realized she wasn’t going to get better; that the quiet, quirky, intensely intelligent, and immensely loving woman whom I had adored for my entire life was, in some ways, already gone.

When, about a month after that, she did leave us, as sweetly and gently as she lived her life, I still felt like I would break in half from the grief. Nevertheless, that moment on the porch held a very important flash of clarity. It wasn’t welcome, but it was necessary.

I think, for better or worse, I had another one of those moments recently.

Two years ago this October, I got another one of those calls from my dad. His father, who with my grandmother is the heart of our whole family, had been diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis—a word that clanked dully in my head—was six months to a year, at the very best.

The bad thing about living alone is that no one is immediately there to pick you up off the floor when that’s where you suddenly find yourself, wailing. The good news about living alone is that you can sit there on the floor and wail just as much as you want: true, tearing, broken howls.

The fundamental difference in my thinking about the respective health of my mother’s mother and my father’s father goes back to my childhood. Grandma had had several heart attacks when I was still in my single digits. Grandpa had still beaten me down a ski slope into my late teens. Where I always remember her as having been frail, he was always robust. In a way, Grandma’s death had never been out of the realm of possibility. Grandpa’s mortality was, and in many ways still is, a completely foreign concept to me. It does not compute. It doesn’t work. As my sister told me once, we all figured he’d die in a freak ski accident at the age of a hundred and four.

So why, suddenly, were words like “prognosis” and “metastasized” being used in relation to him? Why was that okay? How did that possibly make sense?

I hate it when I can answer my own questions: that the reality of age and illness very rarely is okay, or makes sense, but that doesn’t stop it from happening anyway.

Over the succeeding months, which became a year, which became more than a year, something rather miraculous happened. The cancer responded well to treatment. While still difficult, his reaction to the chemo was not as debilitating as it could have been. He lost his hair and got horn-rimmed glasses, so that when people asked what was different about him, he could say, with the proverbial twinkle in his eye, “Oh! I got new glasses. That must be it.”

Grandpa, feisty and good-natured as ever he was, stayed himself.

And I, stubborn and afraid as ever I was, stayed very firmly in denial.

The realities have been seeping in more slowly than they would have, had the cancer been more aggressive or if he had not responded well to treatment. In that time, I have had to come to realize that while he is still himself, he is also dying. That idea still gives me pause, is still illogical in the greater context of the man I know and love. But it is also true.

Last week, I had one of the worst cases of hiccups I have ever had. It was one of those times where your chest is so tight that when you hiccup, you feel as though your whole diaphragm is about to spasm out through your mouth. The noise you make is not a demure little “hic” but more like a strangled “HURK.”

I could barely breathe, let alone speak, so I did the one thing I know to do: I called Grandpa.

One of his many legacies in our family is his incredible ability to cure the hiccups. You will tell him, gasping and squeaking, that you have the hiccups. He will level his eye on you in amusement and scoff, “No you don’t. Come on, give me one good hiccup.” And more often than not, you will do your damnedest to produce one hiccup as proof and fail utterly. He will grin knowingly, and you will be cured.

Unfortunately for me and my airways last week, his line was busy. As I continually dialed his number, heard the busy signal, hung up and tried again, hiccupping myself into oxygen deficiency, I had a very clear and quiet thought:

Who will cure my hiccups when Grandpa is gone?

If I had been thinking about his illness, I never would have gone near that thought, but my distracted brain brought it to the surface. After I recovered from both my hiccups and the shock of accepting that someday, probably sooner but hopefully later, Grandpa would be gone, I wondered if I would look back on that moment as one of the turning points, akin to my realization on the inn’s porch in the rain. I think that may be the moment when at least a small part of me stops fighting, stops being so scared and so angry, and acknowledges that somehow there will be a world without this person, whom I have spent my whole life loving.

The gratitude for a life, well-lived and well-loved, is an immense thing. Somehow, though, in my experience, the grief for a life lost is louder, at first. It is aggressive and must be ridden out, with the faith that ultimately what will be left is a quieter grief, which will heal, and a very large love, which will persevere.

A world without my grandfather is not one I would choose to live in, but eventually it’s a world I’ll have to live in. It will be a world where every day I think about how many of the pieces of who I am and how I live came from him. It will be a world where he lives in every moment of banter, every deck of cards, every mint julep, and countless other details.

And it will be a world where maybe someday I'll be able to level my eye on younger relatives in dry expectation and smile smugly when they are inexplicably and utterly unable to produce one good hiccup.

If you ask me, that's a pretty good legacy to uphold.

Bullshit

We are, above all things, a card playing clan.

This statement I apply to my father’s side, which consists of two grandparents, a collection of aunts and uncles, spouses, various and sundry cousins (first, second, and some degrees of removed), one great-grandchild, and a cousin from my mom’s side, whom my grandmother has officially claimed as her own—bloodlines be damned—since we all love him to the point of distraction.

Gin rummy is our time-honored standard, as is an accompanying, strong dose of trash talk. My mother reflected once that even after decades in the family, it was still a bit jarring to overhear her sweet, tender young daughters lay heavy sarcasm upon her father-in-law over a hand of cards. He of course had coached us all in both cards and sarcasm, and would rib us joyously and mercilessly.

Sometime in my childhood, as card games caught on at my elementary school, I started bringing home new games to add to the repertoire (Gin was the standard, but a few brave souls occasionally ventured into Russian Bank). Since I had the mongoose-like reflexes of an uptight nine-year-old, no one except my sister would ever play Egyptian Rat Screw with me, and when she did, she became remarkably violent in her slapping technique. The game fell out of favor quickly.

Bullshit, though, was a surprising hit.

The reason the game caught on in our family is that many, many people can play, and there sure are a lot of us. I have a very vivid memory of the first time we played, sitting around the kitchen table in the house where I grew up. Some two or three decks of cards had been called in for the occasion, and we eyed each other—by turns suspicious and smug—throughout the game. At one point, my grandmother, the sweet and enduring matriarch of the lot of us, gently laid down a stack of cards, stating their impossible content. I knew it was impossible, because I was looking at what she claimed to have in my own hand. I opened my mouth and then froze.

Really? I’m about to call bullshit on my grandmother?

Of course, the younger ones weren’t allowed to say "bullshit," but even the implication of "BS" was rather shocking to me, when applied to the grand high queen of our clan. We could trash talk with Grandpa, sure, but the deferential respect we paid to Gram was just as sacred as the sarcasm we used with her husband. My family watched with some amusement as two of my long held beliefs collided: that being respectful to our grandmother was a consecrated duty, and that losing at cards (or, really, anything) was to be avoided at all ethical costs.

Eventually I managed to squeak out in a tiny voice, “BS…?” Everyone, including Grandma, burst out laughing, but I had learned a surprisingly and widely applicable lesson:

Sometimes calling bullshit isn’t quite as easy as you might think.

I received a text this morning from a friend of mine, the only person from high school with whom I am still in contact. We joke that since we became friends during our last years in high school, we have been in love with each other in shifts: whenever either one of us turns up single and starts to think longingly of the other, the other is pretty much guaranteed to have just started seeing someone. I repressed the urge to call him recently when I broke up with my boyfriend, to let him know he should be on the lookout for a new main squeeze. When we did end up talking, I found out—with vague amusement—that he had in fact just started seeing someone.

It’s a strange friendship—one based on a mutual attraction that we’ve never quite gotten around to addressing in the many years we’ve been friends. When we both ended up going east for college from California and his Thanksgiving plans fell through, he came to my family’s Boston branch festivities. My family, of course, fell madly in love with him (I began to wonder if it was genetic predisposition on our part), and the next year he sheepishly asked his parents if it would be okay with them if he stayed east to be with us. And so the tradition started.

On one of those Thanksgivings, he and I ended up walking around Boston for an entire day. We passed a jewelry store, and I said offhandedly that when I was older, I wanted a strand of fat black pearls—then I’d know I’d really arrived (whatever that meant). Six months later, a small package arrived in my college mailbox: a little bag with a strand of freshwater black pearls, all the size of blueberries, which he had bought for me when he had visited family in the Philippines.

It’s no wonder that most of the men I date have had a hard time measuring up.

In college we had talked about how we would get married one day; we’d use our twenties to date all the wrong people and come back to one another when the time was right. I didn’t realize at the time how dangerous a game that was to play: a form of relationship Chicken, where you play along with the banter, refusing to blink first and admit that such a clean arrangement belies a lot of complicated emotions.

I was forced to blink last year when he asked if he and his girlfriend could sleep on my floor while they were in town.

I realized, with some surprise, that in the strictest sense, he and I never really had been together. I’d never met any of his other girlfriends and had always imagined them as more temporary and theoretical interludes than actual people. My claim on him, the bantering future we had casually built, turned out to be remarkably slippery. I brought out the black pearls and held them in my hand. Here was the proof, right? Here was the evidence that ours was more than just friendship, but at the same time never quite a relationship.

Cold comfort, that.

He had broken the unspoken arrangement. He had forced my hand, called my bluff, and made me admit that I had wanted the game to be real. We started with a small pretense—not quite a lie—putting cards facedown on the table and pretending like there might be a relationship underneath someday. I didn’t notice that over the years the pile got bigger, the stakes got higher, and as a result it became increasingly difficult and extraordinarily painful to call bullshit.

When I saw him a few months ago, he single and I in a happy relationship, I felt that old, seductive pull: how effortless it was to be with him, how natural the banter. I flirted with him the way I shuffle cards: easily and without thought. Without thought, that is, until the thought of my boyfriend pulled me up short, and I looked at our interaction a little more closely. It was the same as it always had been—mostly fun and comforting, until either one of us needed it to be real, and then it was just a house of cards.

I realized then that ours had been an inherently cowardly game: there was never any risk in planning a pretend relationship. In that moment I thought of the most gratifying part of my relationship with my boyfriend: that it was real. We had both gone out on that terrifying romantic limb and miraculously found each other out there together. You don’t plan relationships in theory. You build them in reality.

It was quite surprising to me when I broke up with my boyfriend, because what we had built didn’t turn out to be permanent, that I kept that realization in mind and didn’t fall back on the old, comfortable game of pretend.

So when my friend texted me this morning, telling me that he had gone out on a date last night, and that the woman’s mannerisms reminded him of me, which made him like her all the more, I rolled my eyes and thought, “That’s great. It’s also bullshit.”