Dead Weight

Our golden retrievers died within a year of each other. Goldie after Christmas one year, Penny the next Thanksgiving. It was my first taste of death’s iron-blood flavor, and I reacted to it then as I have since—dumbly, unsure of what to do or say or think. Unsure when I can go back to acting like normal.

Penny in particular was a hefty dog, solidly over seventy despite how much we tried to run her in the Texas heat. She was a big dog, even as the lymphomas sucked the life away from her body.

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The next summer was the culmination of our brief cycle of deaths. In Kolkata this time, for Thama, my grandmother.

The whole trip was beastly. Escaping the stifling heat of a Houston summer for the muggy purgatory of Kolkata. Jetlag that kept me up past dawn. A dearth of toilet paper. And our eyes—all of our eyes—tinged with the yellowing knowledge of death. I was fifteen then, and any discomfort was like oil flashing out of the pan.

She did not leave her shadowy room much during our two-week stay. She didn’t leave her bed. I’m not sure I saw her anywhere else that trip. She was week, tiny, fragile: the cancer weighted in her stomach left her rooted to the spot, incapable of extended movement.

One of those nights in Kolkata, when I was the only one awake and couldn’t stand reading any more John Grisham (the only books in English on the shelf), I strayed out to the veranda and watched packs of dogs trolling for scraps. They were nothing, these dogs, these curs, they were beyond waste. They were dying machines trapped in a dying world.

The only noise in the house was the persistent hum from the humidifier in Thama’s room. I walked down the wall and peaked into her room. It had been painted darker than all the others, a chestnut brown, making visibility all but impossible at that hour. I knew her bed was to the right and her servant slept on a cotton mat by its side. Under the humidifier’s band of sound you could hear my grandmother’s breath, stunted, painful intakes that seemed like she was shocked by a ghost every ten seconds.

Eventually I could make out the insignificant form of my grandmother. She was never anything close to large, but age and death had pulled her down with disease till she couldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds. That weight on the dogs was massive, overbearing, pushing hard at your thighs for pets-to-the-head or treats. On my grandmother this weight was nothing.

I closed the door. I stayed away. I slept till three P.M. everyday. There were many difficult things on that trip, and I was one of the most difficult. Now—now that I have a chance to go back—I’m not sure what to expect, how to act. I want my relatives to believe that I want to see them, that I don’t see their country and their relations and their heritage as some dead weight ascribed to my identity without me asking. It’s not. It’s not but I don’t know how to prove that. If all it took was me carrying seventy-five pound bags from Prague to Kolkata, I would do it. One on each shoulder.

But I’m traveling for a wedding this time. Celebrations and dancing, hugs and kisses, and the weight of souls gently, gently lifting up and away from our beings.

I can’t wait.