Late middle age has crept up on me, and I can still honestly say it is the most terrifying nightmare I've ever had. In it, I am at a wake for my maternal grandparents. In reality, my grandmother died in the mid 1970s and my grandfather, years before her, in the mid-1930s.
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| Image by Teece Aronin |
At the wake, my grandparents are laid out in a wooden double coffin that looks oddly similar to a piano crate. My grandmother, looking like the 86-year-old she was when she died, is dressed in a snow-white wedding gown. My grandfather appears to be a young man, in keeping with his early death while still in his forties. Although he was not in the military that I know of, he is dressed in a muddy, wool, World War I uniform. It seems he died in battle and is being buried in the uniform he was wearing when killed. His hat lies under his hands which are folded across his stomach. His face and body appear to be those of a worn and battered store mannequin, hard to the touch with telltale chips all over.
The room is filled with people coming to pay their respects, and suddenly the crowd parts to reveal my grandmother, padding around barefooted. Her wedding gown is gaping in the back like a hospital gown, and she is dragging an IV pole around with her. I look to the piano crate/coffin to see that my grandfather is no longer there either. I'm both shocked and terrified, thinking that if my grandmother could rise from the dead, hop out of a combination piano crate and coffin and scamper off to join the party, there was no telling what my grandfather was up to.
Then a voice, a sort of Hercule Poirot presence, makes an announcement. He tells the crowd that my grandfather's corpse has been stolen and that both thief and corpse are still somewhere on the premises.
Like someone who has fought her way to the surface of a deep and murky pond, I smash back into wakefulness. I am shaken but confident that my grandparents are securely ensconced, side by side in the cemetery - and not in one huge double-sized grave - just two nice regular-sized graves - as any long-dead married couple should be.
I love men, but like unrefrigerated mayo at a Fourth of July picnic, men don't love me back.
I'm still sorting out an experience where there was enough of what I can only call malevolent relationship weirdness going on that for just a minute, I wondered if it was my fault.
Was it my fault that after nearly a year of dating a man, he told me something jaw-droppingly "surprising" about himself (no, he wasn't married) followed by his unilateral decision that this issue was too big an obstacle for a continued relationship? And all just one week after encouraging me to be freer with him?
When he told me all this I cleverly pointed out: "But this is just one week after you encouraged me to be freer with you."
It seems that when I became freer with him, I became happier with him and we couldn't have that in part because the surprise he'd just shared, aka the bomb he'd just dropped, might not be conducive to my continued happiness.
When asked, "Why didn't you tell me this sooner?" he replied, "Because you couldn't have handled it sooner."
Interesting how Jack Nicholson here knew what I couldn't handle when I'd handled much bigger bombs from much better men.
"What do you want to say to me?" he asked, dipping his head tenderly to one side so that it appeared he really cared.
"I have nothing to say to you," I replied.
"Well, if you did have something to say to me, what would it be?" he coaxed.
I won't quote myself here because my response was lengthy and contained a lot of Fs.
He smiled and said he understood.
It would be a huge leap for me to imagine how this man could profess to know what I could or could not deal with much less understand how I felt. For me it had as much to do with the deceit I perceived as the revelation itself.
And that's where I come in again: Was this somehow my fault?
Maybe it was and maybe this is the reason: Maybe I just happened to attract a man who knew not that his secret was something I couldn't handle, but that it was something I should never have to handle. And instead of being open with it, or better yet, not pursuing me in the first place, he helped himself to almost a year with me under false pretenses.
In short, maybe I'm the reason because I'm the one who just happened to attract a fraud.
