An Acute Accent

A month after the woman fell off the balcony, I start my online Spanish class.

From my desk next to the window, I can look down nine floors and see where her body lay that evening. In its place now are dead flowers and burnt candle holders, left there by well-meaning strangers. But every time I lift my head, I see the body’s outline underneath the orange tarp—my eyes always find the exact spot. I’m compelled to look again and again, recalling how I glimpsed a hand in a pool of dark blood when a cop came by with his flashlight. It seems rude to be learning a new language in the wake of this death. I don’t know who she is and have no idea how or why she fell, but I haven’t been able to sleep undisturbed or walk through my living room without feeling a chill brush the back of my neck.

“Hola!” a voice calls out from the screen, “can you hear me?”

My instructor is an older man, originally from Central America, with a calm demeanour and large glasses. Some people wave their hands while others say “yes” into their microphones. He asks us why we’re taking this course. My classmates list their reasons—travel, retirement, Spanish-speaking lovers—and I begin to panic. I guide my cursor over to the “Leave Meeting” button. I could blame it on bad Internet connection or malfunctioning Zoom. The last thing I want right now is to introduce myself to strangers, to talk into the machine in front of me. This moment becomes gratuitous, a bit too much—being alive is stupid. I cannot understand why I have this body that continues to breathe, to make sounds and be here now: If it’s so easy to die— just lean over and fall off a ledge—then living like this is without meaning. A stone sits on my chest; then I hear my name. I’m flustered, but I unmute myself, “umm…I like to visit Mexico City.”

The body lies on the pavement for four hours.

Yellow police tape separates it from the living, who skirt the night with their lovers, dogs, and unformed thoughts. In the opposite building, anonymous silhouettes on balconies peer down at the scene, asking questions about the body that remains there in the cold, alone.

This is what death looks like.

I realize that I’ve never seen a dead body—this strikes me because I’ve been living with death for the past twelve months, grieving the sudden passing of my close friend and mentor, Don. And while his death ruptured my present, it also pricked at the scabbed wounds of the past, sending me into a deep depression. So death washes its face when I brush my teeth at night, it follows me underneath the covers, it greets me in the morning with dry toast and then stubbornly shadows my daily movement—but I’ve never been so physically close to a dead body, never seen one so bluntly.

When I got the phone call from his partner, telling me that Don had had an aneurysm, it was an unusually warm October afternoon. I was sitting in a café, trying to write. I’d been feeling good about my sentences, and hopeful that I might one day reach the end of my book. I saw the caller’s name on the screen first, and the moment I picked up I knew something was wrong: He’d had a pounding headache, he’d push through and lectured, he’d driven home, he’d made dinner, he’d collapsed into a seizure, he’d been taken to hospital, his head full of blood. I asked if I could see him, but it was too late. The doctors were going to operate on his body in a few hours: cut him open, remove his organs—and put them into someone else.

When I saw him next, he was sealed inside an urn. It was heavy. I held it in my hands and felt nothing. I didn’t get to see him one last time. I think that this was the worst part of it all.

And so it was when my father died decades ago. There were no drawn out goodbyes, no time to prepare or come to terms, no chance to bargain. I was in a refugee camp and he was somewhere else, making his way towards me and our family. One day he was in this world and the next he was not. It was that easy. And the only thing I have is conjecture: his body sinking slowly in the South China Sea when the boat capsized or was shot down.

Even this thought is without any materiality, and can never attain the shape of a man. And so I was left fatherless.

It’s impossible to fully explain the relationship I had with Don. I first met him when I started my Master’s program at McMaster University, where he’d been an English professor for decades. He’d agree to supervise my thesis, and during our first meeting in his office he’d asked if my family knew I was gay. It came out of nowhere as I’d been diligently rambling about books and theory and such. But this was Don—bold and curious, awkward and up-close. I didn’t know this then, and thinking back, he must have had his own unspoken sexuality on his mind. He must have been wondering how someone decides to come out to their family.

Once we had lunch, and he was characteristically charming, folding up his tiny glasses and fitting them inside a small tube, digging his knuckles into his eyes, then hunching his shoulders over and rubbing his upper leg vigorously with both hands. He took long, silent pauses in between sentences. “You’re lucky that your generation can be gay so openly—” he began.

When he came out, we’d go dancing together, and vacation with our partners. We’d tell each other secrets, ask for dating advice, and check out cute guys together. He drove me to IKEA when I needed bookshelves, and had me over for Christmas dinner with his children. Don was a white immigrant from Trinidad, and when he died he was twenty-nine years older than me. He’d been out of the closet for only ten years. He was my doctoral supervisor, my friend, my family. A father-figure.

I lost my father when I was a child, and I experienced that loss again as an adult. They happened in cosmically cruel and similar ways—abrupt, senseless, and much too soon. One death becomes two, and the two were one.

Psychologists call what I experience unresolved grief, where the duration of bereavement is extended, resulting in a range of pathological symptoms: melancholia, anger, obsession, isolation. But what does it mean for grief to be resolved? Didn’t Freud say that the standard course of mourning actually involves consuming the lost object, incorporating it into the ego so it remains forever part of the self? To mourn is to attach oneself irrevocably to loss, even to the point of becoming it.

Buddhists in Vietnam believe that the dead body must be cleansed for safe passage into the afterlife. One tradition calls for digging up the grave and reopening the coffin after three years of burial. The decomposed remains, mostly bones, are cleaned and transferred to a new resting place or cremated. The body requires earthly attention for its transcendental transitions. And mourning does not expire: the designated period of mourning often lasts for years, and the dead can never be forgotten, finding a place on the family altar, invoked every time an incense is burned, celebrated on every death anniversary.

The dead, then, always surround the living, but the soul of the unattended-to-body roams outside the cycle of reincarnation. There are no chants, no meals, no coin in the mouth to help it move along.

Without the rituals done for a body, does my father remain trapped in this world?

And Don’s heart is keeping another body alive right now.

The woman’s body dropped into my life when I’d had two deaths and no body. Of course, her death is hers and hers alone; but it bled into my grief that night and she will forever stay in my story. On the final day of the year 2020, her body was an acute accent punctuating the persistence of death in my life.

For our first lesson, we review the alphabet and the instructor tells us to place stress on the syllable where there is an accent, which is a reminder, a physical mark that pulls weight, making our mouths extend to find rhythm and meaning. We are asked to practice stock phrases: ¿Cómo te llamas?, ¿De dónde es usted?, ¿En qué trabajas tú?

None of us get it right, stumbling over our tongues and halting any possibility of fluency. The stresses don’t land where they should. Then, in demonstration, the instructor asks an older, balding male student, ¿Es usted Casado? He responds, using the template, No, no soy Casado, soy soltero. It’s such a formulaic interaction, and I know nothing of the man and his life, but my chest wells up. The thought of being alone shakes me. The woman who fell enters my mind again and I feel so much tenderness towards the older man and every person sitting inside the tiny, grainy squares on Zoom. This heightened sensitivity to death has also made me more attuned to the mundane difficulties of the living. I have less bravado, I’m less detached. I’m more ready to reach out for comfort.

When class ends, I imagine what it would’ve been like to be in the same room with everyone, to smoke a cigarette with the man during our ten-minute break, to ride the subway home with those going my way and say, “see you next week,” when our paths diverge into the night.

The city is under lockdown, again, and the number of cases continue to rise. I decide to take a walk to catch the brief and elusive January light. The new year begins on a quiet note, but the one that had just passed was a year of death. Every headline was a devastating number, abstracting the magnitude of the lives lost. Every crack in our personal lives, society, and the world exposed and amplified.

We grieve because we know that the most vulnerable will not be protected, that the refuge of our collective security is a fiction. And yet we cannot grieve, knowing that, before all this, we’d already failed to foster life for so many.

In the park, with its patches of dirty, melting snow, women are pushing strollers. A dog barks. A toddler lags behind. The sun strikes through bare branches to land on tents, a whole city of tents with people seeking shelter. The tennis court is empty.

—and suddenly I see my partner, sitting at his desk, slumped in his chair. His head is down, eyes closed, arms loose, unresponsive.

I break into a run, heading towards home. The brown slush splashes all over my shoes and jeans. I’m panting when I enter the building, forgetting to put on my mask. As I exit the elevator, I bump into the custodian. Her cleaning cart stands between me and my door.

“Did you know what happen?” she asks, pointing at my neighbour’s apartment, which has a small police seal over its threshold.

“No,” I say, wanting to get past her and to my partner.

She gestures with her hand for me to come closer and I lean in. She whispers and, with her thick Spanish accent under a mask, I can barely make out her words, “A friend visiting.”

She folds her body, as if looking over a ledge. “Accident. I dunno, police say maybe alcohol or drugs.”

“So very sad,” she shrugs. I nod my head in agreement and squeeze by.

When I finally open the door my partner calls out, “how was your walk?”

A month after Don passed away, I gather with friends to celebrate a birthday. It’s a biting cold November night, and we all share tough pizzas that come out of a stone oven. A, whose birthday it was, had recently suffered a miscarriage. She tears up when someone asks how she’s doing. Her husband, C, puts his hand on her back. We all force smiles onto our faces when she says she’s okay. I think about what it’s like to carry life inside one’s body, but also to hold death, a mass of flesh and tissue that once had a heartbeat. That would’ve had a name. It’s possible for death to have existed inside one’s body too, and to experience its extraction.

Another friend, B, arrives late. He comes in, hugs everyone, and sits across from D, who was his lover for over a decade. They parted ways not too long ago. They are cordial and tender towards each other, but in between them, stretched out across the 14 inches of pizza, is the death of an imagined life together, children, a house, compromises, old age. Everything that was and could’ve been. Loss is materialized in your ex sitting in a chair, picking off a piece of olive from a slice. This loss you can hug, and ask if they’ve seen friends you once visited together.

My partner kisses me gently on the cheek, and all I want is for Don not to be gone forever, to see my father one last time or have a funeral with an opened casket. At some point, I say to B that I’m scared of death, that it has suddenly become real. And I feel weak and blindsided. That I, out of anyone, should’ve been more prepared, should’ve seen it coming. I thought that I knew death and defined myself through it, having read about it in books, written about it in essays, heard about it through others’ experience. And of course there was my own father’s death. But I feel dumb now, requiring an actual death to realize that death is real after all these years. I wonder if growing old is just experiencing the things one already knows. That knowledge does not come from experience, but experience accents knowledge to make meaning that was already there appear.

When my partner and I walk home, we pass a group of young hipsters huddled outside a dive bar without jackets, red-faced, smoking a joint. I see that they have so much experience ahead of them, and from this moment on, the people in my life will die one by one—and there is nothing I can do.

During a later lesson, we learn to count numbers. Uno, dos, tres. When we get into the double digits, I lose track. For some reason, my mind can’t follow them and their replication, even when they are written out in words. All the infinite combinations and possibilities overwhelms the moment.

Frustrated, I look up from the screen and notice that the light of dusk lingers. Only a week ago it was completely dark outside. The days are getting longer. I see the spot where the body was, and nothing has changed.

I think about the morning after the woman fell off the balcony—the entire perimeter was cleaned, returned to normal. The police tape removed and the blood washed, as if the body had never been there. A few people stood around watching their dogs sniff each other’s behinds. One little terrier came by and licked the spot, circled around and wagged its tail. Then, finding nothing of interest, it moved onto the green turf and did its business, the owner dutifully prepared a plastic bag and scooped the shit up in his hand.

And I’m still here attempting to roll my tongue, memorizing digits. Next to me, on a bench by the window, the potted coleus plant reaches its stems of green and pink leaves toward the dying light. On two tips, small white and blue flowers grow in a spike. The flowers bloom because the plant knows the end is near. This is its attempt to reproduce itself before it shrivels and recedes from the world.

In soil, the fallen buds would take hold, turn sun and water into life. But here they lie on the linoleum floor made to look like wood, drying up before I run a rude vacuum over them.

 

Cover Image by Nathan Riley on Unsplash