A Hardening

I learned that my grandfather had died while standing at a sticky yellow pay phone in Monterosso al Mare, looking out over the Italian Mediterranean. Sunbathers filled the beach, lay out on rocks poking out of the ocean, strolled by with gelato in cups and cones. No one spared me a glance, despite the tears rolling down my face. I was just one more American tourist, and the Europeans looked over and through me by habit. Just one more American tourist in a place only recently popular to Americans.

When his funeral took place, I was in Santorini. It was the end of the season in Greece, and the streets of Oia and Fira were empty. The sun, though, was as strong as ever, and the ocean, the caldera, as beautiful. Between those things, a grief-filled event taking place on the other side of the world had no hold on my imagination. My grandfather's dying, even death itself, seemed impossible.

My favorite uncle was the one who had a kind word for everyone, who thought that his nieces and nephews were the smartest, handsomest people anywhere. The summer that he died was the summer that I got married. That summer, I was working hard to get in shape before the wedding. I swam three or four times a week with my future sister-in-law, an ex-water polo player. One night, I was returning from the pool, and had just pulled my car up into the driveway, when my parents burst through the front door and came running over to me. My mom was in front, and her face was contorted. I didn't have to ask what had happened; as soon as I had opened the car door, she said, "Your uncle is dead. Drowned!" He had drowned in his backyard pool. My parents, worriers by nature, had been waiting for me to get home, their grief compounded by their anxiety for me, this nasty coincidence of our contemporaneous swimming. For years after, when I swam I was afraid, not that I would also drown, but that I would see my uncle somewhere there in the water with me. I could not get near a pool without seeing him floating facedown in it.

When he was buried, I was in Kauai. No one had wanted the wedding to be put off; too many people were coming from too far away. No one had wanted us to miss our honeymoon, either, and so we went, and I cried every night. It's a testament to the island that, despite my grief, I still loved it there. Of all the many places I've been, Kauai is still the most beautiful. And yet, death was believable there.

Why am I sitting here remembering these things? What do I want? I don't know, myself. Sometimes I turn over old hurts like sharp stones, almost savoring the feel of the edge in my hands and the tickle of the blood starting to run. Forgiveness, maybe.