Generic

This is printed in small bold face text on the side of the pill canister that I am holding in my right hand. I give it a little shake—like a maraca. I’m holding another bottle in my left hand—a familiar one—my amphetamine salts; the backbone of my chemical construction for almost the past two decades. I give them a little shake as well. These unconventional maracas remind me somehow of my grandmother’s death; the death that skinned our family down to a width of only two generations.

            She was cremated. My grandmother’s corpse was ignited in intense heat and rendered into a compactable, smaller shape consisting of sandy debris and small chunks of bone. Or teeth, I guess. Was she wearing her dentures when she went into the oven?

            Our little family gathered, crowded in her living room on her last day. We watched and waited for the jagged, struggled breaths to stop, and looked away politely when her dentures would occasionally slip out of place. This would occur when she slipped out of consciousness, and whenever she slipped the dentures would slide out of her mouth. This was frequent during that last day, when her veins were full of morphine.

            My mother, who had cautiously and constantly cared for her mother throughout the decline, would push the dentures back into place. Knowing, with empathy always, that grandma would be upset and embarrassed when she returned to awareness—if she did. No one wants to die embarrassed.

            Earlier during the gathering of death, or celebration of life—whatever—my grandmother barked a command to summon me.

            “Boy!”

            I recognized she had long ago given up on my actual name and she knew that I knew she was speaking to me. Like a puppy, I went to kneel at her side and grasp her beautiful hand—shrunken, bony, and veined.

            “Boy, what do you want to do before you die?”

            I stuttered, there were so many things, “I’d want, I want, I want to play music in Japan and be famous there.”

            She cackled; a hard, sharp laugh, followed by a ragged cough that she wouldn’t have to be inconvenienced by much longer. We both knew this. I felt that this was a special moment—a moment to define, solidify, and conclude the relationship we had—and it was unavoidable to pass it up.

            “And grandma, what do you want to do before you die?” I said this as I squeezed her hand—her wonderful, lovely hand.

            She started laughing slowly, but the intensity quickly builds until she is almost hollering. The gathering of family is perplexed by this outburst. I hold her hand as she concludes her laughter with a shattering series of breaking coughs.

            “Boy, come here. I’m going to tell you something important.”

            I leaned in, staring at the white film of her glazed eyes before turning my ear towards her mouth.

            “Boy, you’re my favorite.”

            I kissed her forehead, the peaks of her pronounced and gaunt cheekbones, and on her lips. I was unconcerned about the dentures. I told her that I loved her and retreated back to my old room from high school to cry like a head cheerleader, staring at a positive pregnancy test.

            When she was incinerated, or not because she had already left, her vehicle was turned into gravel. We poured most of it under a red maple tree we were planting to honor her, and Tony Cannon sprinkled plastic pigs in the hole before placing the tree, to honor her favorite animal. Remaining small portions were placed in teeny wooden cylinders and distributing among the remaining family members by my mother.

            I shook mine when I got it. My little sister stared at her container; her eyes were wet and capsized. When I shook it, it sounded like a maraca. The gravelly bits of my grandmother’s vehicle—the pieces of bone, grainy sand, and maybe dentures, rattled like a fine percussive instrument.

            “Juniper,” I said with a reluctant moment of realization, “Check it out. It’s a grama-ma-raca!”

            Juniper’s eyes captured mine with a punishing look. They were now a cold wet—an arctic wet.  “That’s not funny.”

            I knew my grandma though, in a different way than most people know theirs, or how my family knew her, and was confident in my statement, “Grandma would have thought that was funny.”