Death is the Hum of an Oxygen Pump
It’s been a while since my last post, primarily because of an overly full plate at my job. Sorry.
My grandfather died a little over a week ago. I say this not to evoke pity for me or my family, but because how his death affects me says a lot about who I am.
My grandfather’s passing made me realize how fortunate I am to have the mind of a photographer. Throughout my life, even before I owned a camera, the way in which I view existence has made it very powerful, albeit very sad and lonely at times. Where I think most people take life as fluid stream of happenings and emotions, there are a few of us who key in to certain aspects of a memory or occurrence. Instead of losing the small things in the experience and the “mess” of life, we gain so much more by making something special out of these small things.
I see life as a story; as a series of pictures or a short movie vignette. Sex, for example, is not necessarily about the sweat or the orgasm, but is about the outline of a breast in the darkness or the fleshy curve of a thigh under my thumb. It’s the angles and the light and the pressure. Sure, we enjoy orgasm, but when we’re too old to enjoy sex on a physical level, it’ll be those images that evoke the most powerful emotions. If you have any amount of art in your soul, sex is about almost everything but orgasm.
I experience most aspects of my life in this way. Memories of my friends’ wedding is them, 4 inches from each other’s faces, knowing nothing else in the world but the other face looking at them. A walk in the park is the neat way a tree’s roots upbraid the dirt. A day at the beach is lost in the shadows and beams of light bending over solitary rocks. Every lovers’ quarrel I’ve ever had evokes a lot of pain for me, because more than anything else, I can see a single tear forever tied to the corner of the eye that I loved more than any other eye at that time and place in my life.
Life, to me, is falling in love with a million tiny images every day, no matter how painful or negative the experience.
In any event, my grandfather was in a bad way for some time before his death, so the knowledge that we’d be at his funeral was no great shock to any of us. It doesn’t necessarily make the loss easier, but I think it makes it different. I’m not quite sure how it’s different exactly, only that death seems like less of an insult when you can see it coming, when you can breathe it in and feel its branches and roots spreading throughout your thoughts and your emotions.
A week before he died, I paid a visit to him to say my last goodbyes. He looked very much alive, but it was obvious he was not much longer for this world. Not that I’m a doctor or a psychic or anything, but there’s a very obvious science to dieing in the modern era. For this reason, my strongest memory about this night was the soft hum of his oxygen pump toiling away in the background, laboring to support a broken body gasping for just a slight extension of its expiration date. Even though this oxygen pump was as quiet as it could be, the amount of lifetime it was trying to keep behind an increasingly swollen dyke was nearly deafening.
But alas, the small Dutch boy’s finger is never really enough to keep the dyke intact, and so my grandfather’s life was no longer able to be contained. He died a week later, not with a bang or a whimper
As I drove home from his house in the early morning hours, the rain started to softly fall and The Beatles’ “Let it Be” queued up in my CD player. Hollywood couldn’t have written a more perfect moment. Although the heaviness of this particular moment was a far cry from the rapture of my favorite lover’s kiss, both of these things will forever drift in the ether that is my love affair with this strange existence.
