Death (long)
25 January 2010
My sister, Taysa, died in a motorcycle accident in 2002. There are some excellent gothy pictures of her online that I didn’t know about or forgot about until I googled her just now. The first two are just thumbnails that don’t go to full-sized images, but the rest enlarge all right. The “memorial web page” linked there did exist as recently as September, but seems to be gone now. Maybe temporarily.
My brother, Mike, asked me last week about my memories of the morning of her death. By “morning” I mean about 3 A.M. Mike was at our dad’s house in California when the news came, and of course my dad was there too, and a couple of family friends, and so today the most commonly recounted memories of that morning are memories of the things that happened to these people. But I was living in Seattle at the time, and experienced none of it. I haven’t written my own memories down before, mainly because it didn’t occur to me to do so, but also because they are so vague. I think the vagueness is because I was alone: no one shared these events, and I didn’t talk about them until later, and so no stories got formed. But I thought maybe I’d write down what I remember now.
To me the notable feature of that morning, and of the week that followed, was the role played by the very boring details of material life. To begin with, there is the matter of my phone and my answering machine. At that time I had an old-fashioned phone, with a cord and everything, and an old-fashioned answering machine, with a tape. (I still have the same phone, but not the answering machine; I have free voicemail now.) I would get calls from telemarketers at all hours, so it was my habit to unplug the phone and turn down the volume on the answering machine all the way before I went to bed. I’m sure I turned the volume that night, but I might have left the phone plugged in. In any case something woke me up at about three. It might have been the phone ringing, or it might have been the clicking and winding of the tape on the answering machine, which was always loud. (Loud enough to wake me up? I think it was the phone ringing. Today every time a phone wakes me up I have a sharp, anxious feeling.)
The point is that I was awake and knew only that someone had called me. I didn’t care much, but since I was awake anyway I got up and went to the bathroom. When I got back to my room I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking, which surprised me a bit: I’d assumed that the call was a machine, or a mistake, and that there would be no message. I almost went back to bed anyway, but it was a strange enough hour for a phone message that I thought I’d be wondering too much about it to sleep well. So I pressed the button.
It was my dad. Everything he said was worked into the gaps between great rapid sighs, as though he were out of breath or constantly forgetting and reminding himself to breathe. He said, “Taysa’s gone,” and then, “She’s gone.” After that I don’t think there were any more sentences, and possibly no more words, but just disconnected syllables in between the monstrous sighs.
I called him immediately and didn’t get much more, except that I should go at once to Mesa, Arizona, the suburb of Phoenix where Taysa lived.
There were many small and uninteresting problems to be solved. Not difficult ones. How do I book the first flight from Seattle to Phoenix at 3 A.M.? I didn’t have an internet connection. I looked up United Airlines in the yellow pages and called them. They have special rates, “bereavement rates” they are called, for situations such as this. They sell you the ticket at this rate up front but afterwards you have to send them a note from the funeral parlor to show that you have qualified. What do I pack? It is warm in Phoenix. Nice clothes for a funeral? How long will I be gone? How long does it take for a Seattle taxi to pick me up if I call it at that hour? Not long, it turned out. How do I let the people at my new job know that I won’t be coming in that morning? I remembered to write the phone number down on a slip of paper so that I could call them from some phone in Phoenix later in the day. I put this slip of paper in my pocket.
I was not at all confused. I was not sleepy and the situation was in no way surreal. There was some sort of instant adrenaline, maybe actual physical adrenaline or maybe a special emotional adrenaline, that kept me perfectly focused and even efficient. This also happens when I injure myself. I do not scream or curse but just get help in the most direct possible way.
I don’t remember what I ended up packing. The taxi driver wanted to chat, and soon I told him where I was going and why; then for the rest of the twenty-minute drive he talked about the chanelling of incorporeal entites, in particular the Seth Material, about which he was writing many books. I wonder what he thought of me and how often he had driven other people on similar errands. People die unexpectedly and then other people take taxis to the airport early in the morning. It must be a situation familiar to taxi drivers.
I wondered the same thing about the people in the airport. I had the impression, which I think is common in these situations, that while everybody around me was living a normal life in the normal world, I was living a different kind of life in a strangely disjunct world, so that although I could see the world in which they lived I was somehow barred from it, like a ghost. But surely people are wandering around the airport all the time because of sudden deaths. You probably pass them every time you fly. I probably passed others that morning. I sat quietly at the gate and listened to some sort of music on headphones. You see people doing this all the time at airports.
I don’t remember one moment of the flight. I got off the plane somewhere and met some members of my family and then we got on another plane to Phoenix. I remember landing in Phoenix and thinking something along the lines of, “Fuck Phoenix,” which is still more or less my position.
Are these worth the name “memories”? There is no story here, just a few images that happened to stick.
More details. Rental cars, hotel rooms, police, funeral homes. We had to find places to eat. We bought many copies of the newspaper with the accident report; I don’t know what happened to them. What to do with all the things in her apartment? Find a suitable store, buy boxes and tape. What to do with her two white mice? I don’t remember. It fell to me to call all the local people in her cell phone whose names sounded familiar to one of us — that is to say, her friends, as close as we could guess — and tell these people what had happened and the date and time of the memorial service. After I had called half a dozen I realized that none of them were going to pick up their phones and I would have to leave messages. Many of them came to the service and I have never seen any of them again.
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