On Death
By: Cody Bechberger/ HelloYesToast
I’ve been away for a little bit. Got myself wrapped up in a lot of things and felt like I wasn’t giving my family the attention they needed (still don’t, but that’s a whole other thing). Some of the other things ended, I got some space back in my life, and then there was a death in the family. Don’t love that that’s what it took to get me to write again, but here we are.
It was my grandmother, my Mom’s mom, who I was particularly close with. I say that, and my immediate reaction is to compare myself to others; “were we really that close? We talked a lot, sure, but we hadn’t visited in a couple months before the hospital. And I definitely wasn’t as close with her as my grandfather or Mom…”. It’s as though I can try and talk myself out of experiencing the grief by downplaying the relationship, which feels really shitty the more I consider it.
She was incredibly important to me, as I spent every summer up at their cottage growing up and regularly went down to Florida for Christmas to their trailer with my parents. She was incredible loving and kind, didn’t necessarily care about my interests but would indulge me without judgement. She got me my first Gameboy back in the 90s, and bought the family our first console a bit later with the Gamecube. She exposed me to whole worlds without realizing it and loved that it made me happy.
About 2 months ago, she went into the hospital up North with breathing issues, and while we were all hoping it wouldn’t be a big deal she was also 85 years old. They checked her over and realized her heart was not doing great by any means, ultimately diagnosing her with end stage heart failure. We had months, maybe a year or two if we were lucky, but it was coming. She had two weddings this summer, each for a granddaughter, that she was super excited about. Surely she would make it to those…
About a month goes by, the hospital is in contact with one down here closer to us, and they’re going back and forth about doing a few procedures. Opening one of her arteries a bit more, replacing the aortic valve, and we keep getting told that even though she’s 85 this hospital isn’t concerned. They’ll be able to do it and do it well, so she’ll be more comfortable for the rest of the time she has. And they’re transferring her down! Great!
She was flown down with my grandfather and my uncle, my parents had driven over to meet them and got a hotel room and then a small apartment for about a week. The impression we kept getting was that this was going to happen quickly and she would be discharged and could go home within a week and a half to two weeks. Nice!
Then the delays start. “We need to rerun the tests to prepare”, “Maybe you don’t need one or both of the surgeries, and we’re still discussing the order”, “The tests only run on certain days”, on and on and on. And I don’t want to make this sound like a criticism of the medical system, they took excellent care of her and tried their best to find a solution to help her…but I really can’t help feeling like if someone made a decision a little bit earlier, she might have had longer.
Anyway, she’s down here 3 weeks in total, and the first 2 are completely fine. Beautiful, even. I was able to go over a few days and just exist with her and the rest of the family. We brought my daughter over twice to see her and get some more time with her grandparents. My wife was even saying that the last time we took my daughter over was probably her last good day. She was sitting up with us for a bit in the morning, but was resting for the afternoon, and by then we could tell things were not good.
Hind sight is a bitch like that, eh? In the moment, you see signs like that and just think it’s a temporary low, that they’ll bounce back without issue and get back to normal. They just need to rest and recover a bit, especially since she had her surgery coming up. But then you look back and tell yourself that you saw it coming. That it was stupid to think anything else. Maybe you should have said more, etc etc.
She took a turn the next day, started throwing up blood and needed a mainline IV installed to help make her a bit more comfortable. Fuck. I was initially planning to see her the following day, but adult stuff came up and I pushed it to the day after. My wife even got the day off work and was going to come with me. My Mom calls me in tears saying she only has days left at this point, so it felt good to know that I would get at least one more visit with her. Well… the day I was originally supposed to go comes and we call to check in as I’m heading home from work. “She’s getting worse. We’re pretty sure she’ll make it to tomorrow, but do you want to come tonight?” They put her on the phone, and she’s kind of incoherent. Nothing like I’ve ever heard her before. Slurred words, trouble understanding, but still there, ya know? So I hum and haw about it, ultimately saying we’ll still just come the next day. We’ll be there early, get lots of time with her.
Then I get a text that night from my Dad saying they’re transferring her back up North the next day, when we were supposed to be visiting, but they didn’t know what time yet. “Nobody told you?” Fuck, I was livid. Or, I wanted to be at least. And then my sister’s fiance calls me. It’s like 11PM by this point, we’re finishing up an episode of some show, and then I get told that we’re basically there. She’s probably not going to make it through the night, or at least we don’t expect her to. “They’re looking to make a decision about how to make her comfortable.” Great. So I call my parents back. They had gotten the same news and were on their way up. “How about we see what’s up and then if you should come, we’ll call you?”
I’m frozen by this point. Completely paralyzed with indecision. My wife looks at me and tells me I should go, and she’s right. It’s a half hour drive, my parents would only call me with what they’ve found out in a half hour, so I’d be an hour behind. What if she doesn’t make it that long? So that’s it, I steel myself up, holding back the wave of fear and grief already mounting and get dressed to go…
Anger
I’ve been revisiting Slipknot lately. A lot of old music, actually, but Slipknot in particular stands out. When I was younger, I swear I was haunted by them. I was at a very impressionable age when they blew up, and I was terrified by the way they looked let alone their music. I had a friend with an older brother that liked them, so he did too, and would constantly point out magazines with these terrifying masked freaks in jumpsuits, aggressive font used for their name.
I grew up with a fucked up relationship with anger. From a young age it felt like a very impotent emotion, crashing through everything else I was thinking and feeling and would ultimately go nowhere. I could stamp my feet and plead my case until the cows came home, cry and yell until I was red in the face, but it didn’t change anything. Even if I was angry about something that I felt was right, the world wouldn’t budge for my feelings, so I started to bury it.
Along with that, I feared anything outwardly angry and aggressive. It wasn’t until I was in high school and playing football that I realized aggression could be used in some ways, but when it was mixed with anger I would start to get overconfident and embarrassed if I didn’t do what I was trying to. So I kept repressing the anger.
But at this same point in time I was re-introduced to Slipknot in two ways. First, Guitar Hero 3 and the song “Before I Forget”. How in the hell did the terrifying, angry, creepy fucking band from the front of those magazine, the band that had haunted my fucking dreams make something that was this awesome? This fun to play and listen to? That felt…wrong. But then I realized I was already listening to another of their songs since my football coach had put “Psychosocial" on his mix that played in the weight room. And that song had more singing in it! Was it me? Had I been wrong this whole time, or had it truly been the children all along?
So I bought their recent album, All Hope is Gone and was subsequently floored by how much I enjoyed it. Sure, it was aggressive, there was a lot of growling and screaming which I was still getting used to, but there were also other songs that were more melodic, softer. The anger stopped feeling unproductive, it started to feel…motivating. If this band that looked so outwardly terrifying and angry could be sensitive and dynamic in their emotions…why couldn’t I? I never went past All Hope is Gone and “Before I Forget” until I was in university, and even then it wasn’t beyond their greatest hits at the time.
All of this is to say that I’ve been recently going back to listen to them more. They’ve had 3 albums since All Hope is Gone, and I’ve been enjoying every one of them. I’ve also gone back to their earlier stuff as well. The energy, the anger, it’s motivating to get up and do things sometimes.
The last time
I’m driving across the city in the middle of the night, and apparently going to see my grandmother for the last time is the best time for Slipknot’s most angry album, Iowa. I’ve never been able to get into this album before. It’s very dark, and songs like "Disasterpiece" give it a reputation for being…gratutious. In any case, it felt like the perfect soundtrack for my drive. “The Heretic Anthem” and “Left Behind” are particularly great songs to rage sing along with while driving back the growing panic that this was going to be the last time seeing her. I wanted to be angry, I wanted to rage about the fact that I was almost talked out of coming over, that no one told me about the transfer and that I could have had more time. I had slain the beast that was Slipknot in my life, had contorted it to fit my whims and become a tool as opposed to something I feared, it felt fitting it would be used to fight back the grief and fear that I knew was coming for me at the end of this road. It would make me angry and keep me motivated, keep me moving.
So I park, and I go into the hospital.
I’m not going to go into this part a ton, maybe later on, but for now I’m only going to say that it was a beautiful last time with her and my family. She was still there when I left, heading home listening to the back half of Iowa before crawling into bed and falling asleep, only to be awoken by my Dad an hour and a half later saying she had passed. That was it.
That was a week ago, and it has been one of the longest weeks of my life. Every day after that night has been seared into my memory as the grief jumps on top of me even while doing everything that I can to fight it back. Because I have to. I still have a family and a job, people that need me to be able to keep moving. So I’ll stay angry for now, until the grief is over or I can find the space to let it go.