wrong turn

At the intersection, I could go right and head home — but turning left would take me to the cemetery. Seemed like a meaningless, unimportant decision - both turns would take me somewhere with death haunting the area. Home just felt worse, gloomier because of how impersonal everything was - my aunt asking for funeral costs, my mom on the phone with insurance over hospice care. Death would be found everywhere regardless of which direction I walked.

I turned left. I walked down the road, entered the cemetery. Mom would be at home, wondering where I was, but I simply couldn't. Not today. I walked past the graves, taking care to avoid stepping on any of the inset ones. Was inset the word I meant? The graves with stones in the ground, as opposed to the headstones perpendicular to the ground. The gravel trail led me where I knew it would: the reflecting pond. Turtles lived there, as did frogs. Life amid death. One ecosystem barely functioning amid a gray suburban concrete hellscape. Hellscape definitely was not a word. Although, dictionary websites were updating more and more often in real time. But hellscape shouldn't be a word kids could look up in the dictionary. Although why I was thinking about kids, I - well, I was a kid once who read the dictionary.

Not even that morning, the phone was held up to my grandad's ear, even though he was asleep. He was always asleep with pneumonia, on his deathbed. Mom and her siblings were discussing memories they had of grandad. I felt useless and guilt-ridden, not having many memories of him. Still felt useless at the cemetery now, but it beat being at home with constant reminders of how estranged everyone in my family was. No, here was just me, dragonflies, mosquitoes, frogs, and turtles. The dragonflies dipped towards the surface of the water, possibly hunting or laying eggs. I could hear significantly more frogs than I could see, as they broke through the surface only rarely, some hopping from shore once they noticed my presence, others swimming, ignorant of my human existence or maybe merely unbothered. The turtles were basking on rocks towards the middle of the pond, far away from me.

I couldn't say for the life of me just how long I sat there, staring at lives that thought I might eat them, occasionally slapping and extinguishing ones that wanted my blood for their larvae. Mosquitoes, that was. I hoped maybe the dragonflies were eating mosquito larvae, although I could never tell, merely sitting still watching life pass me by.

By the time I turned right again, the sun was setting. I unlocked the front door with my housekey, and Mom was in the kitchen, but she stood, rushed to the door.

"Where were you?" Mom had tear tracks running down her face, dulling what otherwise I would interpret as anger in her tone.

"At the cemetery."

"How fucking fitting. My dad died." Grandad died while I was out. Suddenly my desire to avoid home felt horribly, profoundly selfish. I missed his last call since he called the home phone. He always called the home phone, hating "newfangled technology". I always thought I would have time to maybe convince him of the usefulness of texting or calling one's cell phone, but now that was impossible. Grandad would never again call, leave rambling angry voicemails when nobody was home or insist upon scheduling a time to complain about Grandma's complaints about the memory care unit he had been convinced to place her in.

I hugged Mom, unsure what else to do in this world that now no longer had Grandad. I didn't know what would happen now, as Mom released me and ran to her room, where her cell phone was ringing. Her sister, my aunt, was calling, likely hoping to rope Mom into funeral arrangements. Mom closed the door to her office, where she would talk in a voice too low for me to comprehend, and I was again isolated in a house where death impersonally lingered over the atmosphere. Death felt like a visitor that was now overstaying its welcome, but in reality it had only just arrived - the anticipation hurt more than the impact, just as the majority of life changes had transitions that felt like a fish carried in a plastic bag at a carnival - one has no way of knowing if they will live out their days dying of boredom in a bowl or a roomy aquarium with seaweed and friends.

I returned to my bedroom, grabbed a pen and opened my sketchbook, which I had left on my bed. I never took it with me when I went out because I wouldn't want mourners thinking I was drawing them. Mourners, because I often spent my time at the cemetery. Now, I guess I was a mourner. That didn't feel real, but again, almost nothing did. Almost nothing felt real. The paper of my sketchbook was not nothing, though. It was smooth, and the pen had ink flowing through it. Dried, slightly stuck, but I could make a mark. I could make a mark, and I did, sketching a turtle without fully recognizing that was what I was drawing until it was finished. Then a dragonfly. A frog. A tombstone. I likely would not be attending Grandad's funeral since I was never all that close with him. Hard to be, when he lived on the opposite side of the country, when Mom had moved to where I have lived my entire life.

Mom would be attending the funeral alone, leaving me with Dad. Which was in practice mostly leaving me alone. I didn't know what to feel, what to do with my numb nonexistent feelings, if anything. Nothing felt real. . Maybe that's just what grief did, took people out of their lives, out of what was supposed to be reality, thrusting them into a world where someone who had always been a phone call or plane ride or two day road trip away was suddenly no longer at the other end of any of that.