Obit

by Victoria Chang

I understood then that darkness is falling without an end. That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.

The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can’t.

Because he did not die but all of his words did.

Is language the broom or what’s being swept?

His favorite was to write the world in black and white and then watch people try and read the words in color.

I wanted the night person to write in a language I could understand. Breathing unfolding, 2:33. Breathing in blades, 3:30. Breathing like an evening gown, 4:24.

The way grief is really about future absence.

When language leaves, all you have left is tone, all you have left are smoke signals. I didn’t know she was using her own body as wood.

What if my mother never told me stories about the war or about her childhood? Does that mean none of it happened?

The stone is meant to be read from above. What if I’m in space and can’t read it? Does that mean she didn’t die? She died at 7:07 a.m. PST. It is three hours earlier in Hawaii. Does that mean in Hawaii she hasn’t died yet?

Before this other stone appeared, my mother’s stone was still my mother because of the absence around her. The appearance of the new stone and the likeness to her stone implied my mother was a stone too, that my mother was buried under the stone too.

Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese.

I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I pass the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.

The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.

I wonder if, when people die, they hear a bell. Or if they taste something sweet, or if they feel a knife cutting them in half, dragging through the flesh like sheet cake.

This year they sent a spacecraft on a suicide mission between Saturn and its rings. If I could get between my father and his brain, would I too be committing suicide?

The way his fists stay shut, the way his mind is always out of earshot. The way his words abandon his mouth and each day I pick them up, put them back in, screw the lid on tighter.

love so many things I have never touched: the moon, a shiver, my mother’s heart.

Scientists now say that a mind still works after the body has died. That there’s a burst of brain energy. Then maybe she heard the geese above disassemble one last time. Then maybe my kiss on her cheek felt like lightning.

At the funeral, my brother-in-law kept turning the music down. When he wasn’t looking, I turned the music up. Because I wanted these people to feel what I felt. When I wasn’t looking, he turned it down again. At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.

Bodies jump out of bed. Feet leap off of bridges. Hands never leap. They flag people down. They gesture to enhance language. They are the last part of hugging, which the body mostly does. They wipe off the tears that the eyes release.

I’m not sure when I began to notice her panic without the oxygen, in the way we don’t notice a leaf turning red or an empire falling. One day, it just appears, as if it had been there all along.

When reason dies, determination does not. As in, my father is determined to walk at 10 a.m. at a certain pace. As in his body is determined to move forward with or without his brain, which is two empty slippers nailed into the ground.

I blame God. I want to complain to the boss of God about God. What if the boss of God is rain and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown?

No word exists for about to die

The nurse said after, I’m surprised she made it through the weekend. I was surprised she died at all.

A child’s death is worse than a woman’s death unless the woman who died was the mother of the child and the only parent. If the woman who died was the mother of an adult, it is merely a part of life. If both mother and daughter die together, it is a shame.