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Dreams of a Dad

March 6, 2017 · by Oliver Gray

I startle awake to the sound of a grunt and a meek cry. I drape my arm over the side of the bed to look at the time on my phone, hoping to block as much light as possible from the display. My head aches.

2:13 AM

Lately, I dream of my dad. He’s particularly annoyed with the car parts I’ve bought. Not a single night passes where he isn’t scolding or explaining; imparting, in his own way, how he would have done it, which is invariably not the way I did, in fact, do it.

While the dreams play out in a vividness as potent as waking reality, he almost never speaks. All our communication is nonverbal; grimaces, smiles, shrugs, winks. He’ll often walk some distance in front of me, leading, but rarely looking back.

But last night, he spoke. As he passed an hunk of metal under a spinning wire brush, cutting through 50 years of road grime, he said, “I bet you don’t even know what this is.”

He held it down to my face, so I could inspect it. I realized I was a kid again, standing behind the master as his ever-learning apprentice. The old dirt had given way to brilliant silvery surface below. Pretty, but pocked with years of neglect.

“It’s a brake caliper,” I said.

He smiled. An acknowledgement. I handed it back, so he could return it to its original luster. In that moment, I was as tall as him.

I wake again, this time to a more perturbed sigh and snort. I play the bed-phone-light game again, but this time accidentally flood the room with blue light. The bassinet next to me shifts and fidgets with the hungry wiggles of a newborn.

3:36 AM

Her mom is busy studying her role as Sisyphus, rock replaced by breast and pump. I go downstairs to grab a bottle. The cats barely stir as the fridge turns kitchen night into kitchen day.

In the dreams, we also rarely touch. He wasn’t one for hugs or physical affection in life, either, so perhaps it makes sense. If we do connect, it’s through some medium; my hand on a ratchet as I place it into his waiting, open palm.

But last night, he touched my shoulder. Standing behind me, in a flip of usual place, he reassured me as I torqued down the bolts on a cylinder head. A summer breeze swept through the garage. For the first time in a long time, the tone was not one of lecture, but one of acceptance.

She sucks greedily from the fake nipple. Her little blue eyes flash at me in the dim light, so bright, so wonderful, so overflowing with curiosity. I take the bottle away for a burp, and she screams, but then settles.

Normally, she doesn’t speak, but this morning, she coos and goos a chorus of baby questions.

Normally, she doesn’t touch me, but this morning, her tiny little hands wrap my fingers with a vice grip.

She may never meet her grandpa here, but part of me knows she’s already met him there.

She snuggles into my shoulder a little, drunk on milk and midnight dark.

Forgotten Friday: Sister, Single

March 27, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

A week from tomorrow, my sister will be married.

She’s incredible, as far as sisters go. Sure, she used to beat me mercilessly until I was old enough to fight back, and then continued to psychologically torment my teenage years in that special way only an older sibling can. But our spats, never truly serious, built a foundation for mutual respect as adults, taught us each other’s strengths and weaknesses, gave us insight into each other very few can ever match. Becca is my sister, and yet, on another level, she is me, and I am her.

Excitement buzzes around the nuptials like worker bees returning to the hive, spindly legs covered in potential future sweetness. The stress of months of planning fades, leaving behind a warm, heavy blanket of exhausted joy. My own wedding felt like a drop of water on a hot skillet; beautiful to watch dance and sizzle with frenetic exuberance, but gone much too fast. A few hours on a single day doesn’t seem to do justice to the proverbial ascension into a combined tomorrow, but it’s all we’ve got, so it’s what we do.

A sibling wields a unique kind of love; one born from a nearly identical shared experience. A companion to all those stories lost behind closed suburban doors, a peer like no friend or fiance can be, if only by virtue of the length of the relationship. Not even a very close parent can understand the generational, cultural, and emotional ties that tether brother and sister. Your sibling knows you at your very best and very worst; the haven of your home where you hid your fears and hollered you successes was theirs too, after all.

The wedding will be wonderful. I have no doubts. But a part of me selfishly mourns. A week from tomorrow, the last bastion of the life I knew as a child will be gone.

The house we grew up in was sold years ago, and I can’t bring myself to pull it up on Google Maps, never mind actually drive by it. My cleats have long been hung up as soccer made way for computers and paychecks. My father’s strong hands and voice no longer fill my days with mentoring and humor. All the pieces of youthful vim I cobbled together into the collective tale of my upbringing have melded into the flat pages of the family’s history book, save for my sister, and those tangible, living memories that still swirl around her.

Becca is finally happy, after a long stint of what one could argue was decided unhappiness. Ian’s a good dude, and their future is more than bright. Marriage is what we expect anyway, right? That step that solidifies romantic success, forever friendship, societal acceptance as a lovingly legitimate couple? It’s a major milestone into adulthood, one undertaken by serious adults seriously planning the rest of their lives. Children don’t get married; they shoo it away with cootie-laden ews. To be married is to be mature, or at the very least, brave enough to peek tentatively into the future while holding someone’s hand.

When I walk her down that aisle playing impromptu patriarch, I’m walking us both down an inevitable, unchangeable path. When she says “I, do” the echo will resonate through all our lives, signaling the beginning of an era when we’re all finally free from the fetters of nostalgia, free to appreciate and acknowledge the source while actively moving towards the destination. My dad’s motto was, “never look back,” and now, on the verge of having the freedom to relish in all the possibility wrapped and bundled in each tomorrow, I realize that his words didn’t mean “never remember” but instead “never dwell.”

I mourn, because that’s what you do when you lose something. But the death of one thing often means the birth of another, so my mourning is tempered by the celebration that my sister, the female embodiment of Gray, flowers anew, in a garden of her own tender creation.

A week from tomorrow, my sister will be married.

A week from tomorrow, I can finally let the ghosts of the last thirty years rest, while the spirits of the next sixty come out to play.

December, 1919 – Chapter 1

January 28, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

Welcome to the first chapter of “December, 1919”, a serialized novel written by Oliver Gray. New chapters will be published every Wednesday.

Chapter 1

Face red and flecked with sweat, he held his cap chest-height, scrunched between fidgeting fingers.

“G’d morning ma’am. That’s not to say it’s a good one. I’ve just come from down the docks,” the boy said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as if trying to buy time before speaking again. “I’da telephoned you see, but then I remembered y’ain’t got one. I came running when I seen it. There’s been an accident ma’am.”

“Yer husband…” he said, dropping his head.

Mother’s face completed his sentence. Sickly pale and expressionless, like her spirit had already moved on to join my father, leaving her body behind as a barely breathing husk. We both lingered in the kitchen as seconds sludged by in agonizing silence. I wanted to speak, hug her, lie, conjure some linguistic magic to tell her we’d be OK without him. But instead I just stood, watching the sky turn rotten apple orange in a cloud-muddled sunset. At some point, my mother broke her silence, and left me alone at the kitchen table. Her shock faded into sobs, which, as the night’s shadows sank ever deeper, crescendoed into unrestrained wails. I couldn’t do anything except listen to her mourn and refill my glass.

The boy had offered little in his bumbling description of the events, just a blunt announcement that my father would never come bounding through that door into our home again. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know what really happened, he’d come of his own accord, in a rush, in the face of a situation that would have taken the heart of most boys. The police didn’t come to report his death for several hours, but when he hadn’t come trudging down that side alley after work the previous day like he did with machined consistency, we had braced ourselves for bad news. Part of me felt something change in the energy of our little home that night, a goodbye winked in the streetlights reflecting on the snow, in the quiet mewling of Andy, our alley cat, like the world was letting me know he was already gone.

It was hard to tell whether I’d fallen asleep, or if the bourbon had eloped with my consciousness at some point in the night. Solar knives cut through kitchen, piercing the Philadelphia air, highlighting the emotional hangover that had slung itself over the house. My mother still sobbed, but now her cries sounded pathetic, not angry. I cracked three eggs into a bowl. I wished I could do the same to my brain to relieve the pressure. As the clear turned white against the black of the cast iron and my mind focused back on painful reality, I heard a knock on the front door.

Before I could take the eggs off the heat, my mother emerged from her room, wiped her face, and forced a smile through puffy cheeks. She’d changed into a black dress. Sharp juxtaposition to her normal vibrant purples and blues. “I’ll get it,” she said.

I followed, not wanting her to be alone with anyone quite yet. I could see a man through the side window, but the sun glared at just the right angle to obscure his face. I was wary it might be the police again, or some nosy neighbor that wouldn’t want to leave my mother in peace until she has all the details to share with the church gossips. She cracked the door slightly, hiding most of her body behind the wood and hinges like a shield, and peeked out into the morning.

In perfectly pressed tweed stood my father’s oldest friend, Elmer Green. I hadn’t seen him in years. He’d put on quite a bit of weight, but those wrinkles – the natural tattoos of a man who smiles and smokes too much – gave him away. He took off his hat. “Sorry t’ bother you so early Meredith. And you, Jack. I was in New York. Came down as soon as I heard.”

Mother made some tea. Earl Grey. His favorite. Elmer slurped it thankfully, trying to shake December’s romantic advances. “I can’t believe it,” he said, steam from the cup obscuring his eyes, “Shot? And by the police no less? What did the inspector say? I just can’t believe Andrew made it through that hell for something like this to happen.” He stopped talking when mother’s eyes went dewy. “I’m sorry Mere, it just seems so…unfair.”

It was unfair. My father, the proud and loquacious Corporal Andrew Cooper, served two years in the blood-slick mud of the French countryside. He’d beaten the statistical odds and returned relatively unharmed, save for a shrapnel scar on his right cheek and some memories he’d rather have left on the other side of the Atlantic. He’d faced down Germany and death, emerging from the stink of the trenches victorious.

All to be mistakenly gunned down by some flatfoot who thought he’d make a name for himself by catching a thief. “They thought he’d robbed a bank,” I said, trying to fill in some details for Elmer, “he was lugging a sack of barley. In the dark the police thought it was a bag of money.”

From the police recount, my father had acted suspiciously and refused to step out into the light to show himself to the officer. The officer in return felt threatened, and was forced to fire. This version of the story conflicted greatly with my father’s personality and with what the dockboy had told us. I didn’t know what to believe, except that a man had killed my father and wouldn’t face any justice for doing so.

Elmer reached into his bag and pulled out a stack of papers.

“I hate to do this now, but it’s important,” he said, shuffling through the mess of yellowing sheets. “Before we left for the War, Andrew asked me to witness for ‘im. I’ve got all the correspondence. He was worried he’d never come back from France, and wanted to make sure you and Mere was taken care of.”

“A will?” I asked. It was unlike my father to think so far ahead.

“Of sorts,” Elmer said, handing a careworn, fold-marked letter to me. “More like a contingency. Not officially legal, but a judge wouldn’t be denying these if you presented ’em. He left the house and service pension to Meredith. What little is left of his grandfather’s money is hers, too.”

I couldn’t handle it anymore. I’d forced the idea of his death from my mind when he went to war, imagined my father a modern day Achilles, nearly invulnerable, incapable of succumbing to a force so common as death. And now, after celebrating his return, finally settling back into some kind of familial normalcy, I had to face the senselessness of it all. I thanked Elmer for taking the time to see us, and excused myself before the dam behind my eyes gave way to the building torrent.

“Wait, Jack, there’s one more thing,” Elmer fished around in a separate pocket of the bag for another, much cleaner and official looking document.

I turned.

“He left the brewery to you.”

To be continued…

A Year Without

August 12, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

At this point in my life, given my hobbies and my heritage, I shouldn’t be surprised that a few barstools, beer taps, and feet of lacquered wood can stir my emotions to boil. But as I sipped on a pint of Boddingtons on the same stool that my dad might have sat on decades earlier, all the sediment on the bottom of my soul roiled into a turbid mess of love and sadness. That pint was like any of the other hundred pints I’ve had – twenty ounces of cask-pumped bitter – but it was somehow different, too, like a golden, cascading, liquid echo of every pint my dad had ever had; all the laughter he’d sent into the rafters; all the life he’d lived in Cheshire, in England; all of him that is now in me.

Today marks one year that I’ve been without my dad.

Fifteen odd miles south of Manchester, after a brief jaunt on the M56 and a serene wind through the arbor tunnels of Castle Mill and Mobberly roads, I found myself outside a cottage, all white and black, a pub-turned-piano playing its history across the countryside. The inn, like many others in small English towns, juts perilously into the edge of a sharp turn, like a hitchhiker sticking his thumb out a little too far to attract the attention of passing cars. A faux-gazebo has been tacked onto the front of the building and the main sign has been updated with more contemporary font and filigree, but it looks almost exactly as it did thirty years ago, when my dad used to come here for a pint of bitter, a game of darts, a bit of nightly spoil to counter the daily toil.

We’d arrived midday on a Tuesday, as the pub was changing staff due to a pending sale. The kitchen was closed and it seemed all the locals knew no lunch was to be had at the Chapel House that day, leaving the entire building to us and a flustered barkeep who didn’t know where the previous owners had stored the pint glasses. What would have normally been a bustling bar stood empty, a graven memorial instead of a monument to conviviality.

We have a societal obsession with anniversaries, as if the tangible measurement of one full orbit gives us power, validation, reassurance that we’re alive. A birthday isn’t just a time to remember your origins, but a time to celebrate your victory over another cycle. Many people said to me, and I even said to myself at times, “it hasn’t even been a year” like a roll-over of the calendar would somehow temper my feelings, reset the pain, wipe everything clean by cosmic, solar virtue.

So here’s a year – fully, finally – and nothing feels any different.

I’d never been inside until now, but I felt I knew this place from stories and family legends. Rarely named directly, the Chapel House Inn was the cradle of my dad’s rambunctious zeal, the place he came to life with his companions, became the overflowing fount of energy and fearlessness that I’d known him for my entire life. My dad’s essence had merged with the building, with the bar, with local lore. Stepping through that door, into the tiny front room of the pub, into a past that was mine in name only, felt like ghost-wrapped nostalgia, a physical body possessing a lingering spirit, not the usual other way around.

We rendezvoused with Rhona, the widow of my dad’s best friend and fellow Chapel House haunter. She still lived in Knutsford and knew the history well; seemed to know more about my dad and his adventures as a thirty-something than even me or my sister or my mom. She’d lost her husband, Ken, three years prior, and I wondered why my dad never mentioned the loss of so dear a friend, even one separated by years and careers and continents. She even brought a pile of 3×6 pictures of the six of us – toddler versions of me and my sister with four grinning young adults – little reminders that when Rhona knew my dad, he was almost exactly the same age I am now.

A year, when mourning, is an arbitrary designation that’s supposed to make people feel better after a loss, a token that proves you made it, didn’t collapse, didn’t give in to all the suffering and stress. One year, in theory, marks the last “hard” milestone, claims that nothing from here out is new and if you made it this far, you can make it indefinitely.

I longed for some meaning that I hadn’t found in the rest of his memory, hoped that being there, where I’d never been but my dad had, would stir in me some epiphany, some extra understanding of who he was, and why, beyond the obvious, his loss took so much from me. I wanted his favorite pub to bring equal parts resurrection and closure. I wanted to walk in and see him there, smirking and joking, here, not gone, alive, not dead, my father, not a ghost.

And in some ways, I did. Time, when forced into years, seems linear, unbreakable, unrelentingly progressive. The way we approach life makes it seem like what has been taken away can never be given back, if only because so many years separate then from now. But if you take a moment to let your memories swirl and blend with the memories long-stored in a special place, let all the prosaic blandness of an empty bar whir to life with all you know, and remember, and love about a person, you can, if only briefly, meld the present with the past, be here and there simultaneously, see the one you love raise a glass from across the bar, and wink.

It’s been a year without, but only in a physical sense. This year has been filled with more of my dad than any year in recent history. His memory permeates my every day; his influence guides my every decision. We say “without” after a loss because that’s what makes rational sense. Emotionally, the first year after you lose someone, when you’re forced to face and digest the echo of their life, would be more aptly named a year “within.”

We didn’t stay long, just a few minutes to breathe in the family history and relatively unchanged charm. The soul-sore part of me wanted to relish that pint for hours, sit and try to commune with my father using the built-in Ouija board of musty chair cushions and sagging wood, but it didn’t feel right. My dad was a creature of habit, but never one to dwell. A pint of bitter, a pinch of time, and a punch of emotion was all he would have wanted. And all I could have needed.

Today marks one year that I’ve been without my dad, if I really believe he ever left me.

To live in hearts we leave behind, is not to die

Session #86 – Obituary: Beer Journalism

April 4, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Heather Vandenengel of Beer Hobo is hosting the 86th iteration of The Session. This month’s very a propos topic: Beer Journalism. Special thanks to Bryan D. Roth for playing harp to my fiddle on this one. A more thoughtful follow-up on the topic will be posted tomorrow.

ANYTOWN, U.S.A — It is with heavy heart that we must report the passing of Modern Beer Journalism. In a classic example of the wrong place at the wrong time, he was tragically caught in a hail of bad grammar and poor research outside of a beer blog at 9:42 PM, June 23, 2012. He was 18 hours old.

Modern Beer Journalism (or BJ, as he was known to his friends) was born, brimming and spilling, into a world of digital possibility. While many were concerned that being reared and raised by poorly educated rampant optimists might hinder his development, others noted that BJ bore the intellectual hallmarks of beer evangelist Michael Jackson. Some in the industry thought he may, with time, prove a prodigy, a keg of insight just waiting to be tapped so that all his bubbly wisdom could fill glasses that had been dry and empty for too long. But this world is a cruel place, filled with memes and Buzzfeed quizzes and countless other machinations of time-wasting evil. Because of his low-birth, he was never able to live up to his role model; a bud snipped before we ever got a chance to see what flower might bloom.

BJ started writing at a young age. Much of his work was derivative and trite, focusing on meaningless cultural ephemera and faddish trends du jour. For a period, he wrote nothing but “Top 10 Beers to Drink in Summer” articles, thinking that truly, deeply, passionately, people actually gave a shit about his hastily scrawled dreck. He never seemed able to shake the misogyny that hid deep in his psyche, nor his crippling and honestly depressing lack of self-awareness, probably because he was so drunk all the time. But the fact that he was writing anything at all provoked people into thinking there was potential. His writing was important to the beer and to the people behind the beer. Without the words and stories, the voice of the brewer was like a beautiful ’65 Fender Stratocaster unplugged, unamplified. A few stellar examples of his prose beamed starlight splendor across the internet, and even those outside of the brewed world took note. For a fleeting second, like that moment of beauty before the diaphanous fragility of a soap bubble collides with the hard ground, Modern Beer Journalism burned with vivacious fire.

But like many young people, BJ fell to the intoxicating rush of instant internet gratification. He began hanging out with the curt and oft misunderstood Twitter gang, spending all day retweeting junk, even though he knew it was bad for him. He became obsessed with pointless minutiae; how many hops a brewer could cram into a pint, how much theoretical “imperial” was possible before the beer was akin to paint thinner. His inborn lust for truth was replaced by a lust for attention, attention gained through sloppy, gimmicky novelties and a personality that never flirted with anything beyond the most shallow pools of obvious empiricism. He grew, eventually, to be a shadow of the man he should have been; a cheap facsimile that bore BJs name, but none of the power of his pedigree.

While the police have not released an official statement, many of those close to the family suspect foul play in relation to BJ’s death, and sources tell this reporter that Vani, aka “The Food Babe,” has been detained for questioning. Authorities are also on the lookout for several hundred others masquerading as “writers,” all of who are suspected of having ties the Facebook Mafia, the blurry Instagram Mob, and other seedy organizations.

BJ is survived by a small group of close colleagues, who, with a lot of work and a little bit of luck, might be able to bring honor to his lost legacy, and make the future of Modern Beer Journalism bright. In place of flowers, please read BJ’s birth announcement (originally reported by Bryan D. Roth) so that we may remember him in a time where we just assumed he’d suck, and hadn’t yet been proved right.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

2013 – A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

December 30, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I brimmed with optimism at the close of 2012, having finished the year in the warm and fuzzy embrace of freshly minted marriage, and with the prospects of a cancer-free future for my father tied to an upcoming bone marrow transplant like a curled red ribbon of hope. The outlook was golden a year ago today, for me, for my family, for my life.

But now, as the last few rays of this setting year are about to be clipped by a calendar horizon, all those spots of joy in 2013 that should be illuminated by sunset’s final shine are lost to shadow. I should feel so satisfied, so blessed to have been able to achieve what I did this year, but no light seems to penetrate the heavy black robes that lurk and lurch around the corner of every memory and at the edges of every photograph.

I finished my master’s degree a few weeks ago, but the sugary sweetness of that achievement is sour on my tongue like Belgian chocolate made with rancid milk. I won an award for my writing, the first formal recognition of its kind, but the Richter scale of my emotions won’t register anything below world shaking fault.

I wish I could dig deep into the swirling mess of stomach acid and nausea to find a good word to say about this year – because there certainly were some great singular events and experiences – but it’s really difficult right now. Every time I stick my hands into the bloody guts of my reality, I find nothing but regret and fear and a whole pantheon of emotions I try so desperately to keep locked in Hades.

But life has a way of perpetually trying to strike a balance, teeter-tottering and see-sawing, sometimes wildly, like a poorly calibrated set of scales. I managed 28 years without any major swings downward. Perhaps, in some incomprehensible twist, the universe is pulling me back to center after nearly three decades of steady climb. Not a wake up call necessarily, as I’m already pretty conscious, but more of a baseline, a level set, a reminder that the bigger the light, the longer the shadow.

In the midst of reeling loss, I got to see the posthumous results of loving deeply, working passionately, and squeezing every drop of wonder out of this lemon wedge of life. And not just well written obituaries and eloquent eulogies, but the full cascade of love that falls down so beautifully in torrents, a person’s passing wake that washes over those left behind to purify, to pacify. I got to literally revel in the echo of a fulfilled soul, remember it, feel it, suddenly appreciate it in a way I never imagined possible when it was breathing and laughing, all corporeal and here and now.

I witnessed something in death that I think is often hidden behind the veil of mourning. I saw how one can reach and effect so many, and what even a fleeting relationship or casual conversation can mean as I connected with people who I hadn’t seen or talked to in years to share memories of my dad. I ate and drank and smiled and cried and in my most doleful moments realized that the best people go out with one last ripple of energy, a wave that brings everyone together not out of sadness, but out of admiration and adoration of a life well lived.

I lost two role models this year, but I gained some perspective. I have some tangible goals for 2014 that I’ll work hard to realize, but those are just pages in an ever-growing book. My biggest goal is to live in such a way that my book is worth reading, and that when you close the back cover and place it back on the shelf, you’ll remember who wrote it, and how much he loved this life, despite how unfair chapter 13 might have seemed.

“As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No” – Donne

Hey, Chief – An Essay for, about, and to my Father

December 16, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I wrote this essay as a way to try to stay afloat in the bitter maelstrom of emotions I’ve been drowning in since losing my father. I’m honored that Tin House would consider it high enough quality for their site.

Without further pomp:

Hey, Chief | Tin House

Death of a Man, Birth of a Star

August 19, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

My father died around 3:00 on August 12, 2013. He was 61 years old. He lived more in those six decades than most men could in twelve. If life is measured by brightness and intensity – with weak men an ember smoldering on a stick of incense and great men a blaze feeding on a forest – my father was a supernova.

As his light faded, liver and kidneys unable to hold the battlements against the three year siege from Chronic Lymphatic Leukemia, he saw things. Things that some may attribute to heightened brain activity near death, or hallucinations caused by elevated ammonia levels, or delusion caused by prolonged time in the ICU. Things that others may attribute to gods, or the God, or that shining pre-glimpse of the afterlife pointing the way to the next world.

Some of what he saw scared him. Monsters snarling over his head. Some of what he saw angered him. A mocking, morphing clock. Some of what he saw comforted him. His whole family standing next to him, holding his hands.

But the last thing he saw, that he pointed to with bright eyes, his brown shifting from my blue to the empty space behind me in the sterile sadness of the ICU, is what will twinkle in my memory forever.

He saw stars. Galaxies. A whole universe inside of a tiny room.

The first law of thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. As we reassured him that he could rest and his pain was over, there came a moment where he ceased to be my father, and became only the body my father had inhabited. The energy of his body will return to the Earth, continuing the cycle of growth and decay, forever part of the beauty that blooms and incredulity of the natural world. But if energy cannot be destroyed, where did his mind go? Where is that brilliant soul so full of passion and compassion that was so much more than the sum of his skin and hair and organs?

My wife and I have discussed the “spark” – the flash in the eyes of someone alive and proud and rhapsodic – and what happens to that energy when it “leaves” a dying body. I’m sure that Heaven or Nirvana or perhaps even Valhalla are popular destinations for the purest of spirits, but I’ve never been the religious type. My love of science and tangible empiricism are directly inherited from my father.

Carl Sagan is often quoted for his nod to the idea of cosmic cohesion: “We are made of star stuff.” He meant that our basic elements – the hydrogen and oxygen and carbon – are the same as those found in the sprawling void. But I take it to mean that we’re all connected to each other in ways we might not understand, that our energies echo on in explicit physical ways, imbued in the things we touch and love, on paths that aren’t necessarily visible or measurable by what we currently know but exist in our reality all the same.

The same day he passed, and all that energy dissipated into unknown space, a new shining spot of light appeared in a previously dark area of space. Just north of the constellation Delphinus, just west of the star Altair, a nova burst into life, flaring with such intensity that it can be seen with the naked eye if you look to the northeast on a clear night.

I’d like to think that his energy was the final push this little binary system needed to blast its light across the limitless distance down into our eyes, into our minds.

I’d like to think he’s forever there, winking and smiling, part of a massive power that while impossibly distant, is right there for me to look at every night.

I’d like to think that the best people go on to be more, their energy taken in death, to be reused in birth.

(A full article about the nova can be found here)

RA 20 h 23′ 31″, Dec. +20 deg. 46

Valar Morghulis – Death in Game of Thrones

June 4, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I don’t normally write about pop-culture or TV or movies, and that’s mainly because I’m terrible at following trends. But Game of Thrones (or more accurately A Song of Ice and Fire) tickles my love for medieval fantasy, warfare, swords, and magic in all the right spots. I read the books in a post-injury literary-fever several years ago, and George R. R. Martin’s Westeros lore has been a stowaway on the ship of my brain ever since.

Spoiler Alert: The below has some spoilers, but it’s not exactly running for mayor of Spoilertown. If you haven’t read through at least A Storm of Swords or seen last Sunday’s episode of the HBO show, go read/watch, then come back. I don’t want to be that guy.

I think everyone who flipped/is flipping out about The Red Wedding missed the point. Yes, it was shocking. Yes, favorite characters died in horrible, sort of disgusting ways. Yes, it was all very unfair and how dare a major TV network and a famous author do this to poor, unsuspecting viewers. All that.

But why did we all react so viscerally? Why did a single scene – a minute or two out of an entire season – cause a social media explosion and such anguished outcry from fans?

Because we’ve been trained to expect immortality in our protagonists.

Think about it. Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas kill what, nine thousand orcs each? And hardly even get a scratch? Aragorn falls off a massive cliff and then basically leads the battle of Helms Deep about 8 hours later. I don’t even think he took a nap in between. The trio fight in some of the largest, deadliest conflicts of the entire series where countless non-character humans and orcs and horses and trolls die, waltzing around all invincible, like they’ve been dipped in the River Styx. Frodo has a few too many dates with blades and giant spider stingers, but ultimately, we know he’s not going to die when things are at their most dire, because he’s still got a ring to destroy.

It’s not just a fantasy trope either. Luke and Han stroll casually through volley after volley of woefully badly stormtrooper aim, countless red-shirts are sacrificed to the Shatnerian gods so that Kirk and Spock can escaped uninjured, and James Bond always manages to roll free from that meticulously designed death-trap just before the laser burns off his crotch. Writers use this near-death tension to further the plot, and our mind fills in the details of the story, letting us pretend the hero is in life threatening peril, even when we know it’s just a surface level conflict. But we know, from all our collective viewing and reading experience, that the hero will get out of the perilous situation, somehow emerge from the underworld, unscathed.

We’ve been taught that if our heroes die, the story will die. It’s hardwired into our brains that we need the protagonists to live. When such an inborn rule is violated, and violated so dramatically, we react badly, because it shakes out entire view of the world.

Traditionally, death in literature is a major plot mover. Major characters are killed with significant purpose, to show the pain of true personal sacrifice or to provide a martyr for other characters to avenge. The placement of death is crucial to the narrative structure, either serving as the vehicle for the story (like The Lovely Bones) or a major turning point/start of a final quest for the protagonist (Obi-wan’s death/Dumbledore’s death). Authors traditionally respect the power of death, the weight and solemnity and gravity it brings to the page.

But not George R. R. Martin. He writes with a bladed pen, killing who you least expect, when you least expect it. His deaths are random, senseless, and often don’t support any blatantly obvious plot point. They are brutal and cruel and make you question everything you know about how stories are told. He doesn’t kill the people who seem to deserve death, and has no problem killing characters his readers are rooting for.

Martin understands non-romanticized death. Understands that death has no morality, no ethical base. It doesn’t choose to kill bad people because they are bad, and spare good people because they are good. Death is the natural end of life, the unplanned yang to our daily yin, and as a result, completely random. How many great people have died young from cancer or car accidents or at the hands of some psychopath with a gun, while evil, cruel people lurch around the Earth until they are old, causing pain and suffering for years and years?

The Red Wedding wasn’t written to simply to shock readers, and HBO didn’t make it so horrendously violent just because they’re into that kind of gore. It was done to support an existential theme, to show what life is like during wartime in a country where even a king, his mother, and his retinue aren’t safe. It was done to show that the main GoT characters are all still human, and can die just as easily and pointlessly as anyone else. Martin slams tradition in the face with a warhammer, forcing the speed and finality of death onto readers without any pomp or flashy shows of mourning. His scenes are so painful because they’re so real.

And that’s why everyone lost their collective shit when Robb hugged some crossbow bolts and Catelyn sang the Rains of Castamere with throat-blood accompaniment. Because the scene was so unsentimental, so honest. Because, extrapolated, it reminds us that all the money and fame and power in the world can’t save you from the grave. Because it was a perfect microcosm of what life – and death – really are.

Remember what Valar Morghulis translates to:

“All men must die.”

Beer Review: Dogfish Head Noble Rot

April 19, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

The Earth’s breath swept through the stones as long interred guests howled in disapproval of our gathering. It was a late winter 8 A.M., everything floating in lifeless grey, nothing bragging about the joy of life except for a few bouquets of violet anemones that were propped up next to a sign that read, plainly, “Matthew Leonard Cole.” Leafless skeletal hands reached into the ashen cloud-cover, like some mischievous undertaker had come in the night and flipped all the trees upside down.

Roots above, blossoms below.

The priest, a stranger to us but not this town, stood stoically in his freshly dry-cleaned robes, performing his never ending duty with that bible like Sisyphus with that rock. A red silk bookmark hung from the pages of the holy text, tongue wagging in the winter wind, holding a place of reminder, of memory, of last rites.

Well practiced but unfamiliar, the priest stumbled through an exaltation of Matthew’s life: his myriad but inconsistent successes, his tragically short but intense relationships, the nothing and something and everything he left behind. He did the best he could, having received the scribbled pages of notes from friends and family only hours before, to make Matthew seem like a person who would be missed after this small crowd dispersed.

The priest read and read – those canon phrases buried in Pslam; valleys and walking and shadows and death – monotone to match the grey, somber to match the cold.

My mind wandered, drunk on loss and beer from the night before, and I had a hard time understanding the religion that filled my ears. His words seemed familiar, like I’d heard them before, like I knew their shape and structure, but it felt like I was listening to someone try to explain a complex idea in a language I didn’t know. Or at the very least couldn’t remember.

The few people who had shown I knew through Matt or Matt knew through me – a conclave of our combined social lives. Some had come far unexpectedly, others had come short, full well expecting. They hunched, coats like clerical robes covering sadness, the morning mist gathering on then rolling off waterproof fabric like tears. I counted nine. Nine to remember twenty seven. One for every three years.

Finally, the priest stopped communing and looked at me.

“I believe Katherine has a few words to say.”

I had hoped he’d forgotten, that the idea of this eulogy had slipped away in the midst of the verses, had been carried off by the holy spirit. I fumbled in my pocket for a square of white, my memories of Matt condensed into eight point five by eleven. I unfolded it carefully, reminding myself that he would be doing this for me were roles opposite; were I horizontal and he vertical.

I stared down at the crease in the sheet, one line a little longer than the other, meeting perfectly in the middle.

“Matt asked me to speak for him, but I’m worried that I can’t. I only knew him as a sister and a poor one at that. Many of you – his friends, cell-mates, fellow-trouble makers – might have known him better. But because I share blood, the responsibility falls to me to remember how he was and who he was, when he was.”

The Times New Roman on the paper blurred, deformed and refracted through the water in my eyes. I said I wouldn’t. Didn’t think I could. I folded the paper along the cross and put it away.

“I had prepared something, but it won’t do. It’s too sterile, too formal. Matt isn’t an anecdote, isn’t a punch line to some bad gallows humor. Well he wasn’t, at least.”

Several that had been staring down at the coffin looked up to me now.

“Death baffles me. What does it mean to go away? To disappear from the places you used to be? To leave a house, a car, a life that is full of your things but is empty of you? If our words still appear on paper, if our voices still echo in memory, do we ever really leave? I think Matt is still with me, still in the spaces around me, in all that air that we think is nothing, in the poems and photographs, still lingering like an eternal radio transmission.”

The wind threw a left hook, a massive gust that toppled the sign with Matt’s name, blew the purple blossoms across the graveyard’s tombstone teeth. A few errant strands of blond whipped across and stung my face, self-flagellation for a sister who’d in recent years misplaced her piety.

“And when we go, does our dignity flee? Does it run from this life, this planet, like a scared child in the face of a pillaging army? Or does it persist, angry that it has been dethroned by something as inevitable as death? The Egyptians buried their dead with gold and jewels and all those beautiful things that defined worth and value. I’d like to think we bury Matt today with all the love and spirit he brought to the world. I’d like to think we bury him beautifully, bury him with all kinds of otherworldly riches…

…but I wonder. Death equalizes and strips. The body decays even when encased in gold. Is it possible for a corpse to be regal? Is it possible to nobly rot?”

“Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?”
― Daniele Varè

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