Winter Coat

It was not a big set of stairs from the front door of my Aunt Terry’s house to her kitchen: maybe six to eight steps at best. But I had never tried to carry or push a human being up a set of stairs before and wasn’t sure where to begin.

My aunt had been drinking in the wake of her mother’s–my grandmother’s–funeral all day and was also not sure what to do about the stairs. She leaned backwards on me, the black lycra blend fabric of her blouse pressing on my face. The smell of old basement dust at the other end of the staircase mixed with the smell of her sweat and what I speculated could be a small amount of urine. Her shoulder shuddered with sobs and I briefly contemplated spending the night on the landing between the kitchen and the basement stairs.

At that moment, Aunt Terry tottered further backward, which in turn put my own back against the door we had just come in. I felt goosebumps break out across my back as I trembled with a chill: the sub-zero February winds of Buffalo had been blowing on the metal door all day. I had to get Aunt Terry up the stairs so I didn’t lose my aunt (or any parts of her) to the bitter winter cold.

I leaned my weight with renewed effort into her, bending at the knees and contorting myself into a position I thought would provide more leverage. My aunt is a few inches taller than me and, at the time, outweighed me by 100 lbs. I was counting on inertia to help me out–even if I could get her to fall up the stairs, it would be progress in the right direction.

I had attended my third family funeral in five months that day. The other two–my father’s and my father’s best friend Jim, who I considered an uncle–had been in Phoenix. Their funerals, an unfair thirty days apart, made more sense in the mild Arizona fall: my dad and Jim liked to spend their days sitting in the sun, smoking joints, playing cards, and talking law. We mourned them, sitting outside day after day, smoking and drinking in the orange desert sunsets.

Putting my grandmother in the mausoleum at Forest Lawn in Buffalo had been the coldest day of my life: the wind cut sharp trails against my bare, skirted legs as I walked behind my mother, aunt, and Uncle Ben into the cold marble hallway. Being a long-term desert denizen, I had no coat fit for Buffalo in February and certainly not one dressy enough for a funeral procession: I shivered violently, punished by my lack of foresight.

As I struggled to keep warm and concentrate on the unfamiliar Catholic rituals in the long, grey halls of the mausoleum, I realized the coat I didn’t have was a symbol of my over-all experience with death the last several months. Theoretically, before I went through these losses, I imagined death and grief as something which would happen to me: a bitch-slap from the bony palm of the Grim Reaper across my face. But I was discovering Death was not so heavy-handed. Dealing with death was dealing with the winter coat I never had: every day, I suffered viscerally because of the pure absence of something I wished so badly wasn’t gone.

Suddenly, I heard my Aunt gasp: we had made it to the top of the stairs. She turned and threw her arms around me, crying again. I really had no idea how I managed to make it that far.