Deaths in the Families by Gordon Glasgow
Adulthood is a eulogy for missed opportunity, the dirge a painful rhythm of our day to day. I was once a child with such pure, creative vision. I’ve forgotten that state to the point that it’s not even something to yearn for. The acceptable line of clarity has blurred with age, expectations lessen to simple pleasures and small achievements. I never actually had a passion beyond hobbies, never anything that felt like a raison d’être, but I still sense I’ve failed to meet an unidentified purpose. And life goes on.
George called yesterday morning to tell me that his wife died. It was a sudden death, a freak one. She was hit by a car while riding a bike through the city and landed on her — it’s not worth getting into details. There was a silence on the line for some time before I wished my condolences. George lives over 400 miles away, the most I could do was offer a symbolic form of support, an I’m here if you ever want to talk, although I truthfully didn’t know how ‘here’ I could realistically ever be.
There was an eternal silence when George got off the phone. My husband was still in bed sleeping, in his own world, peacefully unaware of George’s wife’s fate. It felt like I had the apartment to myself. I took a glass of water out to the balcony, for some reason the usual coffee seemed inappropriate. I hadn’t been up early enough to hear the birds for quite some time, it was pleasant just sitting there with a glass of water, listening to the chirps, a moment of providence that I haven’t felt in some time. It’s uncomfortably strange how the death of others, some you hardly know, can cause the most peaceful personal moments.
I decided to have some coffee.
They say life is short and to cherish your loved ones, but what if your loved ones drive you insane. It’s probably best to let them go, to free them and yourself. Regrets have and will be felt, the consequence of motion.
A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway.
I met George when I was 22 years old, teaching English in Tokyo. I was isolated from the culture and found it hard to assimilate. It was nevertheless fascinating. I spent lots of time alone but hardly felt a dull moment. What I remember most from the period before George came to visit was sitting in my small room listening to Japanese radio for hours on end, no idea what they were saying, soothed by the various intonations of this hard to grasp language. There were the long walks around Ota City, the area I was living in, looking for street food, sitting on benches smoking cigarettes, listening to my iPod, usually The Doors or Tom Petty. I rarely went into the city center, comforted in the low-key nature of this residential ward close to the airport, enjoying the routine of going from my neighborhood to the school and back again. I lived the life of a local who existed on a routine. Going to the Golden Gai to drink or to Shinjuku for dinner would somehow have made me feel more isolated.
Eventually, the radio and iPod became unsatisfactory friendships. Branching out was easy in the superficial sense, very difficult to a point beyond that. Not many Japanese people wanted to strain their English beyond a getting-to-know-you at the bar. I had one friend named Kenji Matsuhara whom I met on the bus one day, an Ota City local who worked as a videographer, although he mainly spent his time getting drunk while hanging out on the rooftop of his building listening to Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane. Kenji and I would go to the English cinema in Roppongi Hills or to a park to drink beer and film skaters, but no matter how much time we spent together I could never fully get a hold on who he was, at least not the way I could with an American.
One day Kenji stopped answering my calls, and I was alone again.
Missing an American to be friends with wasn’t my intention when deciding to spend a year in Japan. I’ve found that few things that happen in life are a result of intention.
George appeared on a dating website that was designed to set up Westerners who were living in Asia. I was only casually perusing but something about him stood out. His profile mentioned a few facts. He was 28 years old, spending a year working as an events programmer at an English speaking church in Seoul. He was from Toronto, and he loved the sound that Canada had given to the world, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, the Guess Who, his profile mentioned. He looked handsome in his photos, with blond hair, a pronounced chin, green eyes, a light beard. I sent him a message, ‘ever thought of coming to Tokyo?’ And then shut off my computer, listened to Take This Waltz by Leonard Cohen, and then The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band. Canadian musicians had a subtly special quality to them, I thought to myself as I went to sleep.
You just picked up a hitcher.
It was nerve-racking to meet someone from the internet in person. That’s how I met my husband, but at the time it was much less common. I paced around the Kamata Railway Station biting my nails, probably sticking out like a sore thumb. I had lost my anonymity upon arriving in Tokyo, becoming noticed was just something I had gotten used to. Someone tapped my back and I jumped.
‘I’m sorry. Are you -?’
‘Yes.’
After mentally preparing myself for the possibility of Nosferatu, I was relieved at how good looking he was in person. He looked at me with the same sense of relief I had, and we caught each other in our tracks when we both said at the same time, ‘strange isn’t it?’ We laughed together and hugged hello. I began talking to him a little bit about the neighborhood, the ways it reminded me of New York, the ways in which it differed immensely, the ways in which Japan was a place I could never understand, yet also would never tire of trying.
‘Curiosity always beats out knowledge, in my opinion,’ George said as we walked through the streets to my apartment.
‘I would agree,’ I said, trying to remember the fastest direction home.
The ice had not exactly been broken, an awkward tension danced between us. We had said curiosity beats out knowledge, that wisdom was greater than fact, but we just kept asking each other direct questions, giving direct answers. I kept having a fear that I was walking with a limp and George was judging the way I walked, even though I had never had a limp. I was answering his questions without thinking of what I was saying, my mind focused on the direction through the busy streets, the variety of possible affects I could have been giving off. I wasn’t yet old enough to understand how to portray myself when meeting someone, how to show who I was without trying to show who I was, something I eventually learned through experience, not knowledge.
We got back to my apartment and went to my room, he set his small suitcase down in the empty corner. We attacked each other instantly and passionately. The ice had been broken.
No regrets Coyote.
‘Canada’s America if it were more poetic and tranquil,’ I said to George as we laid in bed that night, discussing the differences between the two countries, how I always had shame of being an American even though I was from New York.
‘Huh. City pride and national shame, personal love and familial hatred,’ George responded after I told him that.
‘The more poetic America,’ I said back.
I was itching for a cigarette, George didn’t smoke. He pressured me to have one, to feel comfortable in my own home.
‘I’ve never felt comfortable in my own home, I’m a gay Jew.’ I responded to George.
‘That’s such a shame,’ he responded. ‘Not the second part of your sentence,’ he was polite enough to remind me.
We spent the next day moving through the city as if we were an island in our own world. George really wanted to try Okonomiyaki, a Japanese cabbage pancake with pork and seafood that was a speciality in the cities of Hiroshima and Osaka. I remembered Kenji telling me how there was no good Okonomiyaki in Tokyo, so on our second night I took George to eat Japanese grilled eel, Unagi No Kabayaki, at a small restaurant near Tatsumi Station. George was repulsed by the eel, he told me it made him think of eating snakes, that after every bite he imagined serpents crawling around his stomach, eating his insides.
‘Indiana Jones,’ I said to George.
‘In a way,’ he responded, only eating his rice.
I noticed on our walk home that night that George actually walked with a limp. He saw me stare at his ankle and explained a sports injury he had in college, how he was forever self-conscious of the limp. He said it was after the injury, during his time recovering, that he started to get more involved with the Protestant Church.
‘I found an ethereal beauty in the silence of recovery,’ I distinctly remember him telling me, limping across Tokyo.
He seemed so gentle and precious, with a particular sensibility that made me feel secure. I felt in that moment how the forces of religion had taken advantage of George’s personal vulnerability, his intuitive delicacy combined with physical injury was easy bait for anyone looking to convert the lost. Yet George seemed happy in his beliefs, and who was I to judge? There’s a difference between exploiting people and giving them what they want, a space that isn’t easily defined, and one in which George existed.
There also exists a difference between actions and ideals, of George’s homosexuality in contention with his faith.
‘It isn’t something I necessarily discuss with the people I hang around,’ George mentioned to me on our walk home.
It was quiet for a little while, another layer of ice formed.
‘I’ve been getting into Suicide lately,’ I said to George.
‘What?’
‘The band.’
‘Oh.’ He said back. ‘Surrender.’
‘Dream Baby Dream.
‘I prefer Surrender,’ he said.
We just come from such different sets of circumstance.
It wasn’t until the third day that George told me he had a girlfriend. Her name was Cynthia, also from Toronto, they had travelled together to Seoul for the year to work at the Church. She would work in the evenings and he tended to take shifts in the morning.
‘Convenient schedule,’ I said to him, angered and bemused.
We sat in my room and I lit a cigarette.
‘You know, there’s a lot of pain in greatness.’ George said, before continuing. ‘And that’s not to say that I’m striving for something great, it’s just that in this process of life I’m going through, I can’t make it easy for myself. If I’m going to achieve anything there must be hurdles. It’s not as simple as straight or gay. I have desires that others would disapprove of, that I can carry out without them knowing. Only God knows, only God will judge me, and I can only try to do my best. And Cynthia, you know, Cynthia is a figure in my life that I can’t let go of. I can’t even begin to explain what she’s done for me, the spaces in my life that she’s filled.’
‘And I don’t really want to know,’ I responded. ‘You won’t come out because you want to make life more difficult for yourself for a challenge in front of God?’
‘No,’ George said, frustrated. ‘It’s not that simple. Perhaps I can’t express what I really mean. I do believe that pain is important on the path to any achievement though.’
‘And life for you is something to achieve? Not, well, something to experience? To live?’
The tone of my voice began to get more bitter, the noise level raised. George didn’t answer. I became more frustrated, smoked another cigarette, thought about how simplistic, frankly un-Jewish his perspective seemed to be. But then again, who was I to judge?
‘My life is constructed in a certain way,’ George began walking over toward me. ‘And the way things are, I can’t just “come out,” I can’t leave everything behind. On a very practical level, the responsibilities I have, the people I answer to, they matter to me, they’re not things I am willing to give up.’
‘And I’m not God,’ I said, grabbing his soft hand lightly. ‘So despite my point of view, you should live however you need to. But.’ I continued. ‘What does your girlfriend even think you’re doing in Tokyo? Doesn’t she find it a little weird that you went off for the weekend on your own?’
‘At this point, she’s used to me going off on my own to take little trips.’ George said, with a great deal of shame.
I laid down to take a nap and woke up around twilight with George sleeping peacefully next to me. How weird to have had this stranger in my space, this man from the internet who at the time felt so inappropriately intimate to me, so close in an unearned way, authentic nonetheless. I had dreamed of him stepping onto a large ship in an early dawn drenched with fog, a big smile on his face. Men and women were at the shore waving him away, but the ship was not able to depart.
And we rolled right past that Tragedy.
That night I got a call from family in New York telling me that my first cousin had passed away. It wasn’t a complete shock, he had been sick for quite a while. I had known and accepted when I left to Japan that I wouldn’t be able to make the funeral if he died.
‘How close were you guys?’ George asked as we sat in the kitchen, boiling pasta.
‘When we were young, I have pretty clear memories of us stealing candy from the pantry before dinner, running up and down the hallways of my apartment building, playing tag, games like that. We never really talked past 14, 15, though. He didn’t get along with his parents, he moved to Louisville, random, and became a chef.’
George asked if I believed in any afterlife.
I said I didn’t know, and we sat in silence for a little while. He strained the pasta, it felt like I had known this man for several years. He somehow knew where the strainer was, where the bowls, glasses, and cutlery were.
‘I believe in generational trauma,’ I said to George as we began eating. ‘You know, my grandparents survived the Holocaust, the grandparents before them survived pogroms, were constantly displaced. That struggle, I don’t know, I don’t think it just disappears after death. I think it moves on with each generation, whether through DNA, or naturally through the various attitudes that family pass on. So will my cousin meet an afterlife? He certainly won’t meet hell, but otherwise I could never give a definitive answer I’d be sure of. His energy, his spirit, whatever the hell you want to call it, that’ll move on to someone else, that’ll still exist somewhere, someplace.’
‘In heaven?’ George asked.
‘No,’ I responded. ‘Definitely not there either. But even if I die and everyone else related to me died right this moment, and no one is around to tell of my cousin’s name, or his family’s names, his essence wouldn’t be forgotten, that I can say with confidence.’
‘I do appreciate the non-traditional perspective you have,’ George smiled, grabbing my shoulder and caressing it. I just looked back at him uncertainly, happy that someone happened to be there on the night of my cousin’s death, content in the vague notion that some greater force could have been responsible for that. Vague the essential word.
We lied in bed that night listening to Helpless by Neil Young.
‘Aren’t you upset that you aren’t seeing more of Tokyo?’ I asked him.
‘I think at this point we both know that isn’t the reason I came here.’
I thought about Neil Young and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The poetry of Canada meeting the harsher prose of the United States, the difference between the songs Young took part in and the songs he didn’t. Ohio vs Judy Blue Eyes, Helpless vs Southern Cross, the presence of George in my life vs the presence without him, how I was thankful for the Great White North, how its ease could balance me out.
I held George a little bit closer, this stranger in my arms.
There was a loss of innocence to Crosby, Stills, and Nash after Young had left, their work was good, but something was missing, an essential void drafted from an exit. And even though Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunited in 1988 for a few shows along the years, they were never quite what they once were. The bond was entropic, each of them had changed since the union had formed, the past was distant and gone.
I held George even closer, knowing he was transient, however impactful.
I took a long shower on the morning before George left. We were going to go have breakfast somewhere in the neighborhood, I was trying to think about which cafes would be open, which one George would like the best. As I scrubbed myself, I thought about how much I would miss him, how impossible it would be to sustain a relationship with someone so ashamed of who they really were.
I came back to my room to find him sitting at my desk, hysterically crying, holding his flip phone in his hand.
His father was driving to the store to buy batteries, or maybe it was milk, I can’t really remember. A van was speeding, blindsided him and — it’s not worth getting into details.
My room was full of death.
George rolled onto the floor, I held him for an hour or two, shocked at how surreal this was, wondering if I was in a bad dream. I’d never been present in front of someone who’d just lost a parent, and it quickly became clear that the only thing I could do was nothing, presence alone in some sense sufficed. It was powerlessness epitomized.
‘He’s gone, he’s gone,’ George kept saying, everything else indecipherable.
I packed his suitcase for him. He kept taking things out and throwing them against the wall, and I would just go pick them up and put them back in. I knew it was important not to say anything, whatever came out would be an injustice to his pain. We finally made it downstairs.
Several passersby looked at the spectacle, trying not to make eye contact. It was late April and the tulips had begun to bloom. Amidst the horror and terror of the past 12 hours, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful they looked. We went together to the airport, he was hysterical the whole time. I remember the driver looking uncomfortable but being extremely polite, I remember George’s cross tapping against his chest as he violently shook in disbelief, I remember the Japanese radio playing in the background, in all its tranquility and contemplation, in the various intonations I didn’t understand. The cab driver opened up a window and I swear I could smell the tulips.
I checked him in. The gate agents looked at George with caution as they told me they would look after him on the flight and give him whatever he needed. They looked very nervous as they were saying this.
George composed himself a little bit, we sat down across from each other at a McDonald’s near the check-in where they served items like the Mega-Teriyaki Burger and the Chicken Tatsuta with wasabi and tartare sauce. I went to get a cup of coffee, I don’t know why but I bought George a strawberry Kit-Kat McFlurry even though he said he didn’t want anything. He pushed it to the floor, I didn’t pick it up, a Japanese lady two tables away from us gasped. He apologized. I shrugged.
I asked him what kind of man his father was.
He didn’t answer for a while, before the time to his flight drew closer and he began to finally talk.
‘My father was a psychotherapist, a pretty good one. He worked closely with artists, trying to get them not to repeat the same mistakes over and over in life. He enjoyed giving structure to the unstructured.’ George sniffled, then composed himself once more. ‘He had this client, a folk musician I think, and this guy was really fucked up, but had a big following, was well known in the local scene. My parents were having a lot of trouble during that period. They would scream at each other every night, throw things, break stuff, it was pretty fucking ugly, images I’ll never be able to forget. And anyway, one day the folk singer went into my dad’s office for a session and pulled out his guitar and just started singing, and he sang and sang one long song, without any break, for the whole 45 minutes. And then he packed his guitar and left the office without a word.’
George paused for a minute or two. I got a little frustrated and asked what happened next. I looked down at the spilled McFlurry on the floor and listened for a little while to all the announcements in Japanese.
‘Well, my dad said he started crying after this guy left, he was very distraught. He cancelled his appointments for the rest of the day, said he was sick or something. He called my mom and begged her to leave work early, apparently they had a long chat about all the topics they’d been too scared to bring up, the issues they’d been repressing, the fears they had of trying to move forward. And slowly, from then on, my parent’s relationship started to improve, not without its ups and downs along the way.’
George took another annoyingly long pause, I began shaking my leg a little bit.
‘And the folk singer?’
‘Killed himself two days later.’
George smelt like sea salt when I gave him a hug goodbye. I tried to kiss him, but he didn’t want to. We looked at each other in the eyes for a couple of seconds and I nodded, he turned around, limped away. The weekend was over. The next day I went back to work.
Of the white lines on the free, free way
There was a larger void than usual after George left Tokyo. Nothing, of course, was quite the same. The long walks through Ota City had a tone of routine as opposed to discovery, the excursions for street food were less exciting, more tedious. A humdrum monotony passed over my days at the school, my time in a foreign land. Tom Petty and the Doors were no longer a soundtrack I enjoyed listening to while going from place to place, I preferred something more sorrowful and ambient, like Bryan Eno or Harold Budd. The summer was painfully hot and the tulips eventually died. I saw Kenji Matsuhara a few more times. He told me one day on his roof that he thought I was uninteresting and to not call him again. I never did.
Canada was back in Canada, the American still in Tokyo. Poetry was gone but the prose of life kept on being written, painfully slow, for better or worse. I spent the last month in Japan smoking cigarettes in my room, looking at the empty space in the corner where George’s suitcase used to be.
We kept in touch intermittently over the next several years. I asked him questions about how he was coping with the process of grief, if he was doing alright. Sometimes he would answer, other times he wouldn’t. I remember seeing photos of him and his wife’s wedding, I slowly became an experience of his past, a metaphor for something he continuously repressed.
I spent the day yesterday wondering why George had called me, until coming to a conclusion that was both disheartening and true; although his wife was gone, death set him free.
Last night, I had the dream again of George on the large boat, waving goodbye, people at the dock in a foggy dawn dressed in black and white suits, waving him onward, a couple of them weeping. The boat was able to leave shore this time. I’m pretty sure I smiled in my sleep, a moment of poetry in an ordinary night.