To Die Alone… Like A Buddha
“I never held my father’s hand, why start now.”
I’m in a cabin by the river, close to Montreal. It’s the thick of winter, the trees are caked in white, snow has silently smothered the ground since morning.
Thousands of miles away, my grandfather, Peter Hand, lies alone, dying under florescent light in some hospital, somewhere in the south of England. He was a sculptor; he sought, and carved beauty with his hands his entire life. He would loathe the sting of luminous light, the way it strips the skin of all complexity.
Peter has four sons. They’re all a drive away from their father, who has perhaps a thousand more breaths to breathe on this earth. Not one of them will go to him, not one will hold his hand as he leaves his body — his crepitated, rusty, joyless body. These were Peter’s adjectives, plucked from emails he sent me over the years, documenting the dull drudge toward death once he entered his ninth decade here.
Peter was a writer too.
When he could no longer sculpt — because his eyes and hands lost their propensity for art — he started to write. Three completed books, two published, all memoirs, of course, all about Peter, naturally. Save one, maybe two mentions of his sons. His offspring were footnotes in his life, if that.
