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How to Die
A Book About Being Alive
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The first person I knew who died wasn’t someone I knew. Not really. My mother’s grandfather died when I was four, a year or so before my almost-epiphany at the train tracks. He lived in a small building behind my grandparents’ house—actually, a tarpaper hut no bigger than a large garden shed that lacked running water and its own bathroom—and I only remember, when visiting my grandparents, being aware that outside, out back, there was an old man—a man even older than Grandpa—who lived in a shed. My mother’s parents were French-Canadian exiles from the nearby farming community of Paincourt, who’d moved to Chatham looking for better-paying work. I’m not sure they ever found any. My grandfather eventually got a job driving a dump truck for a sand and gravel company, and he and my grandmother rolled their own cigarettes, drank lots of whisky and listened to loud country and western music, and would switch to French whenever they didn’t want anyone else to know what they were saying. But the old man in the shed . . . That’s about it: an old man standing in the doorway of a shack while a grey sky pours down cold autumn rain, and even then I’m not sure my mind isn’t making something up and calling it a memory merely because I’m trying to come up with one. A quick phone call to my mother reveals that he’d worked the bush in both Quebec and around Paincourt as a hunter’s guide, that he could roll a cigarette with one hand, and that they discovered a cyst on his back that turned out to be fatally cancerous. I remember his funeral better than I remember him.
But that’s a lie; an exaggeration, at least. I don’t remember the ceremony. I don’t remember seeing the body (my mother informs me it was an open casket affair). I don’t remember watching the corpse being lowered into the ground. I do remember hot rain and steam rising from the road. I remember suits and ties and dresses and the smell of wet polyester. I remember it being too hot inside the car on the ride there and my jacket being itchy. I remember my mother’s hairspray smelling like my mother, and the beginning of a small bald spot near the top of my father’s head. What else? Nothing else except my mother telling me that I’d been a good boy and we were going home soon. I don’t remember crying or complaining or needing any assurance, but I remember feeling happy when my father took off his tie and handed it to my mother who stuffed it into her purse and the car was moving and we really were going home.
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