When I turned out the lights to go to bed, I thought I feared the dark, but it was really death.
I felt the Grim Reaper hovering, its velvety hood concealing a hollow facelessness, scythe at rest but nonetheless at the ready. Those first nights after my older brother Glenn perished, suddenly, I trembled in my bed, curled into a fetal position, unable to sleep. Paul, my partner, did his best to comfort me, but my curved quietness had less to do with safety and more to do with the entity that lingered mere inches from my toes.
Slogging away at work in Los Angeles, I received a text from my sister in Florida that Glenn had experienced a cardiac complication in New York. He had been rushed to the hospital. Moments later, she called to tell me he didn’t make it. I could barely understand what she was saying through the sobbing, which made the situation more surreal: If I can’t comprehend what she’s saying, I don’t have to believe it’s real. I stepped outside, where I meandered in the street under a relentless sun; even in mid-November it shone down like an acrid, yellow beating.
At the time, I was nearing the end of the run of a play in which I portrayed a man grieving the loss of his wife, who’d been violently swept away in a flood. He tried to save her—she got caught in the roots of a tree—but the storm waters were too strong, and the roots disentangled her, and she surged away to a soggy death. So, I had already been living in a realm of grief—fictional grief—to inhabit the world of the play.
But sometimes life and art jump tracks.
The show sold out every night, a hit, and because my brother had died on a worksite, required investigations signified that the service and funeral would not happen for at least a week. I walked up and down the stairwell of my house contemplating whether I should tell the team to cancel the shows, feeling my heart rate go up, then down, then up again. Grim chilled at the top of the upmost stairwell, nonchalantly gnawing an apple with a glob of peanut butter on it, winking at me. Annoyed at it, wishing it would leave me be, I shook my head with disgust.
Theatre has been a crucial part of my life since I was 11. Theatre taught me presence and collaboration, friendship, and emotion. Theatre is like a best friend. I have basked in the glory of booking Broadway shows and winning major awards while also sulking in the disillusionment of not getting work or being critically humiliated. Even though it felt wrong—disrespectful somehow—to perform in the wake of Glenn’s death, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why we should cancel shows. Why would I turn my back on my best friend when I needed them most?
So I performed.
The fictional death of the play had morphed into real death, palpable and present. We all felt it. That weekend, Grim meandered around the dressing room, curious about our costumes, our make-up, our rituals. It picked things up, looked at them, put them back down. Smitten with my containers of fake blood, Grim grinned and licked its lips. It smiled proudly at the research pictures above my mirror: floods, destruction, death. When the Stage Manager called ‘places’ and we headed backstage to begin, Grim looked over at me and winked. Break legs, it hissed.
Fucker.
* * *
New York, when we arrived, presented cold, blustery, and gray. Bushels of orange and yellow leaves, crisp as the winter air, blanketed the streets and lawns of my childhood hometown. Seeing family and old friends felt okay…but I barely remember anything, save for the pallbearing.
The church stood on a small hill with a set of steep red-brick steps that ascended to its entrance. Glenn was tall and muscular in life; we struggled to carry that coffin. The air bit with its frost. By the time we eight men finished carrying Glenn’s casket from the hearse, up the stairs, and down the aisle of the church, we were panting and sobbing in little rainbows of light cascading down from the stained-glass windows above.
Carrying that thing, I strained my neck and could feel the wounded sternocleidomastoid muscle—the elongated fibrous band that stretches from the sternum to behind the ear—throb as I slumped in the front pew. I rolled my eyes at the green-eyed, red-bearded priest earnestly imploring God and the angels to guide my brother to his ‘new home.’ It was the same church we had buried my mother in when I was sixteen. I had not been back there since. Everything looked the same, just newer. It even smelled the same. Frankincense and righteousness.
Later, one of Glenn’s friends and co-workers cornered us at the funeral home to give us a play-by-play account of Glenn’s massive heart attack, which he witnessed first-hand. While the doctors used sophisticated verbiage— arteriosclerosis and ischemia—his co-worker used more common terminology: like, convulsing, and, like, eyes rolling back in his head, you know, and, like, tongue flapping, all slumped forward and shit. It was crazy.
* * *
Back in smoky, red-skied LA (fire season) I felt spent, old, and sore. I visited the cardiologist. Not just any cardiologist—I went to Cedars Sinai, to the best fucking doc in the biz. I trembled in the soft white waiting room, palms slick with sweat, while silky white calla lilies bloomed from a crystal vase, impeccably arranged. Grim appeared, knelt to sniff the flowers, its silky robes softly folding and falling with grave, graceful movements. It breathed in deep, savoring the sweet-pungent stench, then turned its hooded head at me and offered a glittery, pitch-black grin. Weary of its shenanigans, I shook my head. “Leave me alone!” I snapped. The receptionist behind the desk said, “Excuse me?”
Inside the examining room, I shed my clothing, then perched on the cold metal edge of the examining table. The cardiologist did echocardiography across my chest, sides, back, and neck. The blue gel slicked across my skin so cold and slimy. The instrument, like a small microphone with a camera on the end, gently invaded my veins. As I watched the inside of my chest cavity, a fuzzy black and white blur on the small screen, tears teemed down my cheeks.
“You okay?” the doctor asked. “Nope,” I said. He handed me a tissue and said, “You look good in there. You’re okay.” Grim hovered over in the corner by the window, gazing out at all the souls entering and exiting the hospital below. I flipped it the bird when the doctor looked away. See? I’m okay. It scoffed, the bastard, vengefully.
Late that night, haunted by what Glenn’s co-worker had relayed, I sat up in bed and yelled “FUCK THIS SHIT”, except it didn’t come out that way, as I was delirious, and so I think I yelled “SHUFFT THIS FIRRCK,” instead, something unintentional and sadly hilarious. Paul woke and said, “What?” Head in my hands, I shook the imagery off, tossing the covers away and stomping down to the kitchen in the dark.
I can never unsee what Glenn’s co-worker so desperately wanted us to see. I can never go back in time and say, “You know what? Don’t tell us. Better if we do not know, thanks buddy.” I stared out the window where we could see a main artery that passed our house. The cars sped by. LA at 3:30am, the traffic just beginning to ramp up. Life, coming and going in speeding colored steel, vessels of vehicular oil. Life outside my kitchen window. Life everywhere: free, alive, moving.
But then one of the cars slowed to a crawl…some beachy-looking pink convertible, like the Barbie car, with music blasting—Lana Del Ray crooning beguiling melancholy. I spotted Grim in the driver’s seat, hood concealing its face, yet I could see the oversized pink sunglasses. It raised its gleaming scythe while passing by, a silk scarf wrapped around it, blowing behind it in the breeze like something only Joan Didion could elucidate.
All of this in late-night slow-motion.
I shook my head, utterly furious.
A few hours later, inconsolable, I decided I’d walk to work.
* * *
The firm is three miles from my house. Headphones in, backpack strapped, I huffed through the quaint, bungalow-laden streets, all flowery and fenced-in. A deluge of emotion, sentiment, tears, and snot sopped me as I walked. Sobs loosed from my throat. I knew, of course, that physiognomic processes were underway. Endorphins, et al. I knew, of course, of the benefits of walking and exercise. We all know! But perhaps I was unaware that walking—the simple act of placing one foot in front of the other—proved such a potent elixir for grief.
With each mile, I opened like time-lapse photography of night flowers blooming. Blasting songs in my headphones, songs that evoked memories of Glenn, my big brother, our time together, good and bad alike, memories solidifying into small pieces, as of a puzzle. Each piece that formed, I found the right place for it, and pressed it snugly into the larger picture, of his life, of my own, of our family, so many of whom had been erased by greedy Grim: Both of my parents, another one of my brothers, and my half-sister.
Drifting swiftly behind me, velvety robes swishing along sun-kissed sidewalks, Grim snickered and moaned, agitated by any progression whatsoever toward healing. Like a little kid that trails behind its papa, restless and whiny, Grim huffed. I ignored its every protestation. Still, it stayed quite close during those first days of grief-walking. Close enough to lift the hairs at the nape of my back.
I did some research and discovered studies in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) that purported reduced rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation, a region of the brain that is hyper-active during anguish cogitation. People who walked through their grief walked toward healing, away from the mourning daze and toward the clarity of recuperation. I felt better knowing this, felt part of the larger world. If I could view my tiny little life, adversely affected by death, through the lens of proven scientific studies, then perhaps I was neither a freak nor as alone as I had feared.
Not every day was a walk in the park, so to speak. There were days when it all compounded and felt like being stoned to death, like old-fashioned execution. One chilly mid-December afternoon, about a month after Glenn passed, I hurried home from work in the half-light. The sky glowed orange and purple, shrouded by puffy gray clouds moving in. Grim seemed pleased with the gloomy weather and whistled a little ditty as he floated behind me.
The rain would fall any minute, and in LA when it rains, it pours. I’m not an umbrella person. I rushed along. Perhaps the rapidity with which I huffed caused the collapse; I moved too quickly and so did my mind—and the grief-fuse blew, like running the dishwasher, microwave, and toaster all at the same time on the same circuit. PLOOPH!
It suddenly felt like I had no feet. I experienced no sensation whatsoever below my knees. Everything pushed upwards: My feet in my knees; calves in my thighs; my head dislodged from my larger body. “What the hell?” I said, slowing down. The spilling grief of loss assailed, guilt that smelled like spoiled milk over what I could’ve done to prevent Glenn’s heart attack…what I might have done for each family member I had lost…the thick glob of survivor’s remorse lodged in my throat like a fist of bitter pudding…all of it lifting me out of my body.
I stopped walking at the corner in front of the Atwater Park Baptist Church. It dawned on me that the reason my vital organs had escaped their rightful place: I had stopped breathing. I must have been hyperventilating so severely from the crying that I couldn’t catch my breath? I was dying from crying? Literally?
I didn’t realize how quickly my heart pounded. I placed my hand on my chest—it raced. Icy sweat poured off my face, fingers numb, organs about to explode out my body, my face wracked with sobs. “What’s happening to me?” I cried out and then tumbled, face-first, into a big Ficus tree. I frantically wrapped my arms around it, as if hugging it, but what I needed in that moment was not affection, but to feel something firm and unfailing against my body.
I’d felt so adrift, a leaf on the wind, a bird in a tornado, that the sturdiness of the tree, and its little chips of bark that broke off, helped to steady me. The scent of wood and leaves calmed me. My chest cavity, pressed hard against the trunk, had found something solid again, and my heart, detecting a surface robust and real, began to slow.
I slipped down the tree and landed with a sad plop on the ground, breathing heavily. “Are you okay?” I heard someone say and turned to see a little old couple standing outside the church staring concernedly. The husband had pink skin, silver hair, and icy blue eyes, a frail gentleman in a rumpled brown suit. The wife, a stout Mexican woman with large dark eyes, wore a flowery dress. As she approached, I could smell her pungent, flowery perfume and it comforted me. “Is you panic attack?” she asked and gently touched my arm.
Breathless, I scoffed: “A grief attack is more like it.”
“I call for you someone?” she asked.
“Sure,” I coughed. “Call the grief police. Have me arrested—I just assaulted a tree.”
“Si, arbor,” she nodded.
“Better yet,” I said, “Call the grief ambulance.”
“No comprende,” she said, sadly.
I wiped cold sweat from my face, imagining what a grief ambulance might look like: a boxy vehicle but with edges soft, inflatable, like a bouncy castle on wheels. The lights on top are ice-cream cones flashing vanilla and strawberry light. The EMTs are dressed in pink fur and the gurney is a big plastic toy with gaudy colors, tinkling with bells as it rolls up the sidewalk. When they lift you into the back of the grief ambulance, there is a tiny jacuzzi-for-one, and the steamy air smells of minty eucalyptus. They lower you into the warmth, and the bubbles soothe your soul, and the tears flow and flow and flow as they drive you the grief hospital, where everyone wears white velvet and overhead blacklights make everything glow and glow and glow.
But there was no fantasy grief relief. No bouncy castle ambulance.
I thanked the kind woman and pulled myself up, dusting off broken bits of bark and leaves. Across the street, Grim floated on the sidewalk, taunting me. Christmas loomed, so too the gaudy holiday decorations, and Grim held a sweet little plastic reindeer that it had torn up from someone’s lawn. Smiling, Grim broke the creature into pieces, SNAP, CRACK, RRRRRIP, then brought each piece to its hood, and sucked it in like sweets, swallowing them fiercely, its mouth a gaping maw of bleakness. I could hear the little reindeer scream as it passed down Grim’s dark gullet. It was all very Grinchy, very Edward Gorey.
“Fine,” I hissed. “You win. Today. Don’t be smug about it, ballsack.”
For the next few weeks, I walked.
I walked and walked and walked Glenn away.
One foot in front of the other, one mile at a time, one too many rocks kicked furiously to the curb. Tears poured, and disappointment hovered in the air as gray green as LA smog, but the most remarkable thing transpired: Grim trailed further and further behind me with each passing day. Was it afraid of the healing? Was it getting bored with me? Looking for new prey to bully?
Then came the day that I looked behind me while I crossed the Fletcher overpass with the LA riverbank flowing below, and saw no Grim, no Grim at all. Certainly not defeated, never defeated, but perhaps my grief-walking, my foray toward progress, had irritated it just enough that it wandered off in search of someone weaker and sadder, a better adventure for its darkly self.
* * *
A little black-and-white photo of Glenn exists.
It must have been snapped when he was about seven. He’s in school, sitting at a desk, wearing a white sweatshirt, and smiling. It’s astonishing to me how prescient that smile is. It’s the same quiescent grin that traveled his entire 49 years with him. Everything he is, and was, lives in that grin, and though it hurts me, now almost year later, to look at this picture, I am happy I have it. Something deeply magical lives forever in a moment captured on a piece of paper, the way it encapsulates a spirit.
It is, in its own way, a tender morsel of grief relief.
When I turn out the lights at night now, I fear neither darkness nor death. I only fear the bitterness of loss that aches so desperately to creep in and ruin all my everything. On those days, I walk. I feel it, I know it, and I walk.
What I would like to say to you now is this: when the grief ambulance doesn’t show up for you, it’s okay. Shrug it off, strap on your cross-trainers, shove a wad of tissues in your pocket, and walk.
Walk, okay?
While you’re at it, keep close to the trees.
Tim Cummings holds an MFA in Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and a BFA from New York University/Tisch School of the Arts. Recent publications include work in F(r)iction, Scare Street, Lunch Ticket, Meow Meow Pow Pow, From Whispers to Roars, and Critical Read, for which he won their "Origins" essay contest. A regular contributor at LA Review of Books (LARB), he writes features, reviews, and interviews authors. His debut novel, ALICE THE CAT, drops May 23, 2023 from Fitzroy Books. Tim teaches writing for UCLA Extension's Writers' Program.