Geneva the Ghost
My grandmother, Geneva, died in 2004. She was 85.
At the time, I was 12 years old and ascending a monumental dune of depression that would go on to eclipse the rest of my youth. My father’s stress had transmuted into wild, boiling rage — at himself, his relatives, his marriage. My older brother’s alcoholism was becoming ugly and vicious, a rinse-and-repeat cycle of failure and instability that had turned our home into a minefield. Money was tight, tensions were high, nobody could agree on anything. I don’t remember much else about this time other than I was desperately grateful to escape it.
In the last few weeks of her life, I went with my dad to visit Geneva in hospice. It was sunny and unusually warm for the season. I sat with my back to the big pane window and silently watched my father hold his mother’s hand. He feebly recited Psalm 23 from her Bible as if it was the only thing he knew how to do in the moment. My school picture was the bookmark. The sun was setting, and for a few minutes the room caught the most brilliant kaleidoscope of caramel sunlight and dappled shadows onto its stark, bleached, sand dollar walls.
The sudden bath of orange lifted my father’s shoulders like sails and the lilies seemed to lift their limp, drooping necks alongside him. And it felt like the Divine had suddenly appeared, shimmering in the margins, kissing Geneva’s cheeks and placing pearls on her eyelids.
I thought to myself how beautiful it was that this miracle occurred every evening in her room, and how comforting it might have been.
That was the last time I saw her, and it remains my most vivid memory of her. She had already lived a full life by the time I was born. I never got to know Geneva as a person. I remember her rosy, sugared Kentucky accent, but none of what she actually said. I mostly have old home videos and memories of the spaces I shared with her: her house, her pantry, her collection of bells, her living room with the TV on the floor, her slim cigarettes, the sound of her clock, the smell of her closet, her hospice room flooded in light.
My grief for my grandmother is obscured behind a veil. It’s an amalgamation of blurry memories from a chaotic childhood. I grieve the fact that I never got to know her, only the objects and people surrounding the both of us. Her ghost is with me always, in the way I hold a sewing needle and collect knickknacks and pronounce certain words, but it is a two-way mirror. I sift through the residue of other people’s stories hoping to see in.
There is a perfume that comes close to piercing this feeling.
The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside You by Death and Floral seems to have an unnerving effect on many people, reminding them of hospital rooms and the sterile, modern ritual of death. Many people choose to avoid it for this reason.
It’s a fragrance that feels more conceptual than conceivably wearable, although it does contain a sizable dose of vanilla. My first impression was that it smelled vaguely like a hospice room and the inside of a coat closet. It placed me firmly, uncomfortably, back in the chair by the big window where I witnessed my father’s grief and held it in silence.
The more I’ve sat with it over time, the more it reminds me of the smell of Geneva’s house as well. It crawls up into her attic and blows the dust from the memory boxes where she lives behind the mirror. I can’t help but picture a series of images stacked on top of one another; not of her, but of my own hazy half-formed memories of her, all printed on glass and held up against the sky.
The People You Love is a gauzy strand of residue; earthly evidence of a person departed and the things they leave behind. A strange miasma of sterile hospital equipment, fresh flowers, clothes that aren’t yours, dried tears, stale cigarettes, boxes of old photos, dust on a nightstand. It’s been lived in by someone else — someone familiar but not acutely known. You follow it down a cold, endless hallway of beeping machines and church bells, daytime talk shows and soft hymns, sheets billowing on the clothesline on Sunday morning.
Great piece! Lovely writing.
Beautifully written 🖤