She’s So Lucky

“I’m lucky” I make sure to demur, in every distanced conversation, and it is at once a talisman, an incantation, a manifestation, a ritual. “Lucky” – biking by a tent encampment in the Don; reading another heartfelt sign in the window of a now-permanently shuttered local business; scrolling past a video of tenants gathered in a parking lot fighting their imminent eviction.

Lucky – the reverberating echo an intimation of somewhere, a roiling mass of fear, anxiety, rage, unknowable, inaccessible – a haunting something that emerges, a peripheral aura when I watch my boys bicker after spending every waking hour with only each other for the umpteenth day, when I throw myself into numbing tasks with a vicious, obliterating, joyless fervour, when we push away thoughts of autumn and winter.

Lucky – each utterance a tiny laceration – thinking of the quiet pain in my social and organizing circles – the deaths that have laid us low, left us reeling.

Lucky – the yearning for a phantom limb, the focus on negative space, the Barthes-ian desire for an imagined ideal object. A masochist – I don’t permit myself the grace to feel the tiny insubstantial/substantial grief for the things this pandemic, and the failure of our liberal state in the face of it, have rendered inaccessible. I punish myself with “lucky” – suppressing my desires for faces, touch, dancing, the energy of mass anonymized collectivity.

Yesterday I found out my grandmother, in a long-term care home for the past 8ish years, is dying. I cried. “She’s not even a good person!” I sobbed into the Dotytron’s chest. Her decline has been both slow and fast – like parenting: the days are long but the years are short, as they say. I think about her dying alone, because of the failures of this government and the subsequent restrictions on long-term care visitations, even at the end of life. I think about the ways in which so many immigrant kids or kids who fall outside of normative white representations of cis-hetero family structures aren’t lucky enough to have uncomplicated family dynamics or know what it’s like to have doting grandparents. I think about my Poh Poh’s Machiavellian scheming and machinations and the long tail effect of her meddling, her attempts to exert control. The fact that she was a survivor and a force and mean and valued people for their utility. I think about that legacy on her daughter, and her daughter’s daughters. I think about the skeletons in closets and I think about how my entire life, my Poh Poh and Kung Kung lived first, two houses over from us, and then how my mom built this strange mansion in Markham to house both families – a mirror house – two houses joined by a corridor, and so my grandparents always lived so close. I remember how my Poh Poh seldom laughed or joked and how I was raised by a mom who herself wasn’t “mothered” in a way that we here, situated in the belly of excess and empire, would recognize as mothering; and yet, I remember my Poh Poh buttering saltine crackers for me when I used to visit her in her house that was also my house, and how she would boil quail eggs for me to eat by the dozen. I think about how my kids will remember their parents, grandparents and great grandparents, and how memories and age collude to produce something that is of your house but also my house, mirror houses furnished with recollections and representations, joined and separated by the corridor of our shared experiences.

When I look back on this strange time, will I remember how lucky I was?