Obit—Memory, and: Obit—Music, and: Obit—Grief

Abstract

Obit—Memory, and: Obit—Music, and: Obit—Grief Victoria Chang Obit—Memory Memory—died August 3, 2015. The death was not sudden but slowly over a decade. I wonder if, when people die, they hear a bell. Or if they taste something sweet, or if they feel a knife cutting them in half, dragging through the flesh like sheet cake. The caretaker who witnessed my mother's death quit. She holds the memory and images and now they are gone. For the rest of her life, the memories are hers. She said my mother couldn't breathe, then took her last breath 20 seconds later. The way I have imagined a kiss with many men I have never kissed. My memory of my mother's death can't be a memory but is an imagination, each time the wind blows, leaves unfurl a little differently. [End Page 77] Obit—Music Music—died on August 7, 2015. I made a video with old pictures and music for the funeral. I picked Hallelujah in a capella. Because they weren't really singing, but actually crying. When my children came into the room, I pretended I was writing. Instead, I was looking at my mother's old photos. The fabric patterns on all her shirts. The way she held her hands together at the front of her body. In each picture, the small brown purse that now sits under my table. At the funeral, my brother-in-law kept turning the music down. When he wasn't looking, I turned the music up. Because I wanted these people to feel what I felt. When I wasn't looking, he turned it down again. At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the feeling was still there. This was my first understanding of grief. [End Page 78] Obit—Grief Grief—as I knew it, died many times. It died trying to reunite with other lesser deaths. Each morning I laid out my children's clothing to cover their grief. The grief remains but is changed by what it is covered with. A picture of oblivion is not the same as oblivion. My grief is not the same as my pain. My mother was a mathematician so I tried to calculate my grief. My father was an engineer so I tried to build a box around my grief, along with a small wooden bed that grief could lie down on. The texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing me to speak about nothing. If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it face up on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief. [End Page 79] Copyright © 2017 Middlebury College Publications