4. Ary a Word

   

My great-grandmother Dovey might have said there’s ary words to suit the stuff of grief and loss.  She would have said that, but I cannot.  For “ary” has been excised from my family’s working vocabulary.  Dovey’s daughter, my grandmother Ruby, made sure enough of that, taking care that she and hers would steer away from hillbilly speech and diction.  Ruby was even sometimes visibly pained to hear Dovey speak.  Dovey grew up in a place called Dark Holler, and sounded like she had.  Her speech was littered all through with words that told on her as one without an education and without means.  Ruby reared my mother not to talk that way.  Yet my mother remembers.  A few years back, she gave me a book of Ozark speech – not a dictionary, exactly, but one to feature lists of words and phrases once familiar but now gone, or going, out of use.  The book contained my mother’s marginalia, where alongside several entries, she wrote “Mimi,” the name that we of her descendants used for Dovey.  My mother never uses “ary,” but she remembers it and pencils in the one who used it.  It is not, for her, a curiosity in a book, but a word once and no longer for the ear, a grandmother’s word, remembered in a grandmother’s voice.  I think this is part of the problem when it comes to loss and what could be a language for it.  Sometimes loss just means losing language.

 

It is of course true that grief can steal your words – crying, at least as I tend to do it, is sound made where language stops.  Grief can be altogether too physical for words.  But that is not what I here mean.  Instead, I have in mind the way that loss can register in words that death steals along with our own dead.  Perhaps because I treasure words and try to choose them deliberately, I begrudge death this.  I call it stealing because that is how it strikes me.  The words are not misplaced, nor forgotten, they got taken.  And you can no more get them back than you could a wallet stolen.  My thoughts here turn to thievery because it was talk of thieves that would not be called so that led me first to feel this.

 

Not long before he died, I sat in hospital with my grandfather, keeping him company as he awaited, gowned and gaunt, whatever the doctors might do.  Before he sent me home to catch a bit of rest, he pointed me to the wardrobe and asked me to take his wallet home.  He worried, he said, that “some ornery fella might come in while I sleep and get into my britches and I’d lose my pocketbook.”  This was then no kind of odd, but just the way my grandpa talked.  But of course, when you’re on the cusp of losing something, you remark it.  The ordinary can’t stay so when you start to see it how it really is – not a permanent and unexceptional part of the world, but a fleeting visitation almost over.  The world of ornery fellas never was the world itself, even if you took it so. Your own britches can become mere “pants,” against your will.  By the time I was carrying my grandfather’s wallet home from the hospital to save it from any wandering thieves, I had already long seen his mortality.  I just hadn’t, till that evening, heard all that would go with him, all those ornery and old fellas.

 

When my grandfather died, so too did some old fella.  Near but tamer kin to some ornery fella, some old fella was the protagonist in many of my grandfather’s stories, featuring especially in tales about people who mess up.  Some old fella built his farmhouse chimney out of rock that exploded when heated, a fact he belatedly discovered on lighting his first fire and burning down his house entire.  Some old fella used poison ivy leaves for toilet paper when an urgency outdoors took him by surprise.  In short, some old fella was feckless and luckless.  All throughout my life, my grandfather told stories of him, sometimes just to note how people can go wrong so we could use them as a caution, but more often just because some old fella was also reliably a man about whom we could well make sport.  He was always getting up to foolish things –  accidentally shooting his own dog or being run down by an angry sow – to make us feel our own faults somewhat less.  Whatever travails we had suffered, at least we’d not burnt down the house or killed the dog.  To be sure, my family still wiles away the time, especially that interregnum that follows on a fine shared meal, telling stories rich with human folly.  But the stories lack their once singular and near mythical protagonist.  They’re stories of people with proper names.  Some old fella is in the graveyard with my grandpa.  

 

I doubt my grandpa knew that he spoke in ways most distinctive.  He just spoke the ways he spoke, freely casting life’s intensities in a characteristically gentle, archaic understatement.  As his strength and health began to fail, he’d never bemoan his increasing weakness, but remark the change in tanks of fuel.  Where once he could wield his chainsaw cutting firewood for stretching hours, in his 90s, he had only “one tank in me.”  Once the saw was empty, so was he.  I only once heard him speak of his own oncoming death.  Of it, all he said was that he would “prefer to abide a little longer.”  Since we always had to pray before a meal, I’d hope he’d be the one to do it.  A tendency to understatement, I suspect, may be an aid if one will pray.  For my grandfather, all of human sin and folly, all our misdeeds and mistakes would find tidy sum in his asking God to “help us to leave undone the things we shouldn’t do.”  That does pretty much cover it, and nicely too.  Lately the bit of his praying that most sounds and resounds in my thoughts is what he would pray in church to summon up some blessing on the preacher ahead of his sermon:  “Give the preacher a happy recollection of the things that he has studied.”  Grandpa isn’t here to plead for me, but I, too, could use some happy recollection of the things that I have studied.  But all I have just now is this, echoing trails of sound long gone, all voice and no idea.  The idea of an idea is itself a sound to drown out all else that should here follow.

 

When my grandfather had conceived some mad plan both ingenious and daring, he’d simply say, “I have an idea.”  This phrase was sign and signal that something truly novel was about to be afoot – that something that never should work was about to be worked upon the world, that marvels soon would follow.  But I have to interject here and insist upon precision.  My grandpa’s pronunciation of “idea” was never proper – it sounded like i-dee, with the stress upon the i.  He did not have ideas, but i-dees.  My present compulsion to clarify just this owes to my lifelong sense that “ideas” and “i-dees” are not the same.  The first is something anyone can have; the other is a word to inaugurate something entirely new into the world.  One cannot like the end of all i-dees.

 

I have now gone far adrift from what I’d meant to write – something about how language is never only words, but sensibility, and it’s a sensibility that death will take when it takes the ones who use the words.  I wanted to write that when my grandfather died, the atmospherics of life suffered an alteration that I did not like, the world became a place that much less infused with wry humility about ourselves and what we do.  But really, I can’t find it much in me to write all that.  I have no i-dee, just echoes of a once familiar language never mine but in which I had some happy share.  I’d rather here record the words themselves, but even that really does not suit.  They were not really words meant for pen or pixels, but words for voice.

 

It bothers me to have all this language lost and gone.  It bothers me more to burden pages upon pages with the dulled and dulling artifice that forms my learned, professional voice.  That voice is what my book on grief most needs.  That voice could lift into generalized (and thus wholly inadequate) abstraction the problem of languages going lost when those who speak them perish.  See, the strange voice unhappily mine intones, language is part of constructing the world as we experience it, what sense we make of it and, also, the more nebulous felt quality of what the world seems like.  Lose the speaker, lose the language.  Lose the language, lose the world.  That’s an idea I could develop into a chapter for my book on grief, an idea I could trace through several philosophers historical and wise.  I could do that, but I won’t.  I am altogether too haunted by the version of myself that would develop under such a task:  I might not blow up my own house with sedimentary rock built in the chimney, but I’d be doing something like.  Some old fella put in a book all the ways we suffer with our griefs.