Exoskeletons

The dead roach on my dorm room floor, which I had trapped and slowly suffocated under an empty garbage can two weeks earlier, was just like my grandfather. Not because of the roach-ness, but because of the deadness, and how neither of them were ever coming back. The roach was now dead, because of me. It had died sometime between the moment I trapped it, and the moment we were in now. I’d collaborated with Death himself (I assume Death is a man). I could have gently coaxed the roach onto a piece of paper and brought it outside like a nice tree-hugging sort of person would, or I could have ignored it completely, and let it scurry into the back of a cabinet or a tiny hole in the wall, of which I’m sure there were many. But I didn’t do those things; instead I killed it slowly, which was even worse than just killing it period.
It was November of my sophomore year of college, and I was newly acquainted with the experience of a loved one dying. My grandfather, who I called my Papa, was only 76 when he died, and he was a silly, kind, and calm man, one who smelled clean like soap and aftershave, and wore Mets hats and oversized denim overshirts with jeans and white sneakers. He also wore a silver watch, which continued keeping time even after he died, which seemed wrong of it to do.
I had many memories of him, the Rolodex of which felt like it was shrinking by the day. I tried to write them all down so I wouldn’t forget, but it wasn’t enough. Even writing them down, I could feel them coming loose like apples falling to the ground. I could picture them, but I couldn’t conjure the details. Having bagels for breakfast and going for a walk around the block, or to the playground when I was small. Me swimming while he sat by the pool. Eating at our usual restaurants, lathering butter onto bread. Sitting together on the couch, keeping each other company. What did we talk about? What did he say to me? I couldn’t remember.
I had just come back to school in D.C. from his shiva, which had been held at my house on Long Island. Grief had mostly stolen my appetite (the one good thing it did) and I had subsisted on small scoops of tuna fish salad and egg salad, cut up fruit from plastic containers, and pieces of chocolate babka ripped carelessly from the loaf. When I got tired of talking to the endless visitors who’d come to pay respects, I went upstairs to my bedroom and watched comedies on my laptop to try and escape into a better, happier reality.
But now I was back in my actual reality, one of my own making. When I entered my room upon return, after my hours-long journey back to campus, I saw the upside down garbage can and remembered what I’d done to this poor roach two weeks prior, before Papa died, before I went home for the funeral, before I knew firsthand Death’s cruel grip. I thought, Oh no, what am I going to do about this? Why did I do that? Is the roach’s family okay?
I had gone into my sophomore year ready to become a new person. I wanted to shed the exoskeleton of the old-me to make room for the new-me. Like a roach, I had been forming my new exoskeleton already. It was delicate and pale, right underneath me. Old-me was waiting to be released like a handful of dead leaves, and I needed to shed it in order to grow larger, to morph into myself. New-me was waiting to emerge in its soft, vulnerable state, ready to do what new exoskeletons do: expand and harden, become a shield—to fuse with myself and become me.
The year before, I had been involved in a dramatic rollercoaster of a relationship that I couldn’t wait to move on from. It had sucked all my energy and attention and left me feeling stuck, in stasis. But this year, that person had transferred to a school in another city, and I felt free. I thought I could reinvent myself by losing my “freshman fifteen,” making new friends, and joining new student groups—and I did do those things. But I didn’t know that my Papa would die two months into the semester, and that it would make me feel like all my cells had reassembled, so that my body contained the same materials but now in a new arrangement, shaken up like salad dressing.
————
At the end of October a few weeks earlier, my Grandma and Papa were driving to Florida from New York, fulfilling another year round the sun as East Coast snowbirds. They stopped in D.C. for an afternoon to visit me, parking in a garage a few blocks from my dorm. It was sunny but a little chilly, a perfect fall day.
We went to get brunch, walk around campus, and see my dorm room. At the end of the visit we walked back to the parking garage and my Papa and I sat on the bench in front while waiting for my Grandma to come out with the car. I can imagine it playing out in scenes like a movie on mute, panning past the green grassy lawns of the university, the students hurrying by wearing light jackets and backpacks, the clear expanse of sky above us. I can see Papa at our table at lunch, a high top with bar stools; him trailing behind me and Grandma on the sidewalk, struggling to walk, and a still image of him standing in my dorm room, though the picture there is blurry.
The bench we were sitting on outside the garage felt sturdy, made from thin slats of steel or iron, then painted a shiny black. After hugging my Papa goodbye, I watched him hoist himself slowly into the car, and then I walked back to my room. At some point in the next day or two, as they continued their drive south, my Papa left me a voicemail. I don’t specifically remember listening to it, or seeing a voicemail pop up on my phone, but afterwards I didn’t delete it. Since the summer before college, I’d been saving all the voicemails I received from my grandparents; they would clutter my voicemail box so much that eventually I’d hastily delete a bunch at random, not wanting to have to choose which pieces of which grandparents to keep or scrap, though I’d make sure not to delete this last one he ever left me. I felt like I’d been pushing my luck as it was; some of my friends didn’t have any grandparents left at all. I might as well start collecting things I might want to have later.
“Hi Jamie, it’s pops,” Papa said in the voicemail. “Just calling to tell you how much of a treat it was for us to come see your apartment, it was so nice to see it. Ah…okay, that’s all. Just wanted to let you know how great a day it was, we were even able to get out of Washington with no problem. So…see you down the road. Have a wonderful day and take care.”
His voice in the recording sounded upbeat and cheerful, not like someone who would be unable to get out of the car when they arrived at their apartment in Florida, go straight to the hospital, and die there two weeks later. Later this voicemail would make me cry when I listened; down the road would never come, or it would if we were lucky, hopefully a long time from now.
The day he died, I was hanging out in a study room with some new friends I’d met that semester. I remember thinking that afternoon that I felt lucky that things were going so well for me. While I had liked the people from my friend group the year before, I had a feeling that they were part of the exoskeleton I needed to shed; they had too intimately witnessed my freshman year rollercoaster, and in order to totally move on from that, I had to move on from them too, though I hadn’t yet, not completely. In the midst of talking and laughing with my new friends, I saw my phone on the table light up with a call from my dad, which was kind of unusual. I didn’t take the call, because I immediately knew what he was going to say, and I felt frozen. I knew Papa had been in the hospital the past couple weeks, but he’d been in the hospital before, and had always come back out. But I’d had a bad feeling that day in October when they’d come to visit; he was walking more slowly than usual, and seemed to be struggling in a way that was abnormal for him, but I had tried to ignore the feeling so I could enjoy the day.
Now I was continuing to ignore it, just for a little while longer. I wanted to stay in this moment, the moment before I knew for sure that my Papa had died, as long as I could. My head felt like it was buzzing. Everything around me went out of focus; my friends’ voices sounded underwater. I was watching my phone ring on silent, knowing I was not ready to hear what my dad had to say. He left me a voicemail and I had further confirmation from the state of his voice that what I suspected was right. He sounded shaky, like he was pretending to be normal but he was not at all convincing. He told me he needed to talk to me and to call him back.
Without saying anything I ran out of the room, found an alcove in the hallway, and sat on the floor. I called my dad back and, crying, he told me he’s sorry, Papa had died.
I felt I had been expecting this to happen for the last eight or so years, ever since we got a call in the middle of the night a few weeks before my eleventh birthday that my grandparents were at the hospital. My Papa had fallen in Penn Station and hurt his back on their way home from seeing Jersey Boys on Broadway. After this I had always felt like my Papa was going to be the first of my grandparents to die. Sometimes it felt like he was the only grandparent that would. He was the most vulnerable, the most obviously unwell. He was the most delicate, in a way, and that scared me. After his fall, a doctor had said to him that life was like this—and he held his hands apart, then slowly moved them closer together until they met in a noiseless prayer. He was demonstrating how in ideal circumstances one’s health fades slowly over time until eventually one dies at a ripe old age. He said that Papa’s fall had exacerbated his health issues, so that now his life was like this—he moved his hands together quickly, meeting with a clap.
The next day I took the train home. The funeral passed in a blur, and at his burial it was cold, the sound of the shovel in the dirt like knives in my chest. I thought about all the things we’d never do again, how he would never make me laugh again and he would never again tell me how much he loved me. The cord of unconditional love tying him to me was now severed. There was before when he was here, and there was now. Everything felt so concrete and binary: he was alive and now he’s dead. I had four grandparents and now I have three. I loved him and now I have nowhere for this love to go. I was old-me and now I’m now-me, and I’m worse for it.
I’d gone into the school year wanting to become someone different—someone better—than who I’d been before, but this wasn’t exactly the way I’d wanted it to happen. Papa’s death clarified some things for me; in the days languishing in my house during the shiva, I suddenly knew there were friends in my life I needed to cut ties with, and others I needed to keep. I would never be old-me again, and there was no need to pretend I even could be. I wasn’t the same person they had known the year before. I wasn’t rejecting them exactly; more accurately, I was rejecting old-me, and making sure she stayed gone.
Papa’s dying also taught me that I could never save anyone from Death, no matter how much I loved them. I was powerless in the face of Death, and eventually, I wouldn’t even be able to save myself. And parts of me were already dying. Old-me was dead. I put a garbage can over her, snuffed her out—it had always been inevitable. But also, the present was dying; it kept becoming the past, and then disappearing forever. My memories were dying; I could never remember everything I wanted to, and even as I recalled them, they seemed to slip away. There were huge gaps, years when I was taking it for granted, not knowing one day my memories would be all I had left, until I died too, stiff in my shriveled remains.
And then…well, then I had to go back to school.
After the shiva ended I rode the train back to D.C., and looked out the window as warehouses in New Jersey, billboards in Philadelphia, lakes in Delaware, and highways in Maryland passed me by. I thought about how a week earlier I’d taken this route in the reverse order, and how everything now looked the same but backwards, which is also how I felt—the same but backwards, an off-kilter reflection.
When I walked into my dorm room, I was faced with the consequences of a choice that old-me made, and there was nothing I could do now to undo it. For days, I let the roach continue to sit there, underneath the upside down garbage can that was actually quite large and right in my walking path. I had to consciously avoid it, walk around it like it was a piece of furniture I’d placed in the most inconvenient place. I was avoiding lifting the garbage can and being confronted with what I’d done, what I’d chosen. What if it was still alive, and it spoke to me, and it said, How could you do this? You’re a horrible person. You tried to kill me! Or worse, what if it was dead, but then it haunted me forever? What if Death haunted all of us forever? What if once we started grieving we could never stop?
A few days later a friend came over and disposed of the roach for me, like it was no big deal. He was not ridden with guilt or disgust, he just bent down and did it, and I felt kind of ridiculous. I was projecting so much onto this roach. I talked about it with friends for weeks. Papa dying felt so out of my control, and the roach was entirely in my control, and I felt I had handled it so poorly. What did it say about me? Was I a bad and unkind person? If I kept talking about it, would it absolve me and prove I was good? And how many other things in my life had I handled poorly? I could write a long list of things I wanted to undo, starting with the present moment and working backwards from there.
I regretted my choice about the roach, but also, I didn’t want to face Death, in my culpability and power, but also my powerlessness. I didn’t want to face the reality that the roach was never coming back, which meant Papa was never coming back; both were equally dead and gone.
Eventually I got tired of talking about it, or at least, I sensed that my friends were tired of hearing about it.
————
Over the next few years I avoided the parking garage near campus with the bench in front; if I found myself accidentally passing by I averted my eyes. I was scared of what I might see if I looked directly at it. Would I start crying publicly? Would I crumple to the ground? From the corner of my eye I could sometimes see someone sitting there and it felt intrusive. The absence of Papa there reminded me of the hole he made when he died; the fact that life—including mine—went on without him made me sad.
During my last week of senior year, I decided to go visit the bench, and it was fine. I didn’t cry or crumple. I just felt like it was time to give myself closure, to stop being avoidant, to force myself to grow up. I sat down and looked around and in my mind I waved goodbye to my Grandma and Papa as they drove away that fall day. In the last few years I had shed and grown so many exoskeletons. How many exoskeletons does a roach have in its lifetime? I felt that mine were and would be endless.