Green Apple Crisp

Tears and monkeys and bridges across time and space

I’m weeping in the kitchen as I clean the stove to get the crumbs from the crisp my husband made last night. My son Noah is sitting in the alcove at the table on the other side of the stove, playing the keyboard and singing a song about Samson and Delilah. My husband is sitting on the couch in the adjoining living room. Our main house, except for the bedrooms and the bathroom, is open. We can each be in a different room, but it’s all one space.

My chest rises and falls ever more raggedly as the tears flow.

I finish cleaning the stove and put the last dishes in the dishwasher. I walk past Noah. He’s moved on to the next cover, his voice resonant, rich, warm, and raw. More tears fall from behind my eyes.

I keep walking, then sit on the corner of the sectional. My husband is reading a book. I continue to weep, fairly silently. I lie down, hugging the deep teal weighted blanket, and give my body over to sobbing.

My husband looks at me and asks if I’m ok. I say, “I’m crying.” He says, “I see that.”

He smiles and places his hand close enough to touch if I want, not so close that it’s touching me. I continue to weep.

I stay separate for a few beats. Then I notice my hand reaching the few inches it takes to touch his. My tears slow. I feel my breath moving inside me. A wave of tears rolls through.

My son looks at me, holds my gaze, and continues to play.

This moment is hauntingly familiar.

I go to my bedroom, grab my laptop, then return to the couch.

I’m transported to 1995, to Pashupatinath in Nepal. I’m on a junior year study abroad program. I stand with my cohort and a Brahim Hindu guide. He’s going on and about Nepali culture, with special emphasis on relationships between men and women, with special emphasis on how dangerous women can be to men, with special emphasis on women’s impurity during their period. I tune him out lest I strangle him.

We’re standing next to a bridge across a river from a marketplace, a hospice, and funeral pyres. As Mr. Brahmin drones on and I continue to autotune him to the teacher from Peanuts, I hear a woman wailing.

I see several people emerging from the hospice carrying a frail body. They proceed to the side of the river. One man has his hand on the frail one’s wrist.

After several minutes, the man drops the frail one’s wrist. He removes the clothes from the frail one’s body and throws them in the river. More than one woman is wailing now; it’s a chorus.

The men in the group pick up the frail one. With a tender somberness, they walk towards the funeral pyres, several fires already burning, several groups of men in white sitting beside them. They find an open pyre and begin making camp. The wailing continues.

I notice that I haven’t breathed for a while. I exhale. My eyes are moist. I can’t even hear Mr. Brahim anymore.

A screeching monkey captures my attention as she jumps from a tree to the ground. I’m used to this by now; in Nepal, you never know when a monkey might make an appearance.

My eyes follow the monkey to the marketplace, where children are playing and laughing while their bright sari-clad mothers do their best to herd them.

Like the monkey, my mind wanders to another time and place: 1991, a hospice in Rockville Center, NY.

I’m sitting with my grandmother, looking at the monitor that reports her vitals. I’m 15. I’m fascinated by the hospice: the dying, the monitors, the beeps, the smells, the nurses and staff efficiently moving through the hallways, in and out of patient rooms.

The other side feels so close. Yet, no one holds my grandmother’s wrist as she transitions. There are no monkeys or children laughing or mothers in saris going about their day.

There is a flat line on the monitor. There is gentle crying and funeral planning. There is taking her body to the morgue and getting her room ready for the next dying person and their family.

I arrive at the funeral home the next day with my parents and brother. I stand next to my father as he approaches the open casket. He falls to his knees weeping, a scene I’ve never seen before or since.

I read a poem that I wrote about our family fitting together like pieces of an ancient jigsaw puzzle. I want to make sense. There is no sense to make.

Standing next to Mr. Brahmin by the bridge with dying, death, and living all happening in the same space at the same time is perhaps the most real moment I’ve ever experienced in my life. I get in my bones what I’d read in my anthropology classes about coevalness—that every experience I’m having is happening at the same time as every other experience others are having. No person or culture is ahead or behind another; all experiences happen simultaneously.

Still sitting on the couch, soft, empty, at peace, I glance at Noah and see a monkey sitting on his left shoulder as he strums his guitar. I look out the handmade wooden window beyond my husband and see the faint outline of a sari-clad woman waltzing by with a laughing child.

My grandmother whispers in my ear, “I’m so happy that he could cry at my funeral. He certainly couldn’t when I was alive; I wouldn’t have had it.”

I am in awe. All these tears falling from different eyes in different places.

I rise from the couch, walk to the kitchen, and eat a green apple that didn’t make it into last night’s crisp. Smiling, I take a bite and walk outside.