Barely.  I tried calling Mom two days ago but there was no answer and she hasn’t called me back. I’m still not over Grant’s passing; my personal tipping point and I hate myself for referring to Grant that way, but it’s true.  I haven’t left my apartment in over a week.  The local market I use for grocery delivery stopped answering their phone yesterday.  I’ve only seen three cabs today.  They’re old and dinged up, from some independent cab company I don’t recognize, and they just drive around City Line, circling, like they’re stuck in some loop, like the drivers don’t know what else to do.  At night I count how many windows I can see with the lights on.  The city was darker last night than it was last week, or the week before.  The city is falling apart.  It’s slow and subtle, but you can see it if you look hard enough.  Watch.  Everything is slowing down.  A wind up toy running down and with no one to wind it up.  Everything is dying but not quite dead yet, so people just go about their days as if nothing is wrong and nothing bad can happen tomorrow. 

I’ve had a headache for a week now, my neck hurts, and I’ve been really sensitive to light.  I’m scared, but not terrified anymore.  Mostly, I’m just incredibly sad.

I don’t feel up to it, but here’s a link roundup, in honor of Grant.

San Jose Mercury News
The Silicon Valley’s home sales continue to tank with the number of deals at a 40-year low.  The mayor of San Jose attributes the market crisis to the glut of homes belonging to the recently deceased.

The Burlington Free Press reports that a May 3rd session of Congress ended with the sudden death of a Missouri Representative William Hightower and senator Jim Billingsly from Vermont.  While neither Hightower nor Billingsly has been seen publicly since the 3rd, the offices of both congressmen have yet to make any such announcement and their only official comment is to claim the story is patently false. 

The Miami Herald reports that according to UNICEF, the populations of children in Kenya and Ethiopia have declined by a stunning 24 percent within the past year.  The UN and United States government dispute the findings, claiming widespread inaccuracies in the “hurried and irresponsible” census.

I went to Grant’s wake today.  The visiting hours were only one hour.  2pm-3pm.  I got there at 2.  We had some common friends but I didn’t see anyone that I knew there.  I didn’t see his sister or recognize any family members either.  I waited in a line that started on the street.  No one talked or shared eye contact.  This is so hard to write.  I’m trying to be clinical.  The mourners were herded inside the funeral parlor, but it split into three different rooms.  Grant’s room was small with mahogany molding on the walls and a thick, soft tan carpet on the floor.  There were flowers everywhere. The smell was overpowering and made the air thick.  The family had asked for a donation to a charity in lieu of flowers.  I don’t remember the charity.  There was no casket.  Grant wasn’t there; he wasn’t in the room.  There wasn’t a greeting line and I don’t know where his family was.  There was only a big flat-screen TV on the wall.  The TV scrolled with images of Grant and his friends and family.  I was in one of those pictures.  We were at the Pizza Joint, standing next to each other, bent over, our faces perched in our hands, elbows on the counter.  I had flour on the tip of my nose and he had his PJ baseball hat on backwards, his long black hair tucked behind his ears.  Our smiles matched.  It was one of those rare posed-pictures that still managed to capture the spirit of a candid. That picture didn’t stay on the screen long enough.  Other people’s memories of Grant crowded it out. Also, the pictures of Grant mixed with stock photos and video clips of blue sky and rolling clouds like some ridiculous subliminal commercial for heaven.  There was a soundtrack to the loop; the music was formless and light, with no edges or minor chords.  Aural Valium.  It was awful.  All of it.  The mourners walked around the room’s perimeter in an orderly fashion.  Point A to B to C to D and out the door.  I didn’t follow them.  I held my ground and stayed rooted to a spot as people brushed past me.  No one asked if I was okay, not that I wanted them to.  I watched the TV long enough to see the images loop back to its beginning, or at least the beginning that I had seen.  I don’t know if there was a true beginning and a true end.  After seeing the loop once, I stared at the other mourner’s faces.  Their eyes turned red and watered when the obviously poignant images meshed with a hopeful crescendo of Muzak.  The picture of a toddler-aged Grant holding hands with his parents seemed to be the cue.  Then the manufactured moment passed, and everyone’s faces turned blue when the TV filled with blue sky, that slickly produced loop of heaven.  I wanted to shout fuck heaven, I want Grant back and I don’t want to die.  After an hour had passed, I was asked to leave as someone else’s visiting hour was starting.  They had a full schedule: every room booked throughout the afternoon and evening.  I peeked in the other rooms before I left.  No caskets anywhere, just TVs on the walls.  Pictures.  Clouds.  Blue Sky.  More pictures.  When I went outside, there was another long line.

Now I’m sitting in my apartment, crying, and thinking about my father.  He died when I was four.  I remember his wake.  I remember crossing my arms over my chest and not letting anyone hug me.  Everyone tried.  I remember being bored and mad.  I remember trying to hide under the casket presentation.  An Uncle that I’d never met before pulled me out of the mini-curtains below the casket.  He pulled too hard on my arm and I cried.  I think my tears were the equivalent of the four-year-old me saying fuck heaven, I want my daddy back, and I don’t want to die. 

I’ve turned off comments for this post.  I’ve posted, and deleted, and then re-posted this a few times.  I’m going to leave it up and as is.  But no one else gets to say anything about Grant or me or anything today. 

It finally happened.  A very close friend of mine, Grant Lee, died two days ago.  He was twenty-four.  I have been unable to get much information from his family.  I talked to his older sister, Claire.  Grant died at work, at the Pizza Joint, two blocks from my apartment.  She said his death was sudden and “catastrophic.”  I asked if he died from an aneurysm.  Claire said the doctors told the family it was likely heart failure, but they wouldn’t tell them anything specific.  I then asked for information about the hospital he went to, but she rushed me off the phone, saying she had too many calls to make.  I called the Pizza Joint, wanting to talk to the co-worker who had found Grant dead, but no one answered the phone.  I’m going to take a walk down there after I post this.  It’s awful and terrifying enough that Grant died, but it looks like his cause of death will be covered up as well.   

I met Grant in a video store a week after I’d moved to Brooklyn.  We rented Nintendo Wii games and old noir flicks together.  Grant ate ice cream with a fork.  He always wore a white tee shirt under another shirt, even if the other shirt was another white tee shirt.  Grant was tall, and slight of build, but very fast, and elegant when he moved.  I’d never seen him stumble or fall down.  He worked long hours at the Pizza Joint, trying to pay off the final four-grand of tuition he owed NYU so he could get his diploma.  That debt wasn’t Grant’s fault.  His father was a gambler and couldn’t pay that final tab.  Grant had a crooked smile and he only trusted a few of his friends.  I think he trusted me.  Grant liked to swear a lot.  He liked fucking with the Pizza Joint customers whenever he could.  Sometimes he’d greet an obnoxious-looking customer with silence and head nods only.  Invariably, the obnoxious-looking customer would talk slow and loud because they assumed Grant (who was Korean) didn’t speak English.  They’d mumble exasperated stuff under their breath when Grant didn’t respond.  Finally, he’d give the customer their pizza and make some comment like, “You gonna eat all that?  You leavin’ town or somethin’?” and his voice was loud and had that thick Long Island accent of his.  Grant drank orange soda all day long.  Grant would be too quick to tease sometimes, but he always gave me an unqualified apology if I needed one.

Grant was more than a collection of eccentricities or character traits, but that is what he’s been reduced to.  I love you and miss you, Grant.

The Blog at the End of the World has been live for a year now.  I thought it worth revisiting my first post. On March 20th, 2008, in Mansfield, MA; a fourteen-year-old boy died suddenly during his school’s junior varsity’s baseball practice (Boston Globe), and two days later, a fifteen-year-old-girl from the same town died at her tennis practice (Boston Globe).  The two Mansfield residents both had sudden, catastrophic brain aneurysms.

So why am I bringing up those two kids again?  Why am I dragging out the old news when you could open up any newspaper in the country, click on any blog or news gathering site, and read the same kind of stories only with different names and faces and places? 

Despite the aid of hindsight, I’m not prepared to unequivocally state that the teens mentioned above are our patient zeroes.  However, I do think those reported stories were mainstream media’s story zero concerning the cerebral aneurysm pandemic and the first of their type to go national, and shortly thereafter, global. 

And, finally, a one-link Link roundup:

New York Times reports widespread shortages on a host of anti-clotting and anti-seizure drugs used to treat aneurysms.  Included in the shortage, are medications that increase blood pressure, with the idea that increased blood flow through potentially narrowed vessels would prevent clots and aneurysms.  Newer, more exotic drugs are also now being reported as in shortage: nimodipine (a calcium channel blocker that prevents blood vessel spasms) and glucocorticioids (anti-inflammatory steroids, not FDA approved, controversial treatment that supposedly controls swelling in the brain).  The gist of the story is about the misuse of the medications (many of which are only meant for survivors of aneurysm and aren’t preventative), of course, leads to a whole slew of other medical problems, including heart attack and stroke.