Looking around, I caught the open window. There the city was on fire, a million lights glaring from the unmarked homes, a million souls floating up from the smoky ash.

I was always a strange child. I always wanted to know a soul, to see it as an individual, not able to be replicated unless I could commit it to memory. I would sit back and ponder a face, study every spasm of the arm, every mannerism, see how they would act under stress. I’m sure someone seeing a six or seven year old sitting there studying a life would be quite bemused. Children, after all, are not supposed to act like this. They are supposed to be innocent; they are supposed to wonder why Cinderella’s stepmother was so mean, not why Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire always seemed to have his soul torn in two. I suppose I turned out this way, after all, being born a writer (who, by stereotype, are supposed to be naturally a bit off kilter) and a writer always wants to become a different person, even for a second, understand the meaning of a life not our own. It is the only time that we can feel completely and totally alive, more alive in those moments than we can ever again have the possibility to feel. In that way, we are actors (who must become a different person on screen, in front of others, in front of themselves) but only bound to a crisp white paper laying in front of us. In that way, my grandfather and I shared the same personality, becoming different people learning how to live.

Life carries with it a series of cruel traditions, like chemical bonds, nearly impossible to break apart by human means. My grandfather could not break them; he could not stop these brutal life lessons coming at an age too young to be reckoned with. It seems his life was always destined to be this way, to have the world thrust itself unceremoniously onto his shoulders from the moment he was born. He came into this world, cold and dark and alone, his mother on the bed in a house whose lights were not to be lit, having been abandoned by a husband hours before to find a doctor, yet more likely to have stopped at a bar somewhere to celebrate his first child’s arrival. I can see her mind furiously working even now, lying on a desolate bed trying to survive. Why would a pregnant woman get up to turn on the lights? Women after all are supposed to be brave, now as the world falls apart at the seams, in this pivotal year of 1940. A woman can do this. A woman can survive alone. And so it happened. My grandfather is caught coming out of his mother to avoid a near certain death from falling onto the floor, his mother rolls off the bed in sweaty exhausted painful tears to clean him, his mother cries herself to heartbreak for how her son’s life is now certain to become.

Even then, his life could have turned out differently, if only 1941 wouldn’t have come bringing with it the treacherous War, if only his father had not been shipped off to fight in the Pacific, if only life did not find it necessary to make an already shameful alcoholic even more a waste. A child should never have to witness his mother being beaten by a raving alcoholic masquerading as his father, yet few get the luxury of having the world shine fairness. Maybe, if his genes did not beg to make his life harder by giving him a genius mind, his life could have turned out differently still. Yet his life did not turn out differently. This is what happened.

He was too smart; his family too poor. His unquenchable thirst for knowledge would be forced to be set up on a shelf, as family takes a front seat to education, or at least it always has in our family. Children are not to be chained by the dysfunctions of a family, but too often do they play the role of a guinea pig in its deteriorations. This is how it was for my grandfather, forced to be the father of three younger siblings, to shield them from a life filled with despair, and in the process sacrificing his own mortal happiness. I remember my grandfather telling me once, as I begged him to recite the story of his childhood, telling me, “What childhood? I don’t recall ever being a child.” It took me years to grasp the emotion behind his sentence.

Sarah McLachlan plays in the background, words later to be deciphered as “I will remember you. Will you remember me?” These indistinguishable words are being detracted from the utter heartbreak I see all around. I do not know what to do with myself. I do not know how to act. I am too young to understand why this is happening, why people have to die, why they are alone... I just know that one day I will be here again, but instead of seeing the cracked, aging face of a man weeping for the brother he was unable to save, it would be I who would weep over the man I could not know how to save. I am lost to myself, then. My heart would go through a series of devastation this day, as the full impact of the wretched song somewhere in the distant room would hit me. I look then, would anybody remember my uncle? Would they see his happy eccentricities, his carefree nature? Or would all their narrow eyes see is the failure that would surely accompany him, the body alone, on the side of a desolate, dirt road in his old pickup truck, destroyed from years of hardcore abuse of drugs and alcohol, an incurable disease in our family, like some sad old country song? Tears would find their way to the corner of my young ten year old eyes, but I know these thoughts are not the bringer of them. Rather, it is the much worse thought of what my grandfather would remember of this day. What would he see with his aged eyes? Would it be his own failure of not being able to save his brother following the footsteps of their father? Or would he remember his own treacherous heart, of which we both feel, poisoning us? I want to say that this is not what our lives are destined for, that this is not how we will be destroyed, but all I know is the dark abandoned hallway I am running down in hopes of reaching the rosebush in time before I throw up my emotions.

What to do with these broken limbs, this wrinkled skin, this falling apart life that seems to mock even the smallest moments? What are we supposed to do when our head is plunged underwater, unable to breathe, unable to see the world or it see us? Do we let ourselves be taken into the ocean, or do we fight to return to the surface? This I see goes through my grandfather’s head as his oxygen tank is in place, his nebulizer making vibrations on the table like a car passing on the highway. I silently watch, unable to do anything else, as he fills up in pain and despair, as his body slowly and cruelly deteriorates before my eyes. I stand on the sidelines as he works to show he’s whole, intact (in what I’ve come to call his various little victories over the slow death) by doing the dishes, cutting off a low hanging branch from the tree, playing with our dog. These simple things are so victorious as to earn some sort of recognition, something to make him understand he is not alone, yet people come to ignore these things, perhaps to avoid that inevitable sundering that is sure to follow. If only I could follow that advice. If only I could look away, and convince myself that there is no pain behind his eyes, yet even in all of his abilities in the art of deception, it is impossible to deceive me. As he turns off his nebulizer, I set my palm on his and hold it, just to feel the warmth.

I am standing in front of the television set, the only person willing to stand up, in my ignorant youth, to tell my grandfather that he cannot be strong, he cannot prevent going to the doctor, he cannot afford to pretend to be something he’s not, this is not the time for acting. That is when he speaks the immortal words that would haunt me for what I know will be the rest of my life, “I’m dying. I’ll be surprised if I make it to see you graduate.” That is when my world comes crumbling down, because that is when I cannot shut out my own emotions. That is when I, not he, can no longer pretend that things are all right, that my life will always have a father in it. I have grown accustomed to having my grandfather play surrogate; I have forgotten that my own father has left me years ago, that despite him being alive, I have no father. That is when the look in my eyes I have now whenever I see my grandfather sick comes to life. That is when I start counting down the days, and I start counting the numbers of heartbreaks to come. My grandfather senses this, and turns what he said into a joke to break the invisible silence. Yet it does not prevail. Hope no longer exists. All I have is time.

Years flutter by, and I find myself standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. I am yet too young to understand what is happening to me. I do not understand that my mental health refuses to match that of my physical. I cannot comprehend the full impact; I am dying. I cannot break the legacy this cursed family has left upon us all. I cannot see that I am following the same footsteps left in the stone by my grandfather. Somewhere along the rocky edges I discover, my grandfather and I are the same person. We could not break the legacy this cursed family has bestowed upon us all. Just as he is eaten away in all physical aspects of life, I am being eaten away from the inside out. This slow settling depression is murdering me, destroying in its bloody rampage all vital happiness. I am standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. Yet I do not know why I cannot let go.

“What do you have to be sad about?” my grandfather asks me as I drive to school, a year after I have learned to subdue my condition. What do you have to be sad about? It is spoken as nothing, as something completely absurd. What is there to be sad about? This idea seems absurd only because it is. Yet I know this is not why he asks. My grandfather could never fool me. I have scared him with my ability to lose hope; hope, such a dangerous thing to live without (I now come to believe this is impossible). In this second my mother’s voice echoes in my ear, “Never forget, your grandfather would have died years ago had it not been for you.” I am brought back to reality with the same question, “What do you have to be sad about?” I have never answered this question.

I am seven years old. I have yet to learn of anything else besides Christianity, truly believing it to be the source of all truth. My first grade teacher has just informed me that should I not accept Christ, he should not accept me unto the kingdom of heaven. The impact of this statement hits me like a brick smashes into a bird. If I should die, I would go into a place where the only person I have ever known as family would be absent, and that absence would be enough to turn paradise into eternal torment. This cruel injustice finds itself weighing down on my soul and awakening me in this moment to the senses of the world, and this is when I begin to think for myself. Yet for some reason I still cannot help myself from begging my grandfather to believe, pleading with him to have some kind of faith, any hope, for at least one night will he pretend that God does exist. I speak my own infamous words, “This is the only way you will never suffer.”

I am twelve years old, and fear has consumed me in this moment as I see my grandfather stare ahead, seeing something I cannot. I cannot say why, but here is when I see us back at our old house, in the master bedroom. I am looking out the window, at the millions of burning lights. It is then that I see a city on fire. As if sensing my presence my grandfather, looks up with a look in his eyes I have yet to see on his face again. A smile passes his lips, as he tells me, long after I have lost my faith, “Maybe I can believe in God for one evening.”