Eighty-four years of sinking laughter

DISCLAMER: MENTIONS THEMES ABOUT DEMENTIA AND LOSS, MAY BE SENSITIVE TO CERTAIN READERS

Eighty-Four Years of Sinking Laughter

I knew Elias was gone even long before his heart stopped beating; my walls were still heavy with his wife’s laughter while his own eyes had turned into empty rooms. I am the only thing that still remembers that exact azure shade of blue his daughter's eyes were, because Elias now looks at the photo and asks the nurse who this pretty stranger is. It feels like he is a hollowed out tree wandering through his own history without realising it. What used to smell like tobacco and rich oak wood, now smells like hospital soap and confusion. I am a library of his greatest moments, but Elias has forgotten how to read.

Eighty four years in this house, and I remember every bit of it. All those times when he was dancing with his siblings in that cozy living room with the cream carpet and beige fireplace, that time his dad taught him how to cook for the first time and where he added way too much pepper to the eggs and burnt the toast. At nine in the morning on the first day of every month, he would mark his height until he was nineteen and officially stopped growing. I remembered it all while he sat in his rocking chair, confused about the carpets, and confused about the marks on the wall, and confused about me. Confused about his home, and the place he grew up in, and the place he made memories, because now the walls were the only ones left doing the remembering.

The daughter’s footsteps were sharp and impatient, in sharp staccato rhythms that made me anxious. When she was small, she moved like a hummingbird barely touching the cream carpet as she chased the cat, but now she carried the weight of a woman who had already mourned her father and just wanted to settle the estate. She paced the kitchen, which was the site of the great peppery egg incident, and saw only outdated linoleum and water damage. She did not see the way the sunlight hit the corner of the table at exactly four fourteen in the afternoon, she did not see the way it used to illuminate the steam rising from the tea Elias made for her mother every single day for forty two years. She began the clearing, that is what the living call it when they decide which parts of a ghost are worth keeping.

She brought in cardboard boxes with their dry and acidic scent clashing with my own smell of beeswax and centuries of dust. One by one, she began to strip my skin. She took down the photos, including the wedding in the rain, and the black and white shot of Elias’s father standing proudly by the beige fireplace. When the frames were lifted, they left pale rectangles on my wallpaper which were ghosts of ghosts. Elias followed her like a shadow. He picked up a small ceramic bird from the mantelpiece, I hummed with the memory of it being bought in nineteen seventy one at a seaside gift shop with salt spray in the air and his wife laughing as he haggled over the price. Elias turned it over in his hands and his thumb traced the chipped wing. For a heartbeat, his pulse quickened, my floorboards held their breath. I released a tiny draft of cold air trying to stir the scent of the sea that I had tucked away in the rafters.

"Pretty," Elias whispered. Then he put it down in a box labeled kitchen and miscellaneous and walked away. He did not know the bird, he only liked the smoothness of the glaze. I wanted to scream. I wanted to shake my chandeliers until they shattered to remind him of the time he swung from the step ladder while decorating for Christmas and nearly brought the ceiling down in a fit of joy, but I am wood and stone. My only voice is the groan of a settling foundation, and he had long ago stopped listening to the language of houses.

The night before the move was the quietest night in eighty four years. Elias sat in his rocking chair, which was the only piece of furniture not yet swaddled in bubble wrap. The room was an echo chamber. I leaned into him and cooled the air to make him wrap his cardigan tighter, hoping the friction of the wool would spark a memory of his mother knitting it. I watched him sleep. His breathing was shallow, the rhythm of a man whose soul had already packed its bags. I spent those hours cataloguing, I pulled the memories from the deep cracks in the floor, including the vibration of the telegram during the war, and the rhythmic thud of a ball against my exterior brick, and the salty sting of tears shed in the dark of the hallway after the funeral. I pushed them all toward the floor, letting them seep down past the joists, and past the insulation, and into the dark and damp mouth of the soil below.

"Take them," I whispered through my settling beams. "He cannot hold them anymore, I am being broken and you are the only one who can keep them now." The earth beneath me stirred, it was the ancient and patient earth that had been here before I was a forest and would be here after I was dust. It opened its mineral veins and waited.

The morning of the departure was grey. A van sat in the driveway like a hearse. The daughter led Elias by the arm. He stopped at the door, the door where the height marks were. He touched the notch for nineteen years old, he frowned, and his eyes searched the wood for a name he could not find.

"Come on, Dad," she said, and her voice was thin with the effort of not crying. "It is just an old house."

As the door clicked shut, the lock turned for the final time. I felt the severing, it was like a limb being torn off. The house was no longer a home, it was a corpse. I stood there empty while the sign for the scheduled demolition rattled in the wind. Three days later, the yellow machines arrived. They were loud and mindless and smelled of diesel and destruction. They did not care about the cream carpet or the way the fireplace used to glow, the first blow of the wrecking ball took out the nursery, the room where the azure eyed girl had first dreamed.

As my rafters snapped and my windows shattered into diamonds of grief, I felt a strange sense of completion. With every brick that fell, a memory was released, the scent of the eggs, and the sound of the siblings dancing, and the weight of eighty four years of life all spilled out. It did not float away, it did not vanish into the sky. It sank. The rain began to fall and washed the dust of my history into the mud, the earth drank it all. It took the peppered eggs and the burnt toast, it took the birthdays and the tragedies, it took the exact shade of azure blue that Elias had lost.

In a sterile white room five miles away, Elias sat by a window. A nurse brought him a tray. She asked him kindly if he knew where he was. He looked at her and his eyes were clear and terrifyingly empty. He told her "No," with a small and peaceful smile, but said it was a nice room. He was free, he was light as a feather and unburdened by the crushing weight of a life lived. He had forgotten the girl, and the house, and the man he used to be.

But beneath the ground where the new highway would soon roar, the soil sat heavy and dark. It held the secret of the ceramic bird and the vibration of the rocking chair, it held the love that no one was left to feel. The daughter would grow old and forget the exact layout of the hallways. The neighbors would pass away and forget the old man who lived on the corner that would sample his newly made casserole recipe. The world would move on fast and loud and shallow. But the soil stays. The stones stay. The deep and dark roots stay.

The earth remembers what we forget.