Category: Uncategorized

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVnMevuNse0&w=560&h=349]

The title of my entry today would make a seriously awesome band name. Just a heads up to whoever fills Phil Collins’s spot in the music industry.

I have four fish. Three goldfish and one plecostamus. Every day, I like to spend some quality time with my fish, except the plecostamus because he looks like Cthulu’s mom. But I like to spend quality time with my goldfish. A lot of people don’t realize that goldfish have distinct personalities. You can even teach them to do tricks. I haven’t, because I don’t have that kind of time or desire to see a fish do a trick, but I do like to talk to them and basically tell them how awesome they are and sometimes stick my hand in with them so they can attack me.

Last night, I thought, “You know what would really blow a fish’s mind? Fire.” Think about it. There is no way they’ve ever seen fire. I thought they would be really impressed.

I grabbed my lighter and walked on my knees to get right up close to the tank without actually having to stand up because things like “standing” and “walking” are my least favorite activities. All three fish were lined up at the glass, their mouths– perpetually downturned and disapppointed-looking– going in such a way that if there had been a way to transmit the sound to me, I’m sure they were saying “Op. Op. Op.” Which, as you know, is fish for “Yes! Jen’s back! Jen is awesome!”

Then I flicked the lighter.

I think I could have sat down in front of that tank with a plate of fishsticks and a t-shirt that said “I love eating fish” and they would have reacted better. They scattered, looking at me with their wide, horrified eyes. They were afraid of the fire.

After a few minutes of chasing them around with it (which consists of just waving the lighter back and forth in front of the tank), I decided that was animal cruelty and went back to just chilling out and talking to them. But our relationship has changed. Before, they viewed me as a friendly being. Now, they know I command the elements. They’re already pretty freaked out by the fact that I can catch them in a net. Fire is somehow a worse betrayal of the bond between us.

I guess I’m going to have to do something nice for my fish, like watch Blue Planet again. They seem to enjoy shows about coral reefs and such.

There was no real point to this post, I just wanted to share. For some reason, creatures who live entirely underwater are afraid of fire.

It started this morning with a facebook comment. Not on my own page, but on someone else’s. And it was more than one comment. This person’s diatribe read as follows:

look at china…. 1 child per family. they should do that same thing here. would help regulate the baby making machines on welfare and food stamps.who abuse the system.[…]that is why the first amendment is so wonderful brittany. People can have opinions that differ from others. I feel that any mother that has to get on WIC, state aided insurance for their children, or receive any help from the federal or sta…te level, cannot afford to take care of the children they already have. Which is where I differ from most peoples opinions. I know what its like to grow up poor, and going to bed hungry at night. i also know what its like to only be able to sit in front of a kerosene heater for heat, and only take cold running watered showers. Too often i see mothers driving better cars than i do, and are able to eat better than i do. The only point i am making is, if a person is adult enough to make such decisions as having children, make sure you can afford to take care of that child, without the aid of these programs. When our parents were our age and having children, they never lived with their parents, nor did they ever ask for help. At least mine never did.

Setting aside the fact that this person advocates population control, i.e., complete control over a woman’s fertility whether she likes it or not… no, wait, let’s not set that aside. They’re talking about how great the first amendment is while arguing for the destruction of personal freedom? How do you even wrap your mind around that kind of logic?

No, wait, original point. I read this person’s comments and they really hit home. Because I’m on government assistance.

When I started writing, my husband, son and I were hanging on by our fingernails. Because we couldn’t afford daycare but fell above the acceptable assistance level, I stayed home with my infant son while my husband worked fifty hours a week to make ends meet. My first contract, for Blood Ties 1, 2, and 3, was a lot of money at the time. 18k for three books. I was super excited, because now I could afford Netflix. Let that sink in. I could finally afford a nine-dollar-per-month dvd rental service, and it was a big deal in our house. So, we weren’t the poorest people in the world, but we definitely weren’t middle class or anything. We were barely working class.

When it was time to negotiate the contact for my next book, I was super psyched. I had an agent, so I bet I would get, like, 20k for three books this time! After negotiations, I ended up with a $200,000 advance for four books. We lived of off that for four years. We bought a house. Not a big one, but still, we owned a house. We bought a car. We decided to have another kid. Royalties that came in were high. My husband quit the job he hated and went back to school. Everything was fine.

And then it wasn’t. When things took a downward turn, I didn’t immediately panic. “We can hold on until Joe finishes school and gets a job. We have savings. This will blow over.” I waited for a year for things to just “blow over”, and they didn’t. Our savings dried up. I got a job at McDonald’s. My husband quit college and went back to work at the same job, this time at half the pay. Our resources were tapped out. I had to apply for welfare.

I’m not proud to say that we’ve been on foodstamps and energy assistance for a year now. I’m not proud to say that because of my pride, I waited until we were destitute to take action and seek the help that my government offers. We lost that house, which was, incidentally, the house I lived in during my teen years and held a lot of memories. I’m not proud about any of this. But pride doesn’t feed your kids or keep them warm, so I can’t afford pride.

And yet, the attitude persists that people on welfare are there because they’re bad people. I don’t think it’s morally repugnant to do what needs to be done to provide for your children. In fact, I think a bad person is one who will let their children go to bed hungry when other options are available, simply because they value their pride and appearance over the well-being of their kids. That facebook commenter reserves the right to her opinion, and I reserve the right to mine.

I don’t think anyone actually sits down and says, “I’m going to have this baby that I can’t afford because life is more fun when it’s hard.” I don’t think anyone actually says that they’re going to intentionally live off of public assistance, and if they do, it’s not much of a life, so don’t envy them. In order to recieve cash assistance in the state of Michigan, you have to look for a job for forty hours a week. That’s forty hours a week of pounding the pavement, filling out applications. You also have to tell the places that you’re applying that you’re on cash assitances, so they can sign your form to prove that you’ve been out looking. That’s right, you get to tell a stranger that you’re on welfare, and open yourself up to the derision of people like our facebook friend up there. In public. In the end, you get something in the area of a hundred bucks a month for a family of four.

There’s a story that I hear all the time, from literally everyone. A woman goes to the checkout at the grocery store. Usually, the woman in question is described as “black” in a whispered voice because apparently black people put hidden mics around the houses of white conservatives to catch them being racist or something. I don’t know, I don’t get the whispered “black” that almost always accompanies this story. But I digress. This woman goes up to the checkout with some kind of luxury item in plain view. Many times, it’s a brand name purse or expensive-looking manicure. She heaps piles of exotic groceries onto the belt: t-bone steaks, lobster, organic produce. Somehow, she also gets alcohol and cigarettes in there, and she whips out her assistance card and waltzes out with those groceries, six screaming kids in tow. On rare occassions, she actually is overheard telling the cashier how great it is to keep having babies and getting free stuff, so she’s never going to work. Almost always, the person telling the story was standing behind her in line, their meager peasant rations pitfully malingering at the feet of the welfare queen’s bounty.

It’s all bullshit. For one thing, this story is so widely repeated that it just can’t be true. I’m not saying that you didn’t see a woman with an expensive purse using a foodstamp card. In fact, I often carry my Coach purse, which I bought five years ago, because it is sturdy and if something happens to it, there’s a lifetime guarantee on it. What I’m saying is, I was a cashier. My husband was a cashier for almost seven years. Neither of us has ever seen this woman who gleefully hands over her foodstamps and chats loudly about how great it is to commit welfare fraud.

I’m going to break this down for you. Let’s pretend you really, truly did see this woman with her expensive clothes or nails using her foodstamp card. Perhaps she bought those clothes before she became poor. It’s possible she has to dress a certain way for her job. And if she is buying steak or lobster, maybe it’s her birthday. Or maybe she’s cooking for her boss or parents or something and she doesn’t want them to know how bad it’s been.

No one is omniscient. None of us can know what every single person on welfare is thinking or feeling. But what it is about simply needing help, asking for it, and receiving it that makes so many people assume the worst about a person? Maybe instead of worrying about how many people are abusing the system, we could say, “Thank god that’s there to help people in need.” Maybe we could say, “Thank god I don’t have to ask for that kind of help, only to be looked down upon.”

I’m Jennifer Armintrout, USA Today Bestselling Author and public assistance recipient, and I am a good person. And so are a lot of people in the same boat with me.

If you follow me on facebook, you’re probably already aware that I love the movie Machete. Until recently, I thought that the worst possible way to ever be woken up was what happens to Jessica Alba near the end of the movie. Machete pushes her off the bed, onto a floor that is immediately covered in broken glass, while gun fire explodes everywhere and the only thing she can find to arm herself against the invading bad guys is a decorative table-top obelisk.

This morning, I would have preferred that.

At 6am, forty-five minutes before the alarm was to go off, I was, as I am every night, locked in the grip of a stress dream in which people are yelling at me and all my teeth are falling out. Then, I smelled something. Let’s concentrate on this point, as it will become important later. In my sleep, while I was dreaming, I encountered a stench so powerful that my sense of smell overrode REM sleep, a state in which non-essential brainwave activity takes a holiday and your genitals get a work out (look it up).

So, while I’m deeply asleep, something stinks so much that it rouses me to wakefulness. In the split second between my brain waking up and my body hopping on board the function train, I thought, “Maybe it’s my breath,” and tried to nudge myself back into unconsciousness.

But it wasn’t my breath, gentle readers. No, sometime in the night, my dog Sampson, who prefers to sleep under my bed, even though he’s the tall kind of beagle and doesn’t fit very well under there, had gotten sick. Not vomit sick. The other kind.

The poop kind.

Now, I don’t often think about dog poop. But when I do, I prefer to avoid words like “spraying” and “slightly-chilled”. “Gelled” is pretty much off the list entirely. And yet, I faced all of these putrid adjectives and more when my husband barked, “Jen. Your dog shit all over. Get up.” Followed by my two-year-old’s cheerful, fully awake voice asking, “Is that poop?”

Yes. Yes it was poop. So much, so disgusting. I’d just woken up. My husband had plastic shopping bags, a roll of paper towels, a bottle of Woolite and a bottle of Febreeze. He dropped all of these things in a panic and left the room like it was on fire.

Since Dear Author already featured a post about how getting to know authors makes them impossible to separate from their works, and this post has already let you glimpse a part of my life that would have been better left buried, I will try to put this as delicately as possible. I sleep, how shall we say, without creating extra laundry. Since I’d sprung from sleep to shit-cleaning mode in a matter of seconds, I hadn’t really bothered to put anything more on. While I scrubbed at the floor, I realized that this particular moment in my life could be a scene in a John Waters movie. A naked fat woman on her hands and knees, scrubbing dog excrement off the rug.

Did I mention that literally every pair of headphones I own was at ground zero of this catastrophe? That all three pair lay, coiled like Medusa’s head, in a pile of brownish-yellow slime? Well, dear reader, they were. I had to carry them to the bathroom and painstakingly clean them all without submerging them. At one point, my husband, who will have nothing to do with feces but will clean up vomit, as per our wedding vows, came to the bathroom door, made a face and said, “Take a shower before you come back to bed.”

When all was clean, but still odorous, I had the magnificent idea to put the Febreeze to good use. I did so, and vigorously. I liberally spritzed about half the bottle, until the horrible stench was good and covered. Finally, I could sleep once more. Okay, for thirty minutes. But I would make the most of that thirty minutes. I climbed into bed, folded the covers into a protective mask over my nose, and settled in for a peaceful cat nap. Unfortunately, no where on the Febreeze bottle does it have some kind of warning or guide to tell you at what point adding more Febreeze to the equation becomes more harmful than the original smell you’re trying to cover up. My eyes burned. My throat closed. I had an asthma attack.

Stumbling downstairs in the dark, I located my inhaler and took mighty puffs. I noticed the pile of blankets at the bottom of the couch, warm, snuggly, clean blankets that had never been in the same room with explosive dog diarrhea. I wrapped myself in one, fell on the couch and closed my eyes.

Only to be prodded awake by my son, who asked for cereal. My husband gently explained that since the kids were up, we, too, were now up, and we might as well get the grocery shopping done.

That’s right. We capped off our banner morning by doing the one household chore I like significantly less than cleaning pet crap out of the carpet. Things just got better and better from there.

As I write this, it is 1:55 pm, and it feels like it should be 8pm (or, for those not in the United States, 20:00). I think my body has actually aged from the stress of this no good, very bad morning. I’m going to take a nap in my hopefully aired out room, but I’m not going to leave you with pointless bitching. I’m going to turn this story into a lesson.

Every time you meet an author, and you think to yourself, “My, what an impressive person. S/he holds entire worlds in her/his head. Through the power of her/his words alone, s/he can transport me to another realm, one which I was glad to escape to. How in awe I am of the human mind at this moment, and her/his mind, in particular,” remember this post. Remember that at sometime in their recent life, they may have awoken to a morning of such horrors. Remember that authors are people, and sometimes, they have to clean up dog shit.

As some of you already know, I am a registered patient under Michigan’s Medical Marijuana Act, owing to the fact that I have chronic pain caused by Fibromyalgia. I’m totally legit here, so I wasn’t doing anything illegal. But on Saturday, I was well-medicated as Bronwyn Green, Jilly-O and I made our way to our friend Emily’s baby shower.

Things started off well, though we were somewhat delayed leaving my house as I thought it was imperative that google for information on Bruce Willis’s penis size. When the search turned up surprisingly little, we got in the car.

Now, since I live in a teensy rural town, and the shower was in another, slightly larger rural town and both were separated by a maze of country roads, Bronwyn needed my help to navigate. Which was why I got shotgun. In reality, they should have just thrown me in the backseat and let me sleep. But then we never would have had the experience we had.

Rather than tell you what actually happened, I’ll just tell you what happened from my perspective.

One one of those little rural back roads, Bronwyn was going much faster than she should have been going. Like, fifteen or more miles over the speed limit. She was telling us a story about something that terror has now erased from my fractured short-term memory, when she suddenly said, “Aaaand I’m being pulled over. Okay.”

My heart started to pound. Even though I was legally within my right to be, for all intents and purposes, stoned out of my gord, I looked at my red eyes in the visor mirror and knew I was going to jail. Legally, I’m allowed to carry up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana. I had none. But I was going to go to jail. This was happening.

“Jill, hand me my purse,” Bronwyn said, reaching over the seat.
“No!” I exclaimed, gripping the door handle and bracing myself as if for impact. “If you do that, he’ll think you’re hiding weed or you have a gun! You don’t want the police to think you have a gun! If I was the police, and I saw you reach back there, I would think you had a gun!”

I don’t know why I always think that the cops are going to shoot me. I’m a thirty-something white female who doesn’t have visible meth sores. The cops and me should be fine. But when I meet a cop, whether it’s socially or I’m being pulled over, I always say, “I don’t have a gun!” In the latter situation, that brutal honesty is always met with, “Step out of the car, ma’am.”

“I don’t want this to be one of those times when they tell you to get out of the car, Jen,” Bronwyn warned me. “Just don’t say anything.”

The cop came to the window and asked the usual questions. Why were you speeding, where are you going in such a hurry, etc. To which Bronwyn actually said, “I’m trying to get to a baby shower.” Then, the cop asked her, “Where is the baby shower.” I desperately bit my tongue to keep from snapping, “Why, are you gonna crash it?” In my head, all I hear is a litany of I never should have taken shotgun. I should have let Jill sit up here. I have too much access to this police officer. Today is the day I go to jail.

“Where is it, Jen?” Bronwyn asks, actually prompting me to speak in the presence of the law man. I mumbled something like, “Across from Perrigo,” and after the officer had taken her information and gone back to his car, I shrieked, “Why did you tell him about the baby shower? You never TELL THEM YOU WERE INTENTIONALLY SPEEDING!”

Bronwyn, being the driver of the car and the person who was actually in some danger of legal reprecussions, bemoaned her luck and expressed her anxiety over the situation, to which Jill asked, “What, have you got priors?”

I laughed with them, but inside I was certain I was going to go to jail. For those of you who have never experienced the joys of my admittedly questionable pharmeceutical past, let me explain what it is like to be as high as I was. The moment I speculated on the outcome of this traffic stop, in my mind it had already happened. Let me stress again that I was doing absolutely nothing illegal, a fact that my rational mind should have taken comfort in. My rational mind had checked out for the evening. I looked out the passenger window. Beside us, the Plainwell airfield lay peacefully blanketed in new fallen snow. Somehow, and I didn’t know exactly how, that airfield was my salvation.

I was going to make a run for it.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and sprang from the car in one smooth motion, rolling down the embankment like a motherfucking secret agent. I sprinted to the six-foot tall chain link fence and I climbed over that, the shouts of the policeman echoing over the sounds of traffic. I thought about those cars passing, and the people inside, who would go home to tell their families the fantastic story of the hero vigilante who stood up for the rights of the common man. The tale of my capture (for I would almost certainly be caught, either on this fateful day or one in the future, because folk antiheroes walk a fine line between bravery and recklessness) would echo in the hearts of the just forever.

At this point, to my mind, I no longer looked like this:

But like this:

But then, as I ran with a cheetah’s speed and a gazelle’s grace across that open field, something happened. We were pulling away from the shoulder. I had never actually gotten out of the car. And Bronwyn didn’t get a ticket (which is the true miracle of this story). I settled back into my seat, adrenaline releasing its hold on my clenched muscles. I related my tale of heroics to Bronwyn and Jill. “I was running,” I told them, my gaze drifting over the passing (now at the correct speed) landscape. “I was just… running.”

If you’d like to read what really happened when we were pulled over, visit Bronwyn’s blog for the whole scoop.

Tomorrow is the release date for AMERICAN VAMPIRE.

People are saying good stuff about this book. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on it. So you should probably hop on over to Amazon and order it. Look, here is a link that I have generously provided.

So, yeah. You should probably buy this book and read it, and then tell other people to buy this book and read it. That’s how I can afford to keep sporadically blogging. My writing career feeds my true passion, which is telling you stories about my dog and posting pictures of snails.

As many readers of my blog know, I dig older guys. I don’t know why, but guys over fifty turn my crank in a big way. Guys over forty-five, let’s say, because James May is only in his forties, and he’s like, my number one dreamy older guy. But I digress.

I like a lot of older guys, but just being over the proverbial hill isn’t the defining quality that makes me think, “Huh, I would like to get on that, albeit carefully, as he isn’t as young as he used to be.” One famous older man who I absolutely adore, but not in a “Yeah, I’d do him,” kind of way is John Lithgow.

John Lithgow is awesome. He wrote a children’s book about a squirrel, and it’s so cool, you just have to read it for yourself. In fact, he’s written a lot of really cool books for kids. He was also in the most freaking awesome show ever, 3rd Rock From The Sun. And he played a serial killer on Dexter. And that’s where my story takes a horrible turn.

I started watching Dexter at the urging of two of my friends, Scott and Jill, and once I started, I was hooked. It’s one of the best shows on television, as far as I’m concerned, but then again I don’t really watch tv. Anyway, it’s awesome, and I busted through three seasons in four days.

And then I got to season four. Let me set the scene. I’m watching Season four on my laptop. I’m working on three concurrent writing projects for Abigail right now, so I’m doing double duty, writing and watching Dexter. I look up, and there’s man butt. Actually, not bad man butt. My interest is piqued.

And then I notice it’s John Lithgow.

Now, I’m faced with a conundrum. John Lithgow has an awesome booty. How do I reconcile this knowledge with the kindly face of my favorite alien on 3rd Rock? How do I read Micawber to my children without thinking of what a nice butt the author has?

This is why there needs to be some kind of nudity early warning system. When I watched Boardwalk Empire, I was fully aware that yes, it’s an HBO series, I was probably going to see Steve Buscemi nude. But there are some celebrities you just don’t expect to see naked, especially in the four season of a show that has relatively little nudity.

Granted, it wasn’t sexual nudity. But now I know he has a nice ass, I have to put John Lithgow on my “I’d hit that” list, which is already pretty long. Now, I’m going to have to reorder my list, figure out some kind of filing system, and it’s going to fuck my whole day up.

I have two dogs. Both of them have an internal monologue that can be summed up as “duuuuur,” but one is definitely smarter than the other. The smarter dog, an English Springer Spaniel called Tucker, won’t remember that he has a head and will often ram said head into stationary objects, then act surprised and affronted at the pain his lack of consideration has caused. However, he’s intellectually leaps and bounds above our younger dog, Sampson, a Beagle mix.

Sampson is… special. His hobbies are licking fabric (anything from the pants you’re wearing to the furniture to the dirty laundry) and being hopelessly in love with me. When I’m gone for “too long”, a period of time determined not by any chronological common sense but measured by Sampson’s desire to be near me and anxiety that I will never return, he eats my clothing or tissues I’ve blown my nose in or pens off my desk. When he’s not busy worrying over whether I’ll ever return, he’s either sleeping on or near me, or just sitting at my feet and gazing up at me longingly. As you might guess, I don’t generally get a lot of alone time. A real problem arises when Sampson is in a different room than I am, and notices it. And this is the topic of my story today.

Last night, I was in my office, like I usually am. My office is off the living room, and has large french doors with long windows in them. There’s another door at the back of my office that leads to our back hall and connects to the kitchen and bathroom. For the purposes of this post, I’ve made a handy graphic outlining the floor plan of our ground floor:

As you can see, Sampson is in the living room, and I am in my office. Since the sound of the television in the living room is distracting to me, I had closed the french doors to my office. But my office, being the only room on the first floor that doesn’t gravity feed to the upstairs, gets insanely hot if I don’t leave the back door open. So, marked in red on the above graphic is the path Sampson would have to take to get into my office.

The first time this scenario took place, I gave Sampson some leeway. I’m sure it’s a difficult concept for dogs: the thing you want is right there, and the most direct path is blocked. Trying to get beyond the initial dog-mind panic, “I want it! It’s right there! Why can’t I get it?” in order to overcome the obstacle takes time. For Tucker, it was simply a matter of looking through the french doors, seeing that the back door was open, and taking that path of red x’s. For Sampson, it went somewhat differently.

At the time, my cousin D-Rock and I were sitting in my office. D-Rock said something to the effect of, “That dogs is so fucking stupid. He’s never going to figure it out.” I countered with, “No, he’ll get it eventually. Probably take him a while, though.” Sure enough, thirty minutes later, Sampson wandered away from the french doors and eventually made it through the back door. But D-Rock was unconvinced. “He probably just went into the kitchen and heard us talking from the hallway, and was like, ‘Oh, what’s this down here?’ He didn’t mean to actually get in this way.”

I’m afraid she might be right, because last night, the same thing happened. So, there I was, sitting in my office, being generally awesome, and Sampson realizes that he’s been separated from me. I’m pretty lazy, and once I get comfortable, that’s it. I’m done. I’m not getting up for anything, unless the chair is on fire or something. I put up with Sampson’s whining for a little bit, but eventually he decided to charge the glass. That was when something had to be done.

I tried to put my hand up to my mouth and whistle, directing the sound to the back door. Since dogs have such awesome hearing, I thought this would clue him in to the alternate route. No dice. I made direct eye contact and pointed at the open door. “See? Come in the back way!” I shouted through the glass. This just made Sampson more frantic. My son, thinking he could help the situation, went to the kitchen and called Sampson, then tried to direct him down the hall. Sampson just became confused and raced back to the living room, where he collided with the doors. My son decided to open the french doors and let him in.

Sampson was all settled in at my feet when my husband went to the kitchen to make dinner. The sound of food being exposed and touched and possibly dropped was too much for Sampson, who shot out the back door of my office, down the hall into the kitchen. But my husband shooed him out… into the dining room. Sampson wanted back in my office. So he ran to the french doors in the living room and we repeated the frantic whining. This time, though, my son wasn’t there to let him in, and so he had to become more resourceful.

Sampson needed a plan. When my husband unhelpfully scolded him for trying to dig under the doors, Sampson revised his thinking somewhat. Hey, wasn’t there a secondary way to access the office? Yes! It would be tricky, but he could manage it. He would get into my office and be with me and all would be well once more.

Unfortunately, his path to the office was not a straight one. First, he ran up the stairs. Then, he sniffed around the dining room. By the time he finally got into my office, I had gone through the french doors, into the living room, and closed them behind me. Our places were switched. And now, Sampson couldn’t get out. Though he’d just entered the office through the back door, he could no longer remember its existence. Somehow, diabolical forces had trapped him in this hellish room, still separated from my by those infernal french doors.

Now, I’m not saying that dogs should be exactly as smart as humans. Dogs in general can only be “smart, for a dog”. That doesn’t make the dumb ones less worthy of love and good treatment. I’m just saying that if Sampson was a human, he would be your boss. And every night you’d go home and you’d wonder how he got to be your boss, when he’s so stupid. And every night, when you left work, he would be wandering around the office, desperately trying to find his way out.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBWfNWGJ4z0&w=560&h=345]

My grandfather is dying.

Not in the active, immediate way that signals that this is definitely, within days, hours, minutes, the end, but the slow way that involves Hospice and doctors giving statements in months rather than years. Because of this, I’ve been thinking about the nature of grief and loss, and I’ve come to a conclusion: I have no idea how to deal with this, and by “this” I mean this specific death, for this specific man.

To paint a clearer picture of what I mean, I have to paint a picture of my grandfather. My grandfather is the type of man who, when working at the paper mill that eventually gave him asbestosis, cancer, and COPD, would volunteer for shifts that left him on his feet for twenty-four hours. He’s afraid of heights, but as a paramedic he climbed a utility pole to bring down a worker who’d had a heart attack while fixing the wires. He delivered two babies in the back of that ambulance, using softball metaphors to talk himself through it. He values hard work the way other people value money; if it could be translated into currency, he’d have a fortune in the bank.

He loves infants more than any man I’ve ever met. He personally carried each of his six children to the nursery after their births. When I was a colicky baby, up all night screaming, he walked circles around the dining room table, singing to me. My own father never stepped up to the challenge, so my grandfather let me be his seventh child. Now that I’m grown, he takes my son for rides through the back fields in a golf cart, looking for wild turkeys and deer and stopping to let him pick up feathers. He calls my daughter “Punkin” and says how much she looks like me.

My grandfather is a man who will admit to past failings of the most major kind, but who won’t admit he’s wrong when arguing over the little things. He’s a man who isn’t the best singer, but who sang the loudest, until cancer took his voice box. He gets cancer the way other people get the flu, and shakes it off just as quickly. When undergoing radiation treatment for prostate cancer in 2000, we joked about the super powers that would result, and had a huge laugh when his “super-strength” caused the rusted-out door-handle on his minivan to break free.

He has known poverty, and never throws anything away because of it. His garage is a horror show of too many tools, too many golf clubs, too much clutter, too many things that will be useful “someday”. That garage was until recently, also home to the many stray cats he adopted. The first one to live there was thin-haired and scabby, missing an ear and in possession of a weeping, dead eye, but he would pick that cat up and let it tuck its head under his chin while he scratched it.

My grandfather is my super hero. Who else would roust a six-year-old with chicken pox from her bed and smuggle her under a blanket to watch a helicopter land in the B.P.O.H. parking lot? Who else would quit cigarettes cold turkey? He’s always been as tough as the cowboys in the westerns he loves to watch, but he reads Women’s World. He read my first book, but not my second because it was “too slow.” But he cared enough to call me and tell me that a vampire movie on television had stolen my ideas. It was Interview with a Vampire, but hey, he cared.

He’s usually honest, he has faith in God. He had a stroke that left him lying paralyzed on his lawn for hours, and the next day he showed up at my birthday dinner.

And now he’s dying.

Grief is a funny thing. I can recognize all the stages as I go through them, but there’s no road map to what I’ll be feeling next, and the entire process will reset when the day I’m dreading actually comes. I’m not sure if I prefer this kind of grief or the kind that happens with a sudden phone call in the middle of dinner. Certainly it would be more easy to enter into deep denial and trick myself into surprise when it happens.

I don’t know how to approach this kind of death. It’s the elephant in the room. Do you mention it? Do you act like everything is normal? Do you let the person you love die without acknowledging the fact that when they go, a huge chunk of your life is going to break off, and you’ll never be the same?

For all I can write about death, with the blood and gore and violence, sometimes it’s a quiet, expected death that wreaks the most horror and loss.