Hollis Giammatteo - The Shelf Life of Ashes

THE
SHELF LIFE
of
ASHES

Copyright 2016 by Hollis Giammatteo

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

Published 2016
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-63152-047-1
eISBN: 978-1-63152-048-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015954804

Book design by Stacey Aaronson

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

Confess your hidden faults.
Approach what you find repulsive.
Help those you think you cannot help.
Anything you are attached to, let it go.
Go to places that scare you.

From the epigraph to
The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron

For my dearest friend, now wife, Dana Blue

I BEGAN A MEMOIR WHEN I WAS NEWLY FIFTY, MEANING to freeze the year, to locate it as an event, an exact sensation, an experience, an obelisk that split the clouds. By the time it was done, that year had grown into many and fifty had revealed itself to be no more identifiable than something seen teasingly far out in the oceanis it a seal, a kelp, a piece of driftwood? Fifty compelled me to question the notion of the self,my Self, an entity I had fabricated from conditions and reactions to conditions, from hopes and fearsand face certain nasty truths: that youth and all its gay attendants flee; that impermanence is king; that death will issue me an invitation with my monogram.

I submitted this memoir to myriad prospective agents and publishing houses, from which it garnered myriad rejections over a period of two years. I remember one particularly vexing reason I was given: the market is glutted with books about aging; therefore, there is no market for this subject. There really is no such thing as too many books about aging, or dying, or redemption. Thats like being turned away from a potluck dinner because youve brought brownies and there is already pie, three cakes, and a melon. I wasnt convinced that this was the real reason; rather, I thought it had something to do with the truth that I had not gone deeply or sincerely enough into my subject, which after all, is everybodys subject.

I put the memoir aside. I left my writing the way one leaves a barmaudlin, reeling. I was tired of my mind, unsatisfied by the elusive nature of its products. I started gardening, began a business in that field, thinking that finally I could make things of physical beauty, employing simple values of design, making order out of natures rich messes. But I began to wonder if, in returning to the memoir with the intention of developing my themes by bringing a more seasoned perspective to this process, I could make a parallel narrative. For my evolving sensibilityindeed, my aginghad invited my perception of this material to change. And so I decided to let the original chapters stand, following them with a commentary, adding auxiliary and autonomous chapters.

The original work had a problem with inside. It neither got inside the experience of others aging nor into a deeper understanding of the phenomenon itself; thus, I didnt let my reader inside me. I defended myselfmy thoughts and more genuine feelingswith humor and hyperbole. In a writing project dedicated to truthful exploration, these are disingenuous ploys. I had nothing to lose by returning, I thought, and perhaps everything to gain.

Here is how I saw it then.

T HE APPROACH OF MY FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY INVITED queasy speculation. Was it a beginning? An ending? A bit of both? I did not actually feel myself turn fifty, nor become, in an eye-blink, middle-aged. But I wondered, could one train for the onset of aging the way one must for a two-month bicycle trip up the Canadian Rockies, say, or any such gravely rigorous, life-altering event? I wondered could a map be found to help one through the tasks of aging? Where lay the key to, if not graceful aging, then the cultivation of a brave and resilient mind that would find something more in the process than losses heaped on losses, middens and mounds?

If I went at it as a project or a seminar, it might be possible to make an intentional transition. Perhaps by working with the elderly, I would get it in my bones and heart and tissue that I, too, was headed there. And so, on the morning of my first week after turning fifty, I sat in the offices of the Columbia Lutheran Ministries, about to have a job interview with a Jewish woman from New York City, who was a former social activist, and, Id soon learn, dressed like me, which is to say she utilized a palette dominated by black.

Before interviewing me for a $7-per-hour job assisting a population of very old people who wanted fiercely to remain in their homes for as long as they could before being hauled out to assisted-living facilities, Harriet handed me a stack of Xeroxed forms. I looked them over. Now, I really dont mind paperwork of this nature. Filling out forms makes me feel tidy and orderly, and as if my education has accrued to somethingthe ability to fill out forms, for example. Where it falls apart for me is the job history. I do not have a job history. So whenever I apply for a job, which admittedly is not that often, and have to produce a history, I must improvise. For one thing, my jobs bear no relationship to one another. Quite the contrary. At one particularly misguided moment in my life, for example, I was going to chemical dependency counselor school. When I came to my senses and dropped out of the program, I immediately got work at the local winery. Irony has always been my guiding light in the world of work.

Even though Harriet was encouraging and the job wasnt a job so much as research toward discovering the Map of Aging Well, I began to sweat. I wondered, should I list my actual jobs, in which case there loomed many chronological gaps, or should I disclose that I am usually busy being a writer, which carries with it gobs and gobs of gaps in the income department? Fortunately, I had brought along my writers rsum as an antidote to my undistinguished list of unrelated jobs.

Harriet looked at it for a long time. She looked at it and looked at it and looked at me. Why in the world do you want to work here? she asked, and this is the moment in the job interview that always stumps me, because I know that my answer will come out sounding as if Ive just read an article in some dumb personal-growth magazine.

I said something about turning fifty. I said something like working with old people would teach me how to walk fearlessly through my remaining days. It was my attempt to bring aging up close to my little, squinty eyes, I said, and read its message clearly. I said something about the sad fact of my aging parents, in their eighties and so far away in Pennsylvania, and that my wanting to work with old people had the flavor of proxy about it. That is, I couldnt help my parents as they aged, but I could bear in mind their experience as I cared for others.