What I love about bureaucracy is that no matter what happened, no matter whose intestines are hanging out, you always know what they’re going to ask you next. At the veterinary ER where I’ve been interning this summer, it’s always the same questions at the desk, the ones that Tina taught me to ask when she trained me on my first day—what is the baby’s name? How old is the baby? Would you like to update the card on file? Could I get a copy of your driver’s license? The other techs say the pet, but Tina says the baby and I say that, too, because what I love is how nobody complains. You get somebody’s big football player looking dad with a kitten the size of a jellybean, and he answers the questions the same way as everybody else, which is that he forgets he’s in the middle of explaining how his kids found this kitten in a gutter and he doesn’t know what to do about it, and he says that the kitten’s name is Sparkles, that he doesn’t know how old it is, that no, the card doesn’t matter, and yes, of course, and he fumbles half-embarrassed in his wallet because he, like everybody else, can never find the license on the first try while somebody’s waiting.
Sometimes this makes people upset, the questions, and later on they get agitated—if there’s a wait, when dogs won’t stop barking, when we run late. Every once in a while someone starts shouting when we don’t do what they want, when we don’t fling ourselves over the desks to rush them to the right place. But most of the time, people find the questions comforting, like I do. My grandfather died three days ago and all the cousins have to write a eulogy. It's comforting to have a task, like there’s structure under the chaos. When I ask questions, I see people stop crying long enough to pull out their wallets, to report facts.
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When I was a child they said I needed to practice showing empathy, this after I didn’t cry at my grandmother’s funeral, after I kept asking where we were going next and what I needed to do. The doctor evaluating me for autism now says, and what was the purpose of those questions? She’s autistic, too, and we both know the answer, but I tell her anyway, for the paperwork—I was making sure my mom didn’t have to worry about it, or I was trying, even though I was eight, even though my dad was there, even though there was nothing I could do. She writes this down.
I don’t have the words to tell her that my grandfather talked more than I did about what was coming next, that he couldn’t shut himself up about the reception in the church hall and the places he’d advertised it. My uncle said he was a heartless piece of shit, and my mom kept crying, but all I’ve been able to hear is my grandfather asking those questions over and over—I put it in the church bulletin, I put it in the obituary, do you think everybody who needs to know about it knows?
I learned how to pretend, of course, to show empathy the other way, the way my dad told me to do that day, to shut my mouth and give mom a hug. I memorized how to do it, because there’s a pattern. I can squeeze hands and say, gosh, that must be so hard. I get awards for bedside manner at vet school, where I am now.
But at check-in, I get to do it my way. I ask what happened. I ask when it happened. I ask what parts of the body are impacted and I circle these on a chart. I ask Tina’s questions and people stop crying, and when I ask who was next, I look at the people who have minor emergencies, whose pets have rashes and fleas, and I see them look at the big emergencies, the dog crying in the man’s arms, and they do it my way. What I want to say about Grandpa is that he wanted to do everything right. The people in the office say, please deal with him first. We all know that this is because they recognize pain and want to do something. None of us have to name it.
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My grandfather, mostly, was like me. After my grandmother died, he didn’t talk about her. You’d go visit him in Florida and he’d talk about anything else. He would go on and on about the rules to Mexican Train dominoes and his three favorite benches on the retirement home grounds. He told the same stories over and over, how his parents moved from Sweden to Massachusetts to Michigan, and how he forgot Swedish, and I went and took the whole series of Swedish classes during college like I could learn something about him from repeating jag heter Christine, vad heter du? Mom was so proud of me, told him I took the classes, but he always just looked out the window and told that same story, how they made him forget. Sometimes no matter what you memorize about formal and informal you, about sentence structure and how it influences perception, you can’t learn a single valuable thing that helps you know someone.
I’m supposed to stand up in front of the church tomorrow afternoon at his funeral and say something like all the cousins are going to. I’ve been googling. I want to say he missed Grandma but my uncle won’t like it, even if his kids are going to lie about how much they loved going to visit that hot room, with Grandpa and his eyes on the wall. I want to say I understood where he was coming from, but Mom will put her hand on my shoulder and look at me, with that pained look that asks sometimes if I came from space.
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People like patterns, and this is why I’ll recite a generic eulogy and go back to my seat and shut my mouth. People love to hear that people were loved and will be missed and were good. The woman at the vet ER, who comes in to the evening rush with her husband and the dog yelping and bloody and struggling in his arms, stops crying when I start to put her through the pattern. The dog’s name is BigBoy. He’s about six. They’ve been here before. Her name is Renee Lawler. She doesn’t care about the card on file. She pulls her license from a beat-to-crap Vera Bradley wallet. The dog got attacked by a neighbor’s dog, his shoulder’s messed up, she sees intestines sticking out. Her husband isn’t answering questions and I see him crying and trying not to, holding the dog by the window that overlooks the parking lot, away from everyone else. She’s not crying now. She’s answering me. She’s asking when one of the exam rooms is going to be open. She’s waiting for her license back.
It's not the same with the eulogy. I can get up there tomorrow afternoon and say what’s going to make people feel better, even if it’s not what I mean. I want to say he was predictable, except I want everybody to know I mean it as a compliment, which they won’t, and it would be a lie, anyway, because he wasn’t, not quite. No one is, except people in lines and me. The last time I saw Grandpa a year ago in an Olive Garden the last night the whole family was in Florida, he turned to me out of absolutely nowhere, and looked at me with these dead haunted eyes and he asked me in Swedish if I knew what love was. I was the only one who heard him, and I was the only one who would have understood him even if he’d said it louder, and we just looked at each other. I’d seen this question on tests, a vocabulary plug-in question, one that Duolingo asked me, and I didn’t know how to answer it, because I didn’t have the words for that.
I hadn’t realized he’d listened when I said I took the classes, and I hadn’t realized he had told us he’d forgotten for whatever strange reason was behind why he did anything. His eyes had the whole answer in them and I wish I’d had something to tell him. Now I’d tell him it looked like this man holding BigBoy and whispering to him, like the dog shivering in his arms. It looked like Grandpa sitting there in an Olive Garden looking so small and lonely without Grandma. I don’t know how to say that in Swedish. I don’t know how to say that in any language.
Hannah Feustle is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi and a graduate of the University of Memphis’s MFA program in fiction. She is the recipient of the 2019 Deborah L. Talbot Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work forthcoming or published in The South Carolina Review, The Worcester Review, the minnesota review, Bayou Magazine, Chautauqua, and others.
Photo by Claudio Schwarz