Liz's Monologue: she sounds like me!

Liz interviewed me the other day. She interviewed me for a monologue. I've been meaning to put this up for a while.
/ thanks Liz ! Oh and I will "keep adding to (my) sentences rapidly, making (my) thoughts little islands connected by dashes." /

Q: Have you ever been close to death?

Well yeah, well my grandpa died when I was like thirteen but that was like the closest I’ve been to someone that I-I loved experiencing death but um, I think the first time I experienced death was probably when I went to the American cemetery here and that’s like—a WWII memorial for all the soldiers, the American soldiers that were here during the war that died.

They have all these crosses without names on them, they just have numbers but there are no bodies in them.

And I remember thinking like, “Well that’s weird…like we’re remembering people but there’s no physical evidence of them being on earth really, just these crosses have numbers--it’s really bizarre.”

So, that was my first experience with death but I think my grandpa’s death was a big deal too…

Um, I was actually in a play when it happened, I was doing Grease (laughs), and um…I-I was Rizzo and my dad, like, I remember looking, for my dad in the audience, he wasn’t there and I was like “Whoaa, that’s not cool,” you know?

And I found out after, my grandpa had a stroke, which was really sad, but….cause he wasn’t sick or anything, he was healthy and then, um, he had a stroke, he was at the dinner table? He was eating and he had a stroke.

So um…I don’t know, my grandmother was there and she was telling me about it the other day…and I was like “oh that’s so sad,” I didn’t know that everyone was home when it happened, but it was very, um….(can’t finish)

Like, I like to think my grandpa’s still here, right? Somewhere…like, part of him.

Um, and so it’s possible because I think—you know, that’s the hardest thing about death is that…someone leaves for good, and you can’t call them up on the phone and you can’t like, uhh talk to them…so--and hear their voice--so I think—that’s when I started praying again really, was like after he died and um, I mean I don’t do it as often as I used to but—you know, I think that was a way of talking to him.

That’s why a lot of the stuff I write is, I think, revolves around him. Like, the idea of the spirit of him being around.

There’s some places here that remind me of him and like, foods that I eat that remind me of him? Like, there’s a thing here called pan de sal which are little pieces, like, they’re little pieces of bread and they’re salty, and you would put sugar cubes on them and when I was little, we made them, and they were like salty and sugary on the inside—like, around the inside. But that’s what they tasted like. Um, the texture’s really weird.

So everytime I eat that I think of him…but yeah, usually when people talk about that, that’s what I think of, about death.

How I felt, and how my family felt, and how I still feel about it.

But um, I think it gets easier dealing with someone gone like that, like I still feel like he’s here in little things like pictures and food (laughs). Cause he loved food.

Yeah, I wish I could say that I still believed in like heaven, or hell, but I think—I don’t know, I-I feel like we invent stuff like that to deal with it, to make it easier, you know?

Um, I mean maybe you live on with people who love you, maybe that’s why you need to make connections with people…I don’t know.