"So Van. You're 80 today, and that means your old. Your an old man, and I'm alive to see it. So who's laughing now?! Ahahahah... oh crap."
"Did you see that, mother? He died. That miserable old coot got what he deserved. Who's laughing now? I'm laughing... crap."
It's hard to remember at this point, but that very first viewing on "Grannies Gone Wild" was genuinely shocking in its stinger. Here was a normal episode of network television, with banal marital conflict and wacky hijinks, that, in its final two minutes, decides to kill off two of its major characters. And it does so in such a silly way (obvious wigs, poop gags, a gigantic thermometer-shaped brick joke) that we are trained over time to laugh at something that is, on its face, not that funny at all.
Right out of the gate, this column has treated death like a joke, because "Grannies Gone Wild" itself treats death like a joke. I've killed Van a thousand times in my mind, and boy oh boy has it been a hoot. But, as has often happened this summer, life's very real circumstances have forced me to recontextualize how I feel about this stupid fucking TV show.
I'm down the shore as I type this. I'm out on the deck in early morning hours, everyone else still asleep in this dinky ass shore town besides me and the seagulls. One of those sleeping individuals is my grandmom (we don't call her "Grandmom," but I'll refer to her as such out of respect to anonymity), who is here with us because her husband, my grandpop (well, stepgrandpop, and we similarly do not refer to him by either of those cognomens) is living out what we all assume are his final days in a southern state with his biological children instead of with his wife.
A sticky situation, not only because remarriages cause this weird tension to pop up between parties, but also because, well, staring into the face of death is frightening as fuck for anyone who attempts it. I guess that's my main point here, that it's disconcerting to think about living the next week of my life with this sort of pall of impending death hanging over everything we do, up to and including watch an episode of Reba that treats death like the lowest form of humor. It doesn't feel very humorous to me.
By the time you read this, it'll be my grandmom's birthday. She has spent the 24 hours I've been with her at this shore house so far obsessively relating her fear that grandpop is going to die on her birthday. Everyone else's reaction so far is to say "no, he's going to make it" and etc., because what else can you say? The alternative is too gruesome; that alternative being some form of "you're 8x today, and that means you're old..." and then "oh crap" and then... fill in the blank.
That wouldn't feel right, because we're trained from a very young age to treat death like the most solemn event in our lives. To make a joke out of that is crass, and yet here we are, watching "Grannies Gone Wild," every day, and every day, we normalize death. Every day, I become more and more like Old Cheyenne, watching her loved ones fall around her, and all I do is sit on the couch and stare into some unknown point very far away, slowly nodding my head, the crushing finality of death normalized months ago. Talk about a joke.
There is, perhaps, room for optimism here. It might be easy to look upon this Grannies Gone Wild experiment and view it as a means to strip away some sort of essential human emotion—that of sadness—and leave a hollow shell behind. However, one might also choose to view it as a gift. It's more than trivialization. It's also more than normalization. It is a source of strength. If we treat death like some great foe, then we might be inclined to cower. If we treat death like some kind of joke, then perhaps we can stand tall when faced with its proposition.
I'm going to choose to see it that way, both for the purposes of this blog and for the purposes of living my own life. I am loathe to say it, but the stinger of "Grannies Gone Wild" holds a very real, very tangible lesson about how to stand tall and how to have courage. I'm going to try to remember that, as I perform this daily ritual, and as the nonfictional world around me continues to outdo the craziness found in this fictional episode of television.
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