My first cigar

My grandmother is going to die today. She’s in a bed in Central Europe, I can’t go to her so I end up on the beach, a far-off second best.

I had wanted to toast her, but didn’t know what she drank. It seemed insincere to toast a woman with something she may have hated. My grandmother smoked cigars. I remember my mother describing how grandma used to pick her up from school, on a motorcycle. She would have a cigar stuck between two swipes of lipstick, her wig held on by a cotton handkerchief.

The old Indian man behind the counter looked at me curiously when I asked for one, repeating what I said in case he’d misunderstood. I’ve never smoked before.

It’s high tide and the water comes up to the dunes. There are only three other people on the beach, and they’re way down the other end. I feel like leather; like I’m wearing the recycled skin of some stronger, calmer animal. I don’t cry and I don’t feel like crying, I just want to be silent for a while.

My new lighter is still wrapped in cardboard and plastic. I don’t know which end of the cigar to light. I had assumed it would be obvious and suddenly feel silly.  I pick a side, struggling to keep the flame going in the inevitable wind. The first suck is caustic. Why did Grandma smoke these things?

Someone told me once that you aren’t meant to inhale cigar smoke, so I just hold it in my mouth, cheeks puffed out like swollen bellies, until my eyes start to drip. But I like the way the stuff drifts out of me on the exhale. I feel like a magician.

When I lay back into the sand, all I can see is sea grass and smoke and blue. I wonder about those people who say you can send thoughts across the world if you try hard enough. I’m not convinced, but I try anyway. I want to tell my grandmother that she has always been a constant. Her letters always found me, no matter how often we moved. She used to draw me pictures of fairies and animals and flowers, folding them neatly into the envelopes as gifts. I never kept them, always a little disappointed that they weren’t money.  I was a child, after all.
Earlier, I wrote to her. It was the way we always kept in touch and it’s the only way I know how to say goodbye. I read it to the sand and snail shells and then I light it on fire, careful not to set the grass alight.

My mouth tastes disgusting. I haven’t eaten for a long time and my stomach throbs a little, pulsating out of boredom perhaps more than hunger.

Mom always said that grandma was beautiful when she was young. She knew it too, which made her a little sour when she got older and mental illness and babies and smoking and alcohol tore her features apart. Family used to tell me I look like her, when she was still pretty. It was meant to be a compliment, but the statement always made me feel sick.
I worried that if I looked like her, I would live the life she lived, that schizophrenia would enter my brain like a worm one night while I slept, leaching sanity like excrement and filling me with paranoia, hysteria and fear.

The cigar has burned down now and I stand, wiping ashes from my pant leg. I walk to the edge of the ocean and reach down to snuff out the fire at the end of my fingertips, throwing the stub into the sea with a kiss. She was crazy, in every sense of the word. But she was still my grandmother.

This anecdote is for her. I am letting you read it because she can’t.