Victoria Chang’s 2020 volume of mostly prose poems, Obit, is about her father’s stroke on June 24, 2009, which destroyed his frontal lobe, and her mother’s death on August 3, 2015 of pulmonary fibrosis. The two dates surface again and again, marking a range of losses within the larger loss. Chang writes obituaries for her father’s ability to use voice mail, for her mother’s false teeth, for her friendships that disappear into a gauze of despair (“Depression is a glove over the heart”), for optimism, for ambition, for her mother’s clothes, and for her own children, whose grief at her death, and whose own deaths, sometime in the future, weave in and out of her own mourning.
The promotional summary of the volume distinguishes obituaries—memories of the dead from elegies—efforts to immortalize the dead. The main difference for Chang’s purposes, though, is that the obituary isn’t a poetic form, but a more matter-of-fact endeavor. Chang riffs on that facticity, fights with it, pokes holes in it, and spirals around it, trying to reconcile the stark difference between this date and that date, this world with her mother in it and that one where her mother isn’t. The resulting tone is sardonic, as she makes fun of the dry inadequacy of the obituary; agonized, as she’s stuck in, and with, the dry inadequacy of death; and wistful, as she bumps around helplessly looking for the right words in a form that can’t supply them.
Appetite—died its final death on Father’s Day, June 21, 2015, peacefully and quietly among family. We dressed my mother, rolled her down in her wheelchair. The oxygen machine breathing like an animal. They were the only Chinese people at the facility. The center table was loud again, was invite-only again. Like always, I filled my mother’s plates with food. Her favorite colored puddings contained in plastic cups. When we got up to leave, her food still there, glistening like worms. No one thought much of it. There are moments that are like brushstrokes, when only much later after the ocean is finished, become the cliff’s edge that they were all along. Death is our common ancestor. It doesn’t care whom we have dined with.
Like most of the poems in the book, this could be a short, short story—an account of the last time her mother ate. It works as a kind of pre-obituary, commemorating a moment on the way to her mother’s death. And it’s also a post-obituary, since it’s written retrospectively, commemorating a moment that Chang didn’t realize at the time was a death. The sentences are staccato and sometimes fragmentary, which gives the passage a feeling of plainness or directness even as it spirals off into metaphor or shifts focus to side details. (“The center table was loud again…”)
The short sentence, “No one thought much of it” functions as the key to the passage, or the hole into which the passage disappears; Chang’s saying that no one thought about her mother refusing to eat, but she’s also talking about the way the poem feels (intentionally) put together of disparate impressions and observations, and about the way the lack of system and the lack of foreknowledge all foreshadow and mirror the absences and emptiness of death—which doesn’t care that this is a last meal, and doesn’t care whether anyone noticed or not.
Chang simultaneously is trying to use the obituary form to chronicle things that aren’t supposed to be in an obituary, and to leave the form behind in order to escape from her memories into silence or abstraction. At times, she abandons the prose poem, pausing to write five-line tanka (mostly to her children) and create a long middle-section of gnomic fragmented lines (“…Earth is a/hole not a sphere meant to be filled/with bodies not with thinking”). Chang’s mind, though, and the book, go back to those two drear dates and the dates around them, without spaces or lines, just text blocks sitting there. “How do you walk heavily with subject matter on your back,” she asks, “without trampling all the meadows?”
As in more traditional obituaries, others’ words and anecdotes drift through the poem. Some lines from poet Tomas Tranströmer are quoted and Chang wonders if his children hated visiting him as much as she hates visiting her father. She mentions that John Wilson, who wrote jazz musician Artie Shaw’s obituary, died before the bandleader did, and wonders what will happen to her obituaries if her father outlives her. And of course her mother and father speak, though they share, not words of wisdom or treasured memories, but odd nonsense (“I’ll fold the juice”) or querulous demands (“How much money will you get”).
Her father’s language loss serves as the subject for a couple of the poems (“Language—died, brilliant and beautiful on August 1, 2009 at 2:46 p.m.”). It’s also a metaphor for the collection as a whole. “Similes—died on August 3, 2015. There was nothing like death, just death,” she writes, and, like many poems about grief, the book is about its own inadequacies and inability to remember or recreate. Obit is an obituary for itself, as it insists, with its blank lyricism, that the effort to hold the dead is dead before it starts.
The last poem in the volume is a tanka which reads:
My children, children,
this poem will not end because
I am trying to
end this poem with hope hope hope,
see how the mouth stays open?
The mouth hangs open to say “hope” over and over, and hangs open because it’s dead and there’s nothing inside. Obit tries to keep Chang’s parents alive and is also the empty space where they were. “Grief is wearing a dead person’s dress forever,” she writes. It’s also repeating the day that they died.