Death (or back to internet)

My grandma died this past fall. It was the first time someone I liked died (Before you ask, I never knew Nelson Mandela personally. Nice try.) Her death has made me rethink what it means to leave a legacy.

My grandmother was no celebrity. The craziest part of her life was that she had seven sons. Whenever I tell people this, they always ask the same question: “Does that statistic include miscarriages and abortions?” The answer is nope. If you count miscarriages and abortions, the number of times she got pregnant is probably in the high teens.

The point is that my grandmother probably had sex with my grandfather upwards of twenty times over the course of her life. That might seem like a modest number, until you learn that she only lived to be a hundred years old. Furthermore, she was in hospice care for the last seven years of her life, and wasn’t even sexually active until she was thirteen, leaving a brief window of eighty years to fuck my grandfather. That means they were having sex at least once every four years. To put this in perspective, the Summer Olympics happens every four years. To put it in even greater perspective, the Winter Olympics also happens every four years.

But my grandmother was more than just a statistic. She was also one of the six million American adults living with Alzheimer’s. It’s difficult to watch someone you love suffer from Alzheimer’s, because you can never tell if they’re just faking it for attention. This is why you need to constantly test their memory. If they sometimes remember things and sometimes don’t, they’re probably faking and you should call the Alzheimer’s Association to come and arrest them. The Alzheimer’s Association jail is like a regular jail except they’re always making you run 5K’s to raise money for the jail, and then when you can’t run anymore, they shoot you dead like a horse.

I think my grandmother really had Alzheimer’s, though, because she kept her story straight those last seven years. Whenever we visited, she seemed to sort of remember our faces but never our names. Her memory essentially rewinded, so that by the end, she thought she was a kid again. She often asked when her father was going to pick her up and take her home, which was sad, because her father was really, really dead. I kept trying to tell her this, but she never believed me. She thought it was one of my classic bits. And can you blame her? I was comedy’s favorite bad boy; but at what cost?

My grandmother’s greatest legacy is clearly the family she fucked out of the ether, but by the time she died, she didn’t even recognize her sons. Alzheimer’s takes away the backwards-looking contentment of nostalgia as much as the forwards-looking contentment of knowing you’ve fostered something that will outlive you. You’re trapped between these two forces that should act in opposite directions to stretch your life out but instead close in like Indiana Jones-walls to make you feel claustrophobic and small.

One of the ironies of Alzheimer’s is that it also jeopardizes other people’s memory of you. When you can’t sustain a conversation or leave your nursing home, you slip out of your family’s collective consciousness. You miss milestones: weddings, bar mitzvahs, separations, divorces, baptisms, amicable divorces, funerals, bat mitzvahs, confirmations, children’s coming-of-age ceremonies, quinceañeras, etc. You miss your grandson blossoming from a conventionally attractive child into a young man with the face and body of a conventionally attractive child. Even worse, you can’t teach him all you’ve learned about sex. He has to learn from his fucking pediatrician like a fucking idiot. You’re not even the first person he calls when he loses his virginity. He calls his fucking pediatrician like an absolute fucking idiot.

Like most people, I’ve thought a lot about my legacy. For a while, I thought it was going to be founding The Record and making it the world’s oldest humor magazine. Now, I’m worried people will remember me for driving The Record into the ground. The truth is, we’re out of money. That’s why we had to combine these two issues. It ended up working out this time, because “In Memoriam/Fuck Till You Drop” is a funny juxtaposition, but I don’t think we’ll last much longer. It’s really nobody’s fault, except our publisher’s (Chloe Prendergast) and our business manager’s (Simon Custer). Sometimes things like this (Chloe and Simon not selling enough ads) just happen.

Still, I’ve become less concerned with leaving a legacy and more concerned with remembering the life I’ve led. I will let my children serve as proof not only of the fact that I learned to fuck as prodigiously as my grandmother even though she got Alzheimer’s and couldn’t teach me even one goddamned thing about sex, but also of the fact that I led a rich and meaningful life. I don’t even care if my children are stupider than me. They’ll still get into Yale, and in many ways, that counts for more in this world than being “smart” or “hard-working.”

Even now, I’m tearing up thinking about my seven future sons: Rico (bastard), Antonio (second bastard, led to a shotgun wedding), Big Rico (conceived on the wedding night, but with the 6’2” maid of honor), Ricardo (far and away my favorite), “Sonny”, Massimo (last-ditch effort to save the marriage), and Little Giuseppe (complete accident. We agreed to have sex one last time after the divorce mediation. Next thing we know, we’re stuck with Little Giuseppe. Kid survived two fucking abortions.) They all look like their great-grandmother.