The Scents of Grief
The perfumes helping me process losing Esque's biggest fan.
As you probably know, my grandma, Melinda Seely, is dead now. You might have seen her comment sporadically on Esque posts, but she ALWAYS responded to them via email. She was my biggest fan. Every time, even when she hated the looks or was confused or had something snarky to say about a price tag. Most of the time, though, she was just calling me incredible and telling me how proud she was of all I do. This is a heart-bending loss for me and I appreciate your patience as I pick up the pieces. I’m finding it hard to write or care about much at all.
It has, however, been cathartic to discover and analyze perfumes that I feel have something to say about death, grief, or aftermath. You’ll find such musings below.
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Haunted Baby, to me, smells like the base of a Christmas tree left in its damp socket a bit too long. Gentle decay, foaming wood, the palimpsests of presents past. Though we didn’t use a real tree for Christmas, every year of our lives except this past one my grandfather would haul their plastic one out of the garage some time in November, then have a mental block against putting it away ‘til March or April, causing much angst for my grandma. Christmas was a twisted time for my sister and I, full of exposed nerves and disappointments and performances of togetherness that never really suited our fractured family, and the cloudy-stemmed, overripe haze created by Haunted Baby made me feel deeply connected to the self that my grandma loved for so long.
My friend picked this fragrance up from the OLO store for me after I smelled it on them and couldn’t stop thinking about it for a week on end. I think it’s only available in-store right now, but it’s worth calling or emailing if you want to experience this. I’m not a huge fan of OLO—I find its scents fairly decorative as opposed to conceptual, but its sublabel Siela does a lot more interesting stuff, Iron and Opoponax being its best. It burns your nostrils with its acrid cleanliness, like huffing the bleach that’s crystallized at the bottom of a pool, abandoned shortly after a thorough scrub. It hurts your teeth, almost, like biting down on a curb, bracing yourself. It also smells like the sad sanitation of a mausoleum.
Another super-synthetic fragrance, this one captures the much-loved odor of an indoor water ride, e.g. Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, in all its hyperchlorinated glory, but this fragrance is unique in that it also explores the less “clean” manifestations of the experience—the cloying fog, a touch of mildew. Feels like the kind of unease my Grandma would’ve easily protected me from.
Varanasi only lists “animal notes” at the very end, but I get an overwhelming stench of civet, like a hapless animal pissing all over the flowers one’s just left at a grave. The animal has no ill intentions, of course, it’s just an example of the exalted indifference of the universe to all our little lives and deaths. It’s a smell that, according to Fusciuni, combines the sacred and the profane like a Bataille novel, showing the two sides of the same coin that are sex and death.
Daisies, referring to the 1966 film of the same name, is like if Varanasi pulled every single one of its punches but left a ghostly outline of its stench: where Fusciuni’s is foul, this fragrance is gentle, where it sours, this one is sweet, and so on. There’s still something lurking under the ease of its surface. The flowers might be for a funeral. I’m also reminded of Harold and Maude.
This fragrance goes straight-up blue cheese, which I know because I once spilled a whole sample of it in my bag, which then smelled like a salad for weeks. The almost-too-much-ness of the lychee and yuzu are pushed over the edge completely with the addition of seaweed: wearing this kind of feels like drowning in a stagnant, syrupy (somehow still lovely) swamp.
When I hugged my grandma for the last time, I felt her leathery skin against her protruding collarbones and thought about how in less than a week, she’d be toted to the UCI medical department. There, people would look at one of the most important people in my life, slice into her skin, ponder her organs and tumors, and eventually, dispose of her body. I do not know where the official place to dispose of bodies used by science would be, but I hope wherever it is, it ends up, even far into the future, swaddled in a thick layer of mycelia, sanctifying my grandma’s body with their struggle toward world domination.
My grandma was the only person in my entire childhood to ever take me to a fast food restaurant, and even then, only a dozen times or fewer. Still, the spilled coke, ineffable, MSG-like savoriness, and proudly lowbrow aesthetic of Multiball couldn’t remind me of anyone other than her. When I saw her dying, she told me I used to perform West Side Story for her in line at Chipotle.
The jackfruit note in Dodo runs a bit rancid, giving what would otherwise be a fairly accessible fruity composition a fucked-up edge. It reminds me of overripe fruit fermenting in my Grandma’s bowl when she started to care less about keeping her house spic and span, as she had my whole life prior.
Obviously had to include this. Somehow wet and dry simultaneously, like flowers drawn in now-soaked chalk on the floor of a tomb, this short-lasting fragrance feels like railing lines of crushed-up Choward’s violet candy. It’s quiet and lonely. It’s not a scent for the dead, but for those they left behind, like me.
I love you, Grandma. All I want is for you to comment something inscrutably snarky on my blog one last time:
<3 ESK
Your words touched my heart. I lost my grandma around this time last year, and I still simultaneously feel her presence and long for it. Thank you for writing about yours— I loved reading about her.
she sounds wonderful. may her memory be a blessing <3