Coming to Terms

I walk up a sidewalk flanked by walled gardens of multicolored roses and daffodils, their sweet scent an uneasy contrast to the quailing of my heart. My red Chihuahua tugs frantically on her leash, her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth as she tries to prove she is stronger than her ten pound body leads me to believe. Little gagging noises issue from her little body and she tries to break free of her collar by vigorously tossing her head.

We reach the front door of the hospice and my mom opens it to allow the dog and I to pass through. I find myself in the lobby. Mid-summer sunlight pours in from the windows, bathing the blue flower printed couches and chairs with warmth and cheerfulness. Vases of plastic flowers are scattered around the room, and there is an assortment of out of date magazines scattered on tables around the room.

Nobody sits reading before the fireplace. There are no groups of people standing around laughing or talking. I hear the clock ticking on the wall and the soft, excited panting of my dog. A nurse in green scrubs with a plastic smile appears and says something in a whispered voice to my mom. After a moment, I follow my mom down the hall to my grandmother’s room.

The room smells of cleaning products and waiting death. Like the lobby, the room is bathed in warm rays of sunshine. Miniature dolls my grandmother collected through the years sit in a long line on the low window sill. The bigger dolls stand or sit on the top of a shelf, smiling at me with painted smiles and plastic eyes.

I shudder and turn my own eyes to the bed. For a moment, I think my eyes have deceived me. My grandmother’s once snow white, beautiful, wavy hair lies flat, devoid of color and life. There are more wrinkles on her face than I remember, and her skin hangs from her face in defeat. Her head hangs to the side like a puppet without strings.

No longer held at bay by a gallon bag’s worth of pills I can’t even name, Parkinson’s has complete control of my grandmother’s body.

It is no longer hers. “Hi Mom! It’s me. Erin and Merci are here, too,” my mother exclaims. Her voice seems too loud in the tomb-like silence. My grandmother opens her eyes and looks at us with watery, colorless eyes. I am convinced she doesn’t see us. My mom puts Merci gently on the bed. I stand back awkwardly, uncomfortable and uncertain of what to say. I don’t think she’ll hear me or understand.

“Hi, Grandma . . .”

She doesn’t look at me, but a barely audible sound comes from her bed. “How . . .are . . .you . . .?”

I can’t understand her, so my mom translates.

I lie. “I am all right.” In actuality the room scares me, seeing her this way makes my insides melt.

The depleted, wrinkled woman in the bed does not match the mental picture I have of my grandmother. I remember her as a woman who knelt in her garden wearing a wide brimmed straw hat tied under her chin with a black ribbon while she planted roses that bloomed like children’s smiles in late spring. At Christmas she made candy holly leaves out of dyed cornflakes and spicy red candies. My cousins and I liked to see who’s tongue would be the most green from the food coloring.

Whenever I got sick, my grandmother would produce her small blue boxes of cluttered costume jewelry for me to go through. I would dump the contents of the boxes on the bed covers of the antique four poster bed in my grandmother’s guest room and spend hours gazing at the shiny brass pins with glass stones that sparkled when they caught the light. Sometimes I would try to imagine where my grandmother got a particular pin and where she might have worn it, and ultimately, how it ended up in a box to be shown to her granddaughters whenever they got sick.

Grandma never sat with me while I looked over the pins, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, and I never asked her about the history behind them. She was there though, in a sense. Secret stories I imagined about her past and who she may have been at my age lay hidden within each item I touched.

It saddens me that I never thought to ask her to unlock the secrets. Despite what I did know about her, there was so much I didn’t know. I had my chance, and I never took it.

Looking at my grandmother now, the engulfing, heavy weight of regret settles on my heart. I blink a couple times and look up from the linoleum floor in time to see my grandmother’s head turn to the side in a drunken manner.

“I . . .will . . .be. . .out . . .soon . . .”

I don’t know how to respond, or rather, I don’t have the heart to respond. She knows I’m here, that our dog is here, but does she know where here is? This hospice? This place of peaceful death?

My mom hands me our dog and tells me to go for a walk around the building. I don’t need to be told twice. Mom hands me the leash, and I all but flee from the room, not once looking back. Wandering around the halls, I find a small, reclusive space with a couch and sit down heavily. Death lingers in the air, in the halls, in the carpet, in the furniture. Escaping it is impossible.

I will myself not to cry, but tears have a life of their own. Merci chases the resident black puppy around the room and I find myself wishing I had their sense of blissful ignorance to the pains of humanity.

A couple weeks later, I am standing in line at REI, wishing the cashier would hurry up. The late July air feels too heavy and my stomach is doing cartwheels all over the inside of my body.

I need to sit down.

When it’s finally my turn, I lean drunkenly on the counter while the cashier rings me up with a cashier’s indifference.

“Are you okay?” My mom asks once we’re outside.

“No. I need to sit down for a second.”

I stagger over to the trees and promptly hurl the contents of my cart wheeling stomach into the trees in front of the store.

Great. If this keeps up, there is no way I’m flying to New Hampshire to visit my stepmother’s family.

That night, as I lie in bed trying to get my body to decide if it’s too hot or too cold, the telephone rings. I know my mom answered it because it goes silent after the third ring.

I wait.

A few minutes later my mom comes in and sits on my bed. She never sits on my bed.

“That was Uncle Charlie,” a pause, and then, “Grandma just died.” I start to cry. I think my mom is crying too, but it’s hard to tell in the dark.

“I’m going to meet Aunt Nancy and Aunt Elaine at the hospice. Uncle Charlie is already there. He was there when Grandma died,” she looks down at me, “do you want to come?”

I shake my head.

“Will you be okay here by yourself? Do you want to come upstairs and sleep in my bed?”

I shake my head again. I don’t want to move. My stomach hurts, my body aches, and now my heart is breaking apart in my chest. Mom strokes my hair gently and gets up to leave, closing the door softly behind her. When I am sure she’s gone, I take my teddy bear and go upstairs to my mom’s room. I climb under the covers, feeling the warm comfort of our Chihuahua at my feet.

I hope Mom comes home soon. I want a hug . . .

I am sick for a week, and though it prevents me from going on my much wanted vacation, it also prevents my mom from being alone in her grief over the death of her own mom.

The funeral for my grandmother is held near the end of my week long illness. The late July sky is a dull, sorrowful grey that mirrors the feelings of my family as we walk toward the gravesite. My grandmother’s polished wood coffin sits beside the plot where her husband is buried. The grandfather I never met.

We gather before the coffin and the service begins. The world seems to grieve with us in silence, the only sounds those of soft weeping and the solemn words of the pastor. A gentle wind dares to stir the hair of those gathered, blowing it into their faces, hiding their silent tears. I know people are crying, but they are so quiet. Am I allowed to cry? I don’t want to disturb the service. It’s so quiet. I look up from the grass and glance at the coffin. Did they dress up her body? I thought the casket was open during the funeral so family members could walk by and pay their respects. How does Grandma look now?

My mind is so busy distracting me, I don’t notice the tears washing down my face. Suddenly the air is filled with a deafening roar. As one, we look up in time to see two fighter jets streak through the grey afternoon sky. I watch them until they are out of sight. God, that’s loud. When the pastor resumes speaking, there is a sad, gentle smile on his face, a smile that almost reaches his eyes.

At the time I didn’t understand the significance of the two fighter jets. Only when my family talked about it with sorrowful fondness at the funeral reception did I realize what it meant: Grandma was with her husband again, and she was happy. Now, I hold the memory close to my heart where it will not fade or be forgotten. In a way, it’s a memory that fills a part of the emptiness my family and I all feel inside. My mom cries a lot after the funeral, especially when a friend offers kindness or sympathy. Having never really known my grandmother as intimately as my mom did, I find it difficult to comfort her. She once spent half an hour weeping alone in her room, refusing a hug from me. I sat awkwardly alone on the couch, at a loss of what to do.

One morning at the breakfast table about a month after the funeral, Mom looks a bit lighter than usual.

“I had a dream about Grandma last night,” she tells me.

I look up from my cereal. “What happened?”

“I was at a coffee shop or some kind of room somewhere. My mom walked in. She was dressed in a white gown and she looked healthy, like she did before Parkinson’s really got a hold of her. ‘Mom!” I called to her. She didn’t answer, she just smiled at me and I woke up.”

“Wow.”

My mom smiles. It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t seen her smile in a long time.

“I think she was trying to tell me that she’s okay; that she’s happy now,” Mom says.

I return the smile. The dream has caused a bit of the dark cloud to disappear from her brown eyes. Eyes that mirror my own. Perhaps now my mom can slowly come to terms with her own personal grief, and in time, I can learn to come to terms with my own.

The knowledge that I didn’t take the opportunity to create an intimate relationship with my grandmother still weighs heavily upon my heart. Yet, I realize now that the memories I do have and what I do know is precious. It’s better to have known someone for one moment of their life, however fleeting, than to never know them at all.