My
grandmother was the first close loss I can remember. I had never known my
father’s father; he had died before my parents even met. But my father’s mother
was a different story. Of my two grandmothers, I wasn’t as close to her as to
my mother’s mother. She simply lived further away—close enough for easy holiday
and birthday visits, but not within walking distance like my mother’s mother.
It’s a distance that I realized, later in life, that I had reflected in
language: while my mother’s mother was “Grandma,” my father’s mother was “Grandma
Hayes.” This incorporation of her last name was a sign of the slightly greater
formality, somewhat lesser familiarity, in my relationship with her. In the
last couple years of her life, I tried to change that, being sure to address
her as “Grandma,” too. But sometimes I forgot.
I had lost
great-uncles and distant cousins, and one first cousin when I was too young to
know what that loss really meant. So I wasn’t prepared in any way, not that
anyone really can be, for losing Grandma Hayes. I was at my parents’ house, sitting
on the front porch, when the call came; my aunt, who had done most of my
grandmother’s care, called to say that she wasn’t doing good. We should come
over. Even then, I didn’t connect it with ensuing death; surely if she were
that bad, they’d take her to the hospital? I didn’t understand that what my
grandmother was doing was part of a much older tradition: choosing to die not
in a hospital, but at home.
When we got
there, she was unconscious on a hospital bed set up in her living room. But she
was still aware. She could squeeze our hands on request, but not speak or open
her eyes. Slowly, this awareness faded. The squeezes stopped. We waited, a
combination of aunts, uncles, and cousins, for two days. For those two days, I
watched. I wanted to be the one holding her hand, but not to speak. My mother
told me when we first arrived to say something to her, but trying left me choked
and sobbing, something I didn’t think my grandmother would enjoy. Her breath
had gotten shallower and softer, until, at last, she sighed deeply, then
breathed no more.
I wasn’t
sure what I was seeing. “How’s her breathing?” I asked my cousin, also in the
room with me, in case I was wrong and I just couldn’t see the shallow breaths.
She looked at me with red, tearful eyes and said, “You need to go get the
others.”
I didn’t
cry when I did, or when everyone lined up to say goodbye. It was when the
undertakers were zipping her into a leather bag that I ran into her bed room. It looked, bluntly, like mine: piles of
clothes, folded and unfolded, bags half unpacked, and books. Stack of books,
lining the walls.
I couldn’t
accept that my grandmother was gone, that no holiday or birthday would ever be
the same. She needed to not be gone. I did the only thing I could think to make
that so: I grabbed a notebook. “Things she gave me” I wrote at the top. I
listed, in no particular order:
-My eyes
-My temper
-My love of
staying home
-My love of
reading
-My
quietness
-My lack of
interest in cleaning
While I’m not sure that all of these things are, strictly
speaking, genetic, I needed to know that she continued in me, in some way. She
would be at every holiday and birthday because I was; she would be there for
every day of my life. Because of what she gave me.
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