From the Recesses – Salting the Ocean

How Differently They Go, How Close They Remain

By on Monday, April 12th, 2010
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My grandmother died in late January of 2005, at 93 years of age. The day before she ended this dance, she and I were planning her 94th birthday party and joking about the hospital food. Sometime in the evening a nurse came in and said the doctors wanted to start her on a morphine patch, but Grandma was reluctant because she “didn’t want to become an addict.” I always loved that line. A bit later on, as I was getting ready to leave the nursing home for the night, I told Grandma that I’d be getting together with my cousin Colleen, Aunt Bev’s youngest daughter, that night and that I’d likely have a bit of a hangover the following morning. I told her that I’d try to be in by noon the next day. She lifted her arms, pretending to pick up a pad of paper, and said “I’ll see if I can pencil you in.” We both laughed and I kissed her goodbye. There’s something defining about our relationship that the last words we shared were an easy joke.

About two weeks before that night my mother had sent news to Guatemala that Grandma was nearing the end and that they wanted me to come home. Grandma loved all her grandchildren limitlessly, but she and I had a special connection. My mother told me that Grandma had been asking about me every day and that she couldn’t remember why I wasn’t there. I booked a flight that afternoon and was home in Upstate New York the following evening. My mother warned me that Grandma had been growing increasingly confused in the previous month, and sure enough, when I saw her the following morning her first words were, “I’m a little mixed up. I don’t know where I am.”

I explained to her that we were in the Hilltop Manor Nursing Home, up near the mall. I explained to her where that was in relation to the house she’d lived in for the past 60 years. I told her it was just up the road a bit from Brozzetti’s Pizza – and something happened. She, somehow, got it. All of it. She was clear and conscious for most of the next week and a half. She told me she loved me and pulled me in for a kiss. She thanked me for coming and asked me about Guatemala. I told her about the volcanoes and the bars around Antigua, and she said she’d always wanted to see one. I presumed she meant the volcanoes. Over the coming days I was with her for most of her waking hours. One night I snuck a bottle of her favorite, Seagram’s 7, into her room and we shared a drink. I’d read her some of my stories (which we both knew she couldn’t give less of a damn about) but she loved the sound of my voice and I loved being with her, whatever the reason.

By that point, she hadn’t been eating for almost a month. The nurse told us that this was part of the dying process. Her body was shutting down its systems. Three days before she died, when we were given the option to introduce a feeding tube, we turned it down. She’d had an excellent contract with the universe, and if the end was to come, we were going to walk towards it with solemnity and grace.

The night before she died I asked if she was hungry. She said she wanted a slice of Brozzetti’s. I went down the hill and returned half an hour later with a pie. She had two slices and after finishing them she pulled her two daughters, my mom and Aunt Bev, both in their 60s, to her breast and said, “You’ve always been such beautiful girls.” In that room, that evening, four human beings sat together in love and the assurance that none had ever betrayed the others. Christ’s last supper had nothing on us. God, I love those women.

Nursing a well-earned headache the following day, I arrived around noon. In the night Grandma had slipped into a coma from which she’d not recover, and in the last hour her breathing grew more labored. Each inhalation was a gasp for air, each exhalation a release so passive it wouldn’t have moved a feather, followed by a pause of a minute or more before the next great twitch told us she was still not ready to go. That hour was the only pain I experienced in the whole process. The spirit was willing, the body was done. The hospice nurse, noting a change in her pallor that I couldn’t see, said to my mother, Bev and me that “it was time” and she left the room.

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