North of Hope (21 page)

She was not a beautiful woman. Her face had the plain bones
of a prairie woman, and she put on weight starting in her forties until she was quite heavy. Even so, she took time to dress well, every day, even without the means to spend much. She wore jewelry and bright colors and never went out without doing her hair and make-up. “I’ve always thought that taking a little bit of extra time to look nice helps brighten other people’s day,” she said. She never sent a card on time for birthdays or Christmas, but I never doubted her devotion. After Grandpa died, she went on mission trips around the world: Israel, Burma, Thailand, Russia. My dad was frustrated that she was spending the little retirement money she had to travel, but she needed a sense of purpose in her life. Whenever she talked of Grandpa, tears filled her eyes, even twenty years after he was gone.

Grandpa died when I was in junior high. We kids didn’t get to go to that funeral, because my mother had custody that week, and she didn’t allow it, something I had suspected only confirmed going through files after Dad died. This knowledge made me angry and happy, all at once. Years after Grandpa died, Dad came down to visit while I was attending Command and Staff School, the captain’s staff course the army held at Fort Leavenworth. We spent the weekend together driving through the little towns in Kansas where he had grown up, first visiting Grandpa’s grave in Topeka.

We pulled into the graveyard, stopping in front of the registry, running our eyes over rows of names engraved dully into polished stone until we found it: Ralph L. Huffman. We drove toward a tree in a corner of the cemetery.

“I think it’s right around here,” Dad said.

We got out of the white rental sedan and swung the doors shut. They swung too easily, slamming with a hard finality. I followed Dad down the manicured lawn past regularly spaced headstones set low to the ground. The thick smell of freshly cut grass hung heavy in the humid spring air. We both wore sunglasses.

Dad’s long legs walked slowly, finally stopping in front of a shiny stone that read “Ralph L. Huffman.” Dad crossed his arms over his chest. He looked down, his eyes hidden behind the dark lenses. Next to Grandpa’s stone was Grandma’s, with her birth date and a dash followed by an empty space. I focused on this as much as I did on Grandpa’s grave. At the time it seemed to me morbid to have your headstone set before you died. I still thought death was something that happened to other people. It also seemed loving in a way I didn’t yet understand, a love that meant you lived your life with another person, wholly, completely, until both of you were put underground.

Dad’s six-foot-four frame rocked back and forth, almost imperceptibly, the way it sometimes did in church. I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the stone. Shouldn’t there be flowers growing around the grave? Modern graveyards don’t have space for that. The shiny stone sat quietly. How could that tiny little line, that little dash between years, hold so much life in it, so many memories? That dash stored the big laugh Dad had inherited. That dash held memories of sitting on Grandpa’s lap in his recliner, his magic tricks and goofy sense of humor, walks when Grandpa, with practiced sleight of hand, plucked lollipops and even ice-cream bars from trees. It must have meant so much more for Dad standing next to me behind his sunglasses, more in the way Dad’s would for me someday, in the way all lives do for someone, somewhere, if we’re lucky.

After that trip I wrote Dad a card. I found it in a box the summer he died. This is what I remembered writing: “Dad, I wish I had put my arms around you and hugged you when we stood by Grandpa’s grave. I can only imagine how much you miss him, because I can’t imagine ever losing you; it is my worst nightmare. I love you so much.” But what was on the card was different: “Dad, it meant a lot to me to go with you to the towns where you grew up and to Grandpa’s grave.” So much left unsaid. Did he know what I wanted to say?

More than twenty years later, I arrived in Arizona when Dad could not. The wave of dry heat evaporated energies I hoped I might have. I drove directly to the hospice. Aunt Marcia met me in the lobby with the hurriedness of someone operating on the final wisps of hope. “You won’t believe it!” she said. “She’s awake and talking!”

We walked to the end of the quiet hallway to Grandma’s small, clean room, where she lay in bed, a light blanket partly covering her, her head and shoulders elevated and her eyes closed. An acacia tree was just visible outside her window through the thin curtain and filtered the Arizona sunlight.

I walked up to her bed softly and stroked her hair back off her forehead. Her hair was still brown and coiffed as she took care to keep it. Dad loved it when we combed his hair when we were growing up. He’d have us walk on his back in the living room or comb his hair when he was reading on the couch. It was one of my favorite things too.

“Hi, Grandma,” I whispered. She opened her soft brown eyes slowly, the same eyes Dad and Aunt Marcia had, the same eyes I have.

“Hi, honey,” she said softly, with a smile dampened only by the exhaustion of letting go of life. Grandma looked so small in that bed, shrunk from her once formidable weight, but her eyes still shone.

“How are you doing?” I asked, smiling at her, feigning cheer and feeling false. I understood why it is said that hearts break. I’d understood for a while now. Underground rivers of sadness scald like fire. And so I felt that ripping and burning of a soul and a heart, breaking in relief at talking to her, breaking in seeing her face and holding her hand, breaking as I felt Dad and Kathy’s absence and knowing they would want to be there too, breaking because I was losing her and I didn’t know how much more loss I could bear. There should be a moratorium on deaths in our family, I thought, and winced at trying to make a joke.

I stood in the midst of that still water of all humanity, a pool that once accessed can never be forgotten, that says that everything will come to an end, everything will die, and that at the bottom of all of our lives is loss. It says love comes with loss, and life comes with death, and that there is pain unimaginable in this. At least that’s what I thought it said then. I don’t know what it is like to drown, to give in to liquid closing over one’s head and filling one’s lungs, but I imagine that at the end, there is a moment when each of us has to let this pool close over us, give up the desperate gasps for air, and reach for the depths where we believe another world awaits, or not.

“Oh, I’m doing okay,” she said slowly, her eyes closing again, the tiniest of smiles flickering on the corners of her mouth. I held her hand, watched her shallow breath come and go, and then walked quietly out of the room. I walked to the end of the hall. I walked back to her room, looked in at her sleeping. I walked back down the hall. What was there to do? What could I do? My movements were as aimless as the desert tumbleweeds outside.

I tiptoed back into Grandma’s room later in the day. Grandma’s eyes opened slowly. “Honey, do you know how much I love you?” she asked, more quietly and slowly than normally.

“I know, Grandma,” I said.

“You’re always moving … so fast … all those places you go … I worry about you so far away.” Her voice was labored and quiet. “I love you so much. I just want you to know how much I love you.”

Family continued to trickle in. Grandma grew stronger, and more and more lucid. A day into her time at hospice, she decided to resume her dialysis.

“Oh, I think I will,” she said, with strength in her voice. Some laughed, and some cried, exhaustion, relief, frustration swirling into separate whirlwinds of grief for each person. The decision to continue dialysis meant she would have to leave hospice care. I did not know what to think. I did not want her to die. She was my
last and closest link to Dad. What I wanted, though, had nothing to do with how the days unfolded.

After dialysis, Grandma collapsed again. Time warped: each moment sped by; each spanned an eternity. The concierge called an ambulance. We headed back to the hospital. Someone has said that suffering stretches the heart, so that after it heals, it can hold more love. But I felt as though my heart were stretched to the breaking point.

Back in the ER, Grandma began a series of X-rays and other tests. I walked beside her wheelchair to X-ray, holding her hand as the attendant wheeled her down stark white hospital halls. Every step took on the gravity of years—years gone by, and years yet to come without her. I trod unwillingly amid shifting verb tenses: she lives, she lived. The brain takes time to train in those tenses, and the heart must train to hold the weight of the change, all the while adjusting to an understanding that we are sinking deeper into the pool at the bottom of sadness.

“Grandma, what do you think about how to find the right person to spend the rest of my life with?” I asked, ignoring my awkwardness, feeling the window closing on her guidance and insight.

“Oh, honey,” she said, with a small tired smile and a look into a close distance, as she did anytime she thought of Grandpa.

“Find someone steady. The rest of those things don’t matter at all … just find someone steady.” I asked her about kids. “Love them, love them, love them,” she said. “Now of course that doesn’t mean be easy, but just love them!” I wished I could imprint her words in my mind, use them to bolster me for the rest of my life. I felt reality shifting and surging below me. I had not had enough time with her. I had not had enough time with Dad. I look back and understand I had not yet begun to grieve for Kathy. I had not had enough time with her either. What more should I ask? What wisdom of Grandma’s would I need to survive the years ahead? What wisdom of Dad’s, learned from Grandma, should I discover?
What mistakes did she make she could tell me to avoid? It was too late to ask Dad. It was too late to ask at all.

Minutes with Grandma rolled away like mercury. I walked back with her as she was wheeled back to her room, and paced in and out of the automatic sliding doors of the ER, out into the unforgiving burn of the sun, back into the cold sterility of the hospital. Neither offered any comfort.

The next morning, dark circles hung under Grandma’s eyes, and she winced even propped against pillows. She had talked with her doctor before any of us arrived. She looked around at each of us slowly, resigned and determined and tired, all at once. “I’ve decided it’s time to leave you,” she said, her voice wavering just a little. “It makes me so sad.” The clarity with which she expressed herself amazed me. “I hope you know how much I love you,” she said to all of us, as she had to each of us individually.

She was choosing to leave life. How is it that we are called upon to make the greatest journey of our lives at the time of least strength? Her choice was inevitable, perhaps, but it was still a choice. Dad and Kathy had been stolen away. All of them waited for the ferry crossing that great river. As one day would I.

We sat with her for several hours before she was discharged. She asked for a comb so we could comb her hair—then, particular about the little wave that came down over her forehead, she insisted on doing it herself. She laid back on her pillow, eyes closing briefly. I wondered how she felt at the moment of decision, the moment of understanding. I don’t imagine any of us can know that last shuddering release, the acceptance or the letting go, until the moment we arrive.

Back at Grandma’s apartment, we helped her into her own bed to sleep, supporting her on pillows to keep her lungs free from fluid. The hospice nurse gave us instructions on the morphine Grandma could take for pain, as well as talking us through what we could expect. She warned us not to exhaust ourselves and suggested taking shifts each night and during the day.

While cousins came and went in the afternoon, I called Peter to talk, and then called another friend in Boston. They were short calls; I leaned into the cradling comfort of voices I knew loved me and were not a part of this play. My friend in Boston took just a few minutes to tell me a story: Her mother, a hospice worker, spent the first half of her life helping new mothers. She spent equal time bringing life into the world and helping life leave the world. In her mind, both represented births. In both cases, she helped a life begin. The weight of the day lifted just slightly, but not enough to quench my sense of dread.

Aunt Marcia and I took the first shift.

We laid mattresses on the floor of the apartment. I set my watch alarm for every half hour, finally lying down to sleep with the hallway light on. Grandma’s breathing came raggedly, the sound of fluid overtaking her lungs. More horrible was when she woke, coughing and crying out. The resuscitation after her initial collapse had broken her ribs, and her coughing ripped through her body in waves. I jumped up each time to hold her hand, resetting my watch alarm to wake me up on the next half hour to give her morphine. Her wakings were far more frequent than my alarm, pain tearing her from sleep. After the first two episodes of her waking, I went in and curled up on the bed next to her, holding her hand. Although her eyes were closed, I felt her smooth skin over bony fingers squeeze my hand.

Still, every half hour or so she woke. The intensity of her coughing pushed her body off the pillows. Once, her body threatened to slide off the bed completely, her lace-trimmed white cotton nightgown riding up against old, soft skin, the nightgown of an old woman or of a little girl. I knelt over her, one knee on each side, supporting her under her arms, and moved her back on top of her pillows. Her body shook with deep and ragged coughs. With eyes wide open, as though she were looking not only at me but through me and through this life, she whispered my name once: “Shannon.” It was almost a question.

“It’s okay, Grandma,” I said, and felt like I was lying, lying to this woman who was dying, this woman who was my father’s mother. “It’s going to be okay.” I hoped that she couldn’t hear the echoes from my rotting emptiness. I was alone on a shore trying to fight off ocean waves with a storm closing in. I smoothed her hair back from her cool skin.

There was nothing glamorous about this. But something else emerged about these waters of shared humanity: that pain too much to handle also comes with exquisite beauty, as common as dirt, as unexpected as grace. Are we meant to be pilgrims of the depths? It struck me that there is no greater intimacy than sitting with someone traversing that tenuous boundary between worlds, sitting vigil with a spirit trembling on the border, reaching toward the new and releasing the old. It seemed to me that our fragile humanity experiences this intersection only rarely because we are not strong enough to bear it more often, because what we live in those moments will take us a lifetime to begin to understand.