Softly Present

My Gram has come to visit me from time to time throughout the years since her death in 1990, the year my daughter was born. She died 2 months after my daughter was born. She had gone to my mother's for the Fourth of July, and they had gone to a parade. My mother adores parades, for reasons I will never understand. It was Death Valley hot that day; I remember it well, I was 8 months pregnant and still living on the land. Literally. We were still in that old camper-trailer called The Strange Boat, while the X was still taking his sweet time getting the house finished, and it was a sweat box. I had sat in the shade in a lawn chair for as long as I could stand it, and then when the afternoon heat had peaked, we rode in the car to a supermarket so we could be in the air conditioning. My Gram, meanwhile, was suffering from heat exhaustion in the bright sun at the parade, but of course, told no one of her distress. She did not say, Could we move to the shade? Could we go home? Could we find some AC? No, she would never ever do that. So, instead, she got deathly overheated, and then had a heart attack in her sleep that night. She did not die, but only 10% of her heart capacity remained, so she couldn't do much besides lie in bed.

She couldn't get up to go to the bathroom, and as much as my mother wanted to take care of her mother at home, she found it intensely difficult to change her own mother's diapers. To do that after working all day at her job. To get up in the morning and face that first thing. To do all that. No. So the decision was made to put my Gram in the hospital, where she was catheterized and fed these milkshake type drinks. And there she was, far away from the home she had lived in for over 50 years, essentially waiting to die.

My daughter was born in August, after a long labor and an eventual emergency c-section. I wasn't up for the 2 hour trip to my mother's city to visit my Gram until early October. My Gram had lost a lot of weight, and had beautiful high cheekbones I had never been able to see in her soft, plump face before. She had not been able to dye her hair anymore either, naturally, and so she had long white roots beneath the dark brown hair. Her green eyes with brown centers, just like mine, were as big and bright as ever, however. And I did not know if I would see her again. So I told her how beautiful her cheekbones were. I told her how important and precious she was to me my whole life. I am happy I had the opportunity to say those things to her. The one thing I did not do was bring my infant daughter upstairs into that hospital ward full of all kinds of sick people so my Gram could see her. I still don't know if I made the right choice. My Gram wanted to see her only great-grandchild and yet was also accustomed to not having what she wanted. I did not want to risk my infant's health. Which door do you choose?

Anyway, my Gram had been hanging in there for months now, alone with the TV when no one was there visiting. The person we all knew she really wanted to see was my uncle, her first born son. He lived way out west, and he kept putting off visiting her. I have always thought he was stingy with his feelings and does not do reality very well. I think he could not face his mother's mortality. My mother had told me he had had trouble believing she had had a heart attack. His mind is a black and white and orderly place full of neat lines and divisions and the reality of this was not fitting in very well there--only 50 year old male executives had heart attacks. But as time dragged on, it became inevitable that he would have to fly east and visit, and so he finally did.

He came a week after I had visited her in October. He saw her in the hospital and then he went back to my mother's house and started drinking. A lot. I have seen him take an 8 ounce glass, fill it with ice and then fill it with gin. Within 24 hours, the hospital called to tell them my Gram had begun to die in earnest. He did not want to go be with her. He refused. My mother wanted to go but since she is not one to ever seriously challenge the dictates of The Men, she couldn't. Like a child, she couldn't. So my Gram died alone, her family soaking in alcohol less than a mile away.

We had all suspected she was just biding her time, waiting for him to show up. She was quietly angry he had not come to visit her in all that time, and had made her wait like that.

I always wished I could have been there with her at the very end. Death does not frighten me. I would have sang to her. I would have sang "Amazing Grace" to her. I would have tried to help her not be afraid. Because apparently she was afraid, and she did not have a smooth departure out of this life.

My Gram's body was cremated, and her first born son packed her ashes into his suitcase and took them back west. He eventually took them up to Idaho, up into the Sawtooth Mountains she loved, and scattered them there. There was no memorial service other than what he might have said into the wind on his solitary journey up there. We really are an odd lot, this family of mine.

But, as I said, I have felt her with me many times since her body died. When I lived with the X and was going through such hard, lonely times, I would suddenly feel her soft, loving presence around me. I still do. It feels like being wrapped inside a sun warmed yellowish pink rose. It feels like being held in soft yet strong arms of love. Sometimes, I will be standing there doing dishes, looking out the window at the ski mountain to the south--it was the same at her house, the window was over the sink and she could stand and do dishes and gaze up at the hills she had grown up in--and it will suddenly feel as if I am in her house, feel and smell the exact same way. Or sometimes in our church, I will come up the back stairs to the chancel or the altar area and it will smell just like it did when I walked in her front door. Or I will be sitting there with the choir in the chancel during worship, and I will feel her near me, feel her softly present beside me.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai