She's got a morphine drip and family permission to fade away. That's what she's doing. I watched through an ER's revolving doors as my cousin and aunt hugged my mother and started crying, just a bit. Behind them, through the glass, there were twisting red ambulance lights, rotating and off to another emergency that means nothing to you and nothing to me, not yet, maybe, or not right now, or maybe it's another addition into the pantheon of the people we don't know anything of: it's a drop in the ocean of anonymity, to say. It's never better expressed than in a hospital waiting room - these people love this person. That person is dying. This person needs oxygen. And this is their family. And this is that family. We're just so numerous and plentiful and the mechanics of tears doesn't function like fluid should, should it. So my grandmother is in room 5511 in a giant building and so many of you keep going and giong and get carted into the hospital and carted out, you walking wounded and anxious relatives; you'd never know that my grandmother is here, downtown Sacramento.
I do and this house is massive with space, as if I could curl into a corner unnoticed. Here a week ago for a wedding, the irony is cloying but the love that turns tightly with every cog-wheel turn of my grandmother's decline stretches and pulls us. In a way, it's just as she'd want it, isn't it?
I'm all out of grandparents now. Please let me just go back to the fishing shed with my grandfather while he showed me lures in Florida and just let me win one more hand with my grandmother at Crazy 8's; the first card game I ever knew. When she taught that to me in the greenhouse of their Florida home, the sun splaying through the glass panes and even then making her hair seem so white. To my young mind she seemed so old. The older I got, the younger she became - climbing three flights of stairs at age 91 to see my cousin's new dorm. Now my last memory is here, in Sacramento - she was speaking to us all as we listened to her and the ventilator and the slight wheeze of the oxygen intake.
At the time, as we laughed, joked, choked down the nervous tension of uncertainty. Well, uncertainty shed its skin and now it's just certain: the breaths are growing farther apart, the recent phone call says. It's just my grandmother and morphine in a slow dance now and it's the most crushing ballet ever. They swab her throat for moisture. They clean the back of the mouth to keep her for gagging when she breathes. They monitor the monitor. We fall apart repeatedly in the waiting rooms and eventually the morning nurses come with coffee from the old machine down the hall.
Oh grandma you're room 5511 and I am your grandson, and I feel so small and want to ask you to spin me on the merry-go-round one more time or ask you to tell me the scary bedtime story one more time.
It's what she would want, so we go like this. Yes, I've been sad. Slide me a pardon; the words are blurry now as I press the button to post this.
Love you.