In the bitter winter of my 4th-grade year, my teachers and friends changed left and right,
but my home and family were always constants I could hold onto. Tedious five-day weeks and
weekends flew by, occasionally broken with visits to extended family, usually my grandma.
There, I knew a breath of fresh air from the monotony of elementary school life could be taken.
Granted, my time at my grandma’s miniscule apartment wasn’t riveting by any means, but it was
something different and that was enough for me.
One Saturday, I was playing with my American Girl Dolls in my room, slowly brushing
the long black hair of the retired Josephine doll. I braided the signature, over-the-shoulder plait
she came with, and tucked a fake yellow flower behind her ear. I was calmly admiring my work
when my mom called out to the family.
“Kids? Can you come to sit down at the table?” The sound echoed in the open-concept
house my parents always disliked. My brother and I raced to the table, curious as to what the
matter was.
“What is it, Mom?” My brother inquired; hesitancy filled his voice at what would be in
answer to his question.
“Sit down, kids,” my mom instructed. Her eyes flitted to my dad’s for a brief second, a subtle display of her unease; other than that, she was a statue. “Your Grandma,” she didn’t have
to specify which one, for my other had died several years prior. “She has cancer, stage 4.”
“Is that bad?” I questioned. I knew what cancer was, and its sometimes deadly
consequences, but I never imagined it would happen to someone I knew, so why wouldn’t she be okay?
“It isn’t the best, but I’m sure she’ll be fine,” my mom reassured my brother and me. “She is going to start chemotherapy soon. It is supposed to get rid of the cancer.” My young mind couldn’t pick up on the slight deflection and lie in Mom’s words. I didn’t cry; my brother didn’t either because my mom said that my grandma would be okay.
Over the next few months, my grandma got sicker and weaker, but I assumed that was
normal. After all, my dad had told me that chemotherapy tries to target only cancer cells, but it
can kill others also, so it would all be fine once she stopped. In the meantime, my mom and her
sister visited often. It was a two-hour drive to the hospice house, but that never stopped her from making it.
By this point, I should have accepted the truth that my grandma was going to die, but I
was incapable of thinking that way. My undying optimism completely shunned the potential fate
that lay in store for my grandma. Nobody in my family that I knew closely had died, so it was
nearly impossible for me to imagine a world in which someone had. Therefore, life moved on as normal for me. I never visited my grandma frequently anyway, but I had not seen her since she was in her little apartment, crocheting blankets and slippers at the speed of light. I had no idea of the changes that had occurred in my absence.
We went camping in the summer. For four days we were going to have an RV and the time of our lives. Campfires became an evening tradition and on the third night, we were sitting around in big green chairs, all aligned in a little circle. Then, my mom got a phone call; it was from the hospice house my grandma resided in.
“Hello, do you have a minute?” The modulated voice asked, just audible enough for me
to make out the words.
“Yes, I do.” My mom answered. She left the circle of chairs and walked inside. Through
the windows, we could see her pace back and forth, the embodiment of stress. Eventually, she set down the phone and motioned for us to join her inside. Her features were taut, and even though no tears fell, they were not needed to show the extent of her sadness.
“I’m sorry kids, but your grandma is not doing well. I think it would be best for us to visit
her.” My mom told us. The words “for the last time” were not said, but everyone could still hear
them. My optimistic self, however, thought there was still no way she would die, not that I had
even grasped what that truly meant, but why would she? She had cancer, but she’d been doing
chemo, something that gets rid of it, right? So why wasn’t it gone? Why would she die?
These thoughts plagued my mind as I sat in the backseat of the 2014 Chevy Tahoe my
dad had recently gotten. The slight squeak of the brakes and the wind rushing by as we zoomed
down the highway were the only sounds that filled the car. Activities to keep us children
entertained—notebooks, puzzles, and an array of Twistable crayons—were hastily shoved in a bag and thrown back in the seats.
When we arrived at the hospice house we were ushered to a large room with nothing but
a folding table, two folding chairs, and the hospital bed with my grandma on it. She was sleeping
when we arrived, so my brother and I were instructed to keep quiet and play with our toys. A
half-finished puzzle already sat on the bumpy gray surface of the table. Decadent desserts in the form of cakes, sundaes, and eclairs were photographed in the 500-piece puzzle. The bright pink frosting that lathered each of these desserts was painful to look at in comparison to the brown walls and somber mood.
There was one window in the corner where flowers and grass could be seen. A
hummingbird zoomed by and I thought of how much my grandma loved hummingbirds. With
their bright colors and constant energy, it seemed almost impossible not to. But her eyes were
closed and she couldn’t enjoy the sight she once loved so much. Eventually, a nurse came into
the room and tilted my grandma’s bed up. The nurse wiped her eyes and helped her open them, a
common task so simple I had never even thought about it before, never considered that it could
be so challenging for someone.
The old woman who sat on that bed was unrecognizable. She was removed from the
familiar apartment, the kitchen with white appliances, and the floral perfume she always wore,
and was reduced to a person completely reliant on others. Her eyes seemed to see nothing of the world in front of her. If the hummingbird flew by again, it would go unnoticed by her once more.
My mom told my brother and I to greet her, but it seemed there was nothing left to greet.
Nonetheless, we tiptoed over to the side of the bed and held her hands, shaking like paper in the wind, as we told her how much she meant to us. The same hands that used to crochet and knit endlessly, now seemed like somebody else’s entirely. No sign of recognition was ever shown in her eyes as we spoke.
Eventually, we retreated to the bright pink puzzle and put it together slowly as my mom
greeted my grandma too. But I think at that moment it was really a goodbye. Soon, the puzzle
was finished, and I pulled out my 30-page sketchbook with an ugly watercolor butterfly on the front and wondered what to draw. I sat there for minutes, pondering what I could possibly draw at a time like this. The beautiful terrain outside the window could never truly be captured; one must be in it to grasp the experience. But I wasn’t in it. I was inside a desolate hospice house watching my grandma die. Still, flowers were drawn and hummingbirds were too, by dusty crayons with childish dexterity.
After a couple hours my dad, brother, and I left, but my mom stayed. Her sister joined
and would give her a ride back to the campsite after everything was over. The car ride back
seemed even colder and more somber than the house.
I woke up on a Thursday morning and my mom was there, crying. I hated to see her cry
and had no idea how to comfort her, so I didn’t. I stayed in my little bunk and thought of all the
memories I had with my grandma. Baking brownies, going to butterfly houses, museums. My
face became hot and my throat felt like it was closing, but no tears came.
Soon after, the funeral was held. As everyone piled out of the car, I didn’t. I stayed in the
car with my dad. My stomach hurt so badly, for a reason that I couldn’t place my finger on, so I
just sat in the car for hours. I think I knew that if I went in there, I would start crying, and I
despised crying in front of people. So, I sat in the car with the guilt of my dad missing his
mother-in-law’s funeral stewing away, not helping my stomach ache at all.
The car door opened suddenly and I climbed into the backseat to let my mom take the
passenger’s.
“It was a beautiful funeral,” my mom lamented. “She would have been so happy.”
It seemed all my parents could talk about was the funeral. She was talking on the phone
with her sister about headstones, ashes, and memorials. It was a lot, but I never cried.
A month later, my family and my mom’s siblings gathered for a memorial in the
cemetery. In the middle of August, the heat was suffocating me; I was wearing black, my mom
wouldn’t stop hugging me, and it was all too much.
My breathing shortened and quickened, my hands tingled, my vision blurred and I
couldn’t feel anything except the heat. I felt my knees weaken and my mom tightened her grip on me. I tried to push away, to get away from the heat.
I ended up in the back of the car, the AC blowing on my face, a plastic water bottle in
hand, and my dad beside me. He told me, “It’s not good to keep your emotions bottled up like that, you have to let other people know what you’re feeling.”
I just nodded and breathed in and out. In and out. I unscrewed the lid to the water and
took a long sip. The metallic tang of the water, warmed from the sun, didn’t make me feel any
better. My mind was flashing through all of the memories, and it was hard not to become
overwhelmed. I tried to think of all the good memories, the baking and crocheting. I tried to
remember the smell of the brownies, and her laugh as I tried to taste the batter. I wanted to
remember the soft pink wool that I knew would become the afghan I keep in my room to this
day. I really did try, but the flashback of her in the hospice house played front and center, over
and over.
In that moment I truly grasped the concept of death. The irrevocable and unavoidable fate that someday everyone I know will face, including me. Even with all the signs, death always
strikes the revelation that one second a person could be alive and the next they aren’t, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Flowers and grass surrounded the car, and finally, I was in them. But unlike in the
hospice house, I could see the imperfections. No hummingbirds or butterflies danced around the
sky, and the flowers were brown and dead, lying on a bed of yellowed grass. The tulips placed on the headstone had already wilted from the unrelenting sun, and soon they too would die and turn to dust, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
