10.10.12

Grammy woke me up just before daylight.

“Sar?” she said softly, the bedroom door sliding slowly over the plush carpet, the handle releasing softly.  I opened my eyes and gently swung my legs off of the side of the bed, trying not to disturb my sleeping husband.  Fluorescent light from the backyard flood light snuck through the slats in the white metal mini blinds and streamed in laser- perfect stripes onto the chevron crochet blanket on our bed.  “Yeah?” I responded, even though I knew.

“I think he’s gone.”

I got up slowly and followed her across the hallway into the master bedroom.  She stood in the corner watching while I walked over to Papa laying very silent and very still in the elevated hospital bed set up next to their California King.  A lamp glowed warmly from the maple bedside table.  She crossed her arms tightly over her thin cotton nightie.  Beige with tiny pink flowers and a delicate lace trim.  She did not cry.  She wasn’t even her typical anxious self.  She was silent.  She was still.  She knew.  

I took a long, slow breath and stared intently into his face.  Pokey grey stubble that scratched when he kissed my cheek.  Silver hair that Grammy had helped him keep meticulously sculpted with egregious quantities of aerosol hairspray over five decades of marriage, since before it morphed into a beautiful silver and thinned to create a dashing widow’s peak, now unkempt and wild.  Wrinkles across his forehead from almost ninety years of worry and surprise, wrinkles around the corner of his eyes from almost ninety years of laser- sharp wit and practical jokes.  He was right there.  And he wasn’t there, all at the same time.

For half a second I wondered if he was just in a deep sleep, but the foam that had dribbled out of his open mouth and down into his creased neck, thick and golden yellow, told me otherwise.  I studied his chest, shirtless, covered up to his armpits in a crisp cotton bedsheet, the top folded over in Grammy’s meticulous way.  I listened for breath.  I looked for the labored rise and fall we had all watched diligently for the past week.  Nothing.  Silent.  Still.  

I looked over at Grammy, still watching quietly from the corner of the room.  “He got really quiet, and that woke me up,” she said.  Dry eyes.  Small voice.  Blank face.  But also grief.  And shock.  Maybe relief.  Maybe resignation.  There was nothing left for her to fight.  She was very tired.

I walked into their bathroom to get a wet washcloth.  I was careful to make sure it was nice and warm, even though  I knew that was pointless.  A warm, clean washcloth, bleached into oblivion and lightly scented by Grammy’s favorite laundry soap, on lifeless, unfeeling flesh.  He was still Papa.  But at the same time, not. 

I had to clean him up.  It seemed like some kind of atrocity to allow such a distinguished gentleman’s last moments in his own bedroom be spent slack- jawed, leaking yellow foam.  Slowly, carefully, I wiped his face and neck.  I gagged.  I tried desperately to hide it.  I was ashamed.  Did she see?  If she did, she pretended not to.  I was annoyed in that moment that I did not inherit my paramedic mother’s strong stomach.  She should be here doing this.  But she herself was already four years in the grave.  What a cop- out.  

I cleaned most of it, but not all.  Not deep into the folds of his neck or back behind his ear.  The rough grey stubble on his delicate cheeks just complicated the matter.  I could feel whatever was left of last night’s dinner creep up in my own stomach.  Just enough so she doesn’t have to see, I thought.  There was something soaked into the pillow right beside his face.  His mouth hung open.  Close it, I thought.  I couldn’t.  I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I imagined his jaw, cold, stiff, frozen in place.  Or would he still be warm, muscles and tendons in their last moments of malleability?  Would his mouth pop back open?  We really didn’t know how long he had been dead.  I couldn’t bring myself to find out.

His face was mostly clean.  The mouth stayed open.  That would have to do.

I wanted so desperately to protect my beloved grandmother from the sight of his lifeless corpse.  The handsome young sailor she watched become a father, a business owner, a respected community figure, a doting grandfather and great- grandfather, and then over the course of a single month, a gibberish- talking shell of an incontinent old man.  It seemed so brutal.  So very unfair.  But also so natural, so very expected.  Such profound contradictions.  Such deep ponderings on the philosophies of existentialism and the universality of life and death.  And here I was trying not to gag about yellow foam.

I gathered the courage to run my hand down the thin, crepey skin of his arm.  Still soft.  Still some give.  A little bit warm, but not “alive” warm.  Fingernails striated and a bit overgrown from the month or so in battle with some very aggressive brain lesions.  His hands, thin and pale, fingerprints worn off years ago, lay limply at his sides.  His eyes were closed.  Thin eyelids striped with tiny green, out- of- commission veins covered, for the most part, his pale, unseeing eyes that had started to bulge out considerably in his last month of life.  The lesions had changed the shape of his whole head and face.  Papa had been gone for a while, if we were honest with ourselves.

I wondered if he was cold.  No, dummy, he will never have to feel cold again, I thought.  Is that a happy or a sad thing?  I wondered how he might feel, seeing himself in this predicament.  What he would want.  Should I cover him up with a sheet?  Should I sit him up and put at least a shirt on him?  He was a big man, and so delicate in his last couple of years; that might hurt him.  Pull a muscle.  Snap a tendon.  He will never feel pain again, I thought.  Is that a happy or a sad thing?  One thing I knew for sure he’d want:  to protect his beloved wife.  If the brain lesions hadn’t already killed him, seeing Grammy heartbroken certainly would have.

The sheet was pulled up to his armpits.  The shirt remained off.  That would have to do.

My husband had made his way over to my grandmother at some point and was standing in the corner with her, arm around her hunched shoulders, himself uncharacteristically still and quiet.  She clung to his arm.  And then gently, she pulled from his support and paced over to the side of his hospital bed.  With a calm face and clear eyes she placed a hand on his stubbly cheek.  She ran a thumb over his thinning eyebrow.  She used her pink manicured fingernails to smooth his wild hair.  She sighed.

Her dashing young sailor.  Her strong, smart husband.  The beloved father of her children, best friend, and ever- present companion.  All at once in this body.  So many versions of this very body.  Now still.  Now cold.  Now leaking all manner of fluids in a most undignified way.  A one- time sentient bag of chemicals.  A malfunctioning hydraulic mechanism.

I called the hospice service before 6 am.  “I think my grandfather has passed,” were my words.  Dry eyes.  Small voice.  Blank face.  What a dumb thing to say.  I didn’t think.  I knew.  And now there was the issue of removing over 200 lbs of nonconscious flesh from my grandmother’s bedroom.  Nonconscious flesh that used to be a mischievous old man who would buy me bubble gum flavored ice cream and slip $20 in my pocket for no reason.  

The four of us remained in the bedroom for a short while until the hospice nurse arrived.  Four bodies.  Three heartbeats.  Silent except for the occasional sniffle from Gram.  The early morning light slowly creeping in through drawn curtains in a soft pale blue reminding us that the earth had continued to rotate.  Blue jays screamed insults back and forth just outside the window.  The garbage truck announced its presence with squealing air brakes and clanging bins.  It was Wednesday.

When a dark- haired woman in purple scrubs arrived at the front door, my husband and I left the bedroom.  He made phone calls.  I mopped an already clean kitchen floor.  Grammy stayed back and watched while the hospice nurse performed all the duties I could not bring myself to do.  Not even for her.  The only service I could possibly perform for a dead man, to protect his wife from experiencing his body in that state, performed by a stranger in scrubs and latex gloves.

With a calm strength and graceful dignity, she thoroughly cleaned under his neck and behind his ear.  She changed his pants and his pillow case and put him in a clean white t-shirt.  She closed his mouth and folded his hands comfortably over his belly.  She combed his hair; not as well as Grammy could, and without the requisite cloud of aerosol hairspray.  And then she, and her latex gloves, and a bag full of soiled cleaning supplies, disappeared through the front door as silently as she had arrived, and Grammy broke down.