The weekend before, I got a phone call from my father. I'm used to phone calls from Dad, letting me know about Grandmother. She has occasional falls, or the occasional illness, but she always gets better. This time, though, Dad said it was serious. The doctor was calling the family together.
Grandmother makes great chocolate pies. She always made a small one just for me, without meringue, because I hate meringue.
Monday night, Dad called to say Grandmother was in a coma. She wouldn't last more than a couple of days. I decided that I wanted to say good-bye to her while she was still alive, so I began getting things ready at work, buying "bereavement" airline tickets, arranging for a rental car, calling the cousins. It kept me busy.
Grandmother always sang "Froggie Went A 'Courtin'" to me when I was little. Her voice was high and a little off-key, but I loved the song. I've never heard the version that she sang anywhere else.
I finally got to my Aunt Paula's house in Ruidosa, New Mexico, at noon on Thursday, June 5. Dad and his wife, Pen, were there already, and they were having lunch with Paula and Uncle Cecil. After lunch, Dad, Pen, and I went to the nursing home to sit with Grandmother.
Grandmother told me once about the first time she saw an airplane. She was on the playground at lunchtime when she was in elementary school. The plane flew overhead, and every child on the playground followed it to the nearby field where it landed, and watched it for some time. They were all hours late coming in from lunch, and had to stay after school one hour for every minute they were late, but none of them cared.
It's not like TV. People in comas don't lie there peacefully. Grandmother's face was red and blotchy, and she breathed as if she was fighting for every breath she took. She was on oxygen. Once an orderly came in to run a swab through her mouth to give her some moisture. It took the nurse three tries to find her blood pressure. Her pulse was extremely rapid. I spoke to her now and then, and held her hand or patted her head. Even if she had been awake she probably wouldn't have known me. She'd had problems with her memory for years. Slowly, her breathing grew harsher and harsher, and she made coughing noises deep in her throat. Dad, Pen, and I took turns sitting next to her, and going for walks away from her room. Aunt Paula came by after a while to sit with her while we went home for dinner.
Grandmother took my brother and me into a toy store when we were little, and said she'd buy us anything we wanted. And she did. She helped pay for college, and she paid for most of my trip to Africa. Any time I had a real financial problem, she helped.
Just when we got back to Paula's, she called to let us know Grandmother had just passed away. We gathered up Cecil and went back to the nursing home. I've never seen a dead person before. The first thing I noticed was the quiet. She lay there peacefully, pale and empty. Her skin looked like wax.
When I was seven, Grandmother drove across Texas with the four of us grandchildren to her home in Corpus Christi. A hurricane was coming across the Gulf of Mexico towards us, and had hit by the time we reached Corpus. The power and phones were out, but Grandmother just went down to the local Piggly Wiggly and got bottled water and candles. I never even knew she was worried.
That night, I asked my aunt what my cousin Earl's son, Chris, was up to. "Oh, he's dead." At first I wasn't sure I had heard her correctly, but, "His mother found him dead in the bathroom April 21. They don't know for sure what happened." (Chris had had cancer when he was in his early teens, but beaten it. In his mid-teens, he'd been badly burned in a house fire, and had become addicted to heroin during his stay in the hospital. They believe he died of a heroin overdose. Chris is the sweetest kid I've ever known, and had the roughest short life of anyone I've known.)
Grandmother would sit in the cool evenings in her house in the middle of a cotton field, listening to the baseball game on the radio. My brother and I would lie on the bed beside her and listen until we fell asleep.
The hardest part was telling the relatives, and listening to their tears. No, the hardest part was listening to my father tell his childhood friend, who grew up on the farm next door to him and still farmed there, and hearing Dad break down in tears so that Aunt Paula had to take the phone from him. The funeral was beautiful. My brother and cousins and I were the pall bearers. I don't think my Grandmother was in the coffin, because it didn't weigh a thing.
Good-bye, Grandmother. I'll miss you.