Miles to Go Before I Sleep

“… and miles to go before I sleep.”
As I listen to my father read Robert Frost poems to my Grandmother in the hospice center of her retirement community, my 10 month old son, Luka, crawls in circles on the dark green carpet and fingers through his Baby Einstein board book. I notice how difficult it is for me to look at him, my father, who is so tenderly reading to his mother, and I feel the fullness of my heart, the near bursting of my eyes. His voice is beautiful and deep, booming really, and at times in my life has caused me great fear with its sheer force. He is a singer, a salesman, a Christian Science Reader. I watch my son instead, and smile on him, admire his gorgeous face and watch his lips as they form the word “duck” when he turns to his favorite page. Intermittantly I summon the courage to look at my grandmother, so emaciated she seems transparent, tissue paper thin – but radiating this indescribable beauty as well. I had imagined she would be dull and grey, but she is almost shiny from her recent brush with death. She wears a brilliant turquoise velour sweatsuit, just like her, I think, to find something luxurious yet practical to die in.
Over the two days I spend here at Ginger Cove in
Annapolis
,
Maryland, I realize that I will know my grandmother better in her death than I ever have in her life. I am saddened by the prospect, but also strangely indifferent, because despite her being my father’s mother, she really hasn’t been much of a presence in our lives. Perhaps I am indifferent because the imminence of her death and my regret might crush me otherwise. Still, I have come here with a strong desire, no, a need, to know her. This need is urgent and demanded by a place within me I did not know existed before. I have so many questions suddenly, that never surfaced until this. I have came to find my grandmother after so many years of distance.
When retiring, she chose to move to
Florida, far from her children and sister who live in
Ohioand
Wisconsin, and then when choosing where she would remain, again she stayed far from her family. My father tells me that her father built a house in
Annapoliswhen she was young, and so she returned here partially because of that – fond memories of her parents and a sweet home in
Annapolis. I am perplexed, as a new mother, that my grandmother would choose not to be an active parent or grandparent in her old age.
Her apartment at Ginger Cove is lined with incredible collections of classic literature, and her décor is all sailing a theme. I remember parts of this, the seagull painting on the wall, from our last visit to her in
Florida, but all of the furniture looks like it came straight from a sailboat, and her décor is a completely nautical theme: mobiles of sailboats, paintings, paper weights, dressers, lampshades, potholders. It is as if my grandmother wished to live at sea.
“You can’t know how strong her desire is to be with her parents”, my father says. She has a picture of them by her bed in the hospice, and I recognize that is her only picture there. When I ask her about it, and mention how handsome they were, she says it is her favorite picture of them, in which they have “total joy”. She tells me it is from their engagement. My father brings over a couple other photos from her apartment, one of her longtime companion, John, who is now the only one she would be living for anymore. He made the move to
Annapolisto be with her, even though all his friends and sailing spots were back in
Florida. A year ago he had to move out of Ginger Cove once it became too expensive for him, but he took up residence nearby and comes to visit her daily, talking on the telephone 8-10 times per day. She doesn’t remember this when my father asks her, and it seems as if she doesn’t really know that John loves her. “Oh, I don’t know”, she says wistfully when asked if he doesn’t come to visit her each day and call her multiple times a day, “I suppose he does”.
My memories of my Grandmother are mixed from childhood. No Christmas cookies, warm hands, or big hugs to remember her by. She was and is a scholar, an academic woman, though she raised four children and has eight grandchildren. She was a concert pianist, a cellist, an avid reader, a critic, and while my son naps I try to piece together what I can of my grandmother’s life, which seems soon to be over. I am almost frantically searching for her here, digging through her apartment while my father is out visiting her in her hospice room. I look through her clothing, the cashmere sweaters and practical yet fine leather bags, the classy shoes which are too small for my feet but stylish years beyond their purchase. I find her journals lined inconspicuously on her bedroom dresser top, and begin to thumb through them. I haven’t seen her in years, and even though the last time there were such hurtful words spoken, somehow now I yearn to know her, to understand this woman whom my son will never know and surely ask me about someday.
I pick up the leather bound journal, and like so many of my grandmother’s books it looks ancient to me, and has that musty book smell I now realize has taken over her apartment. My grandmother cherishes original print books, and I learn this slowly upon returning home as I ponder the book she sent me when I was pregnant with Luka: Grantly Dick Reed’s Childbirth Without Fear. My grandmother’s life is like a puzzle I piece together, afraid to ask my father because each time I pose a meak question he answers harshly, with annoyance, as if he would rather be done with this whole business. But there are so many hidden things between them all, his family, in stark contrast to my own where my siblings and I are open and honest about most everything – especially our dysfunction.
The journal begins with my grandmother writing that she will be a faithful diarist. It continues for three pages with her sweet, intellectual prose that is very hopeful and positive, and then the journal spills into open, white pages. I search through a dozen or so blank books that start out hopeful and end just the same – empty.
Strangely I assumed all these years somehow that my grandmother would be meticulously memoiring her entire life in the same way that her own father did. “Daddy Ralph’s Memoirs” as they are called, is a 500 page book he self published before his death, and I haven’t been able to get through it. Then I have to ask myself, am I so afraid of my grandmother that I am waiting for her death to know her? And now that her death appears imminent, and there are no memoirs to be found, what do I do?
I find my grandmothers scrapbooks, which are actually thorough and she has taken the time to catalog all the photos and caption them. I see my grandfather just after the war when he was close to death from shrapnel wounds to his stomach. His 6’4” frame diminished to a gaunt 120 pounds, he is striking and handsome nonetheless, and lives still today at 81 years. In one of her early journals my grandmother thanks God for sparing her husband from death in their first year of marriage. I ask my grandfather at Thanksgiving to tell me what happened and he relays the story once, says he will never tell it again and reprimands me for asking. The anger shoots out of him after all these years. He was 20 when he was wounded.
The year my grandfather left my grandmother I think I was 13. I was just getting comfortable in my own skin, one year till high school. It was the year after my older brother had attempted suicide, the year after my father’s youngest brother had succeeded at suicide leaving behind a 2 year old daughter and grieving wife. The day before my uncle Gault hung himself from the basement rafters, my grandfather told him on the dock of their
Gulf
Coastcondo that he was leaving my grandmother. Gault had been addicted to crack, playing jazz in the local night clubs, and his wife had left him a couple of times after his abusive behaviors didn’t stop. It must’ve been my grandfather’s news which drove Gault over the edge, or so my grandfather thinks, and it was he who found his baby son hanging there lifeless and blue.
It’s been 15 years since Gault’s death, a man I hardly knew but have thought of many times since. My older brother was in my father’s office when he heard the news, saw the rare tear drop down our father’s cheek, heard him say only one thing about the incident “so selfish.” As I page through my grandmother’s scrapbooks I see him, young forever, smiling. Here he is at his wedding day, a very handsome man, and so resembling my father! Here he holds his baby daughter. In all the photos of the children of that family, Gault is always the baby, always coddled by his siblings, always the baby. When my grandmother is asked by one of her nurses “how many children do you have Dr. Gault?” she answers “three” My father corrects her :Four. GAult is the name of her fourth son, and also her maiden name which she returned to a couple of years after her divorce. Though my grandmother made this solemn omission to the nurses, I am sure not a day goes by she does not think of him.
Today I called my father to tell him a mundane detail about the interest rate on my car loan, which he had asked about weeks ago and I finally got around to calling about. Now that I have a young child, days fade into weeks. It was three weeks ago that we went to see my grandmother, and I wonder where the time went, as my life travels onward and time disintegrates into its own oceanic self. We talked for a while and he asked me how work was last night, how much I made at the restaurant where I wait tables, whether it was slow or not. Then as the conversation wound down he asked if I had spoken to my siblings. Then he finally told me my grandmother passed on last night. I was speechless, and the weight of it stuck to me like a pocket of airlessness. He sounded normal, no catch in the throat. Then he said that he and his sisters would be going back to
Annapolison Friday to give a small memorial service for her, not for them, he said, but for her friends and her companion, John. She had requested in her will that they not have a memorial unless they felt they needed, and only that she be cremated and her ashes spread over a body of water, any body of water.
Andy came close to me to hold me, as he could tell by the sound of it what had happened before I even spoke, and I commenced writing the bills as we had been. “I’m okay,” I said, “I hardly knew her”, but really I just didn’t know what my reaction was or would be. It was like a anchor gaining weight on its way to the bottom, and slowly, so slowly, I felt it taking me down. Everywhere I walked in the house, everything I tried to do, took me down further and further until I had to sit still and just cry. My blood, my grandmother, has passed on.
Andy is better with death than I, he has more experience. He has lost grandparents, and his best friend who was more like a brother was murdered a few years back. But I know nothing of its effects thus far in my life. She is the closest person to me that I have yet lost, and yet I did not feel close to her before now.
Speaking to my father again later, he talked about leaving the burying to the dead, as it said in the old testament and was again repeated by Jesus later. He talked of my grandfather’s near-death experience and how he saw the light, saw loved ones, only to return again to tell the story to us here on Earth. My father spoke of it not mattering whether that was true or not, but that he knew his mother will keep on living, and has certainly joined her loved ones again. This was the first time my father has ever said that his spiritual beliefs may or may not be true, and was perhaps one of the most beautiful and comforting things he has ever shared with me.
My sister spent the day home from work and recalled her memories of our grandmother, spending time with photographs she had of her. I have to work to remember her, but those memories are coming back. She gave me a journal before I left for
Germany, she gave me two cashmere cardigans the Christmas of my senior year in high school. And most recently she sent me the book about childbirth without fear.
Chris and Katherine went to see her just a couple of days before her death, and my sister took her flowers, red roses from Times Square, along with some decadent chocolate cookies. She said our grandmother smelled those roses passionately, and ate the cookies with satisfaction. She sat and talked with them for two hours, listened to my brother play music on his violin and was enraptured. Our aunt Carol was surprised at Grandma’s longevity during those two hours, and said that was the longest she had remained alert and awake for a long time. Chris said she was sharp and intelligent, and Katherine noted that she seemed to be saying good-bye to her beautiful, long life.
The next day she refused to eat, and the next as well, until she passed on Monday evening peacefully without pain or suffering.
Tonight I stepped outside in the windy cold to smoke a cigarette, with the weight and grief of my grandmother’s death still hunched in my shoulders. I don’t normally smoke, but this seemed like an appropriate time if any, and my apologies went out to my grandmother for doing something she would most likely disapprove of. I smoked to all the directions, North, South, East, West, above, and below, and then I drew a circle around myself to ground me in the center. I felt something lifting me as I did this, like dizziness but not quite, something different, and after the circle was drawn I spoke to my grandmother. I told her I loved her with a smile, and just like that I felt a great weight ascend from my heart, and in its place was total peace and joy. I stood stunned in that feeling for a moment, amazed and shocked at the magic of it, and noted the large maple tree so vibrant and alive before me. I talked to my grandmother again and thanked her for lifting my sorrow, and said hello to her parents and my uncle Gault whose presence I felt distinctly with her. It was a moment I will cherish forever, this small ceremony and ritual I created instinctually to celebrate and mourn her passing. She is with me, I realized then, completely and totally with me now more than ever, and I can draw on her strength and power any time I wish, call her to me for all of her knowledge and love. As I finished my cigarette I saw in the street walking towards me a black cat with white feet and a white throat. How ironic, I know, I thought it to myself as well, but that cat walked right up to the maple tree and looked at me good and hard for a long moment. I said hello to it, turned to look towards the wind, and when I looked back that cat was gone! I looked all around and saw it nowhere . . . and with a spark in my heart said goodnight to my grandmother, turned and walked inside, searching in the darkness once more over my shoulder for that cat.
Perhaps the goodbye my brother and sister gave her was the last thing she needed before letting go of this life. Maybe we were all the last link to what she was afraid of leaving, and once she met her baby great grandson, and felt the love of her best known grandchildren with her, she was able to pass over into the other world. This is what I would like to believe anyway. I know now that I will never be able to know my grandmother as I could have, and that one woman’s life is far too complicated to analyze and to theorize, especially once she is gone. There is no simple answer to the why’s, and so we make the circle bigger, invite her in with all of the questions about her, and kiss them goodbye with the wind. She was amazing, she was music and art and literature, and perfect grammar. She was mother and teacher and pianist and cellist and writer and reader and scholar. She was a sailor, a devoted daughter. She was afraid, she was faithful, she was determined and stubborn. She was a lot like me. I see now that this is how she intended it –to be teaching me from afar, holding my heart in hers, lifting it up on the wind.