The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

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My wee one will be starting school soon. I hate that I can't believe the time has passed so quickly, because everyone told me it would and I should have believed them. M. tells me that it's a matter of physics, that time does indeed begin to move more quickly as we get older, and before I know it I will be old and close to death. Pretty.

I miss my grandparents. My grandfather often told me that one day he was eighteen, the next he was an old man, and all that happened in between was a blur. I feel a little bit ashamed of myself for feeling a kind of distance from him now that he's dead, because we did not share biology or a family name. He married my maternal grandmother before I was born, a few years after my biological grandfather died from a massive heart attack, and though he was always 'grandpa' to me, in death he is a tombstone with a name that is not my own. Still, most of my favourite memories include him, and I can't say for certain that he didn't see me as part of himself. My grandmother was a lot like myself, or I should say, I'm a lot like her, with a collection of strange phobias and quirks held together in a neatly groomed package. She was lovely to look at, even when she was older, with perfect hair and carefully applied makeup, and she was always sitting, pulling long drags off a cigarette while she watched everything that moved around her. Always bejewelled, always perfumed, she was happiest when she was the observer and never thought to be anything more. I loved her, having grown up with her strangeness and knowing it as normal, and she loved me and any disagreements we may have had could be counted on one hand.

I think that my grandparents were the only people who really made me feel like I was loved unconditionally. I was not a disappointment to them when I opted not to go to university, overwhelmed with anxiety about having to make a life of my own. They did not raise objections to my friends or my boyfriends, always gracious in the company of both, never criticizing or judging. They told me I was pretty, or that I was smart and I think they actually believed it. They made me believe it.

When my grandmother died, it was not entirely unexpected. She had been battling dementia for a few years, and had been diagnosed with leukemia some years before that, so her health had been in decline for so long that I had begun to forget whom she was. There had been a call in the night, the sort everyone fears receiving, and in an instant she was gone. I was surprised, but not for the reasons one would think. What surprised me was how much influence I had over her death, or at least, her willingness to allow it. The day before, I had visited her in the nursing home, unannounced and unplanned. The trip had been impromptu, a sudden idea that came to me when my sister K. asked what I'd like to do that day. We entered the facility and were met by the usual sights: old, toothless figures slumped over in their wheelchairs, raising their heads in our direction, while their cavernous eyes searched our faces for any sign of familiarity. It smelled like boiled food and antiseptic, and the walls were white and bare. How could my grandparents have come to this?

My grandmother lay in her bed in her room, while my grandfather (in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's and in the belief that he was only there to keep her company and would soon be living with us) held court in the common area. I went in to see her, laying small, shrivelled and frail in a bed with rails, and saw the bruising on her hands, and the fatigue in her face. It was not uncommon for her to be confused about who I was, but that day she seemed to know, and she even smiled. We chatted about the kinds of things granddaughters and elderly grandparents do, the pleasantries that mean nothing and lead nowhere. After some time, I looked her in the eye, knowing I had something to say that needed to be said. I asked her how she was really feeling, and she croaked that she was 'so tired, dear'. I held her hand and told her that if she wanted to go to sleep, she should just go to sleep, and not to worry about anyone else. Do you know what I mean? I asked her, studying her expression. She nodded and smiled, squeezing my hand. I did not see fear. I did not see hesitance. I saw a woman who understood what I was saying and knew that she had heard me. You're beautiful, she said weakly. I look like my grandmother, I smiled back. I told her I loved her and she said she loved me too, and I kissed her forehead lightly before I left the room.

She was gone that night.

The next morning was the first time in my life that I had ever gone to a morgue, and the first time I had ever seen a dead person up close. It was an odd thing to see this woman on a metal table with a sheet up to her chin, motionless, with tubing still in her skin. This was my grandmother, a woman who never went without her lipstick, and here she was completely empty, still and cold. I didn't cry, though. I couldn't. I was in shock at what I was seeing, the image of death which I'd always been so far away from until that moment. It had happened to someone I loved and I was fascinated and relieved and horrified all at once. The nurse who had lead us to her stood respectfully to the side, looking at a chart, careful not to look at the faces of the ones left behind, but I knew she was working at keeping a distance. She knew it too.

As we walked back toward the elevator that would bring us up to the ground floor, I noticed that my watch had stopped. It had frozen on nine thirty, and I tapped it and twisted the knob on the side trying to get it back into its rhythm. I shyly asked the nurse what time my grandmother had passed away, and she looked at the chart. Nine thirty, she said matter-of-factly. I was astonished, and given my curiosity with the paranormal, I was delighted and a little spooked. When I told her about the coincidence, she smiled and said It happens all the time. After working in this job for so long and seeing it so often, I have to say that there are no coincidences.

Six weeks later, my mantle clock in my living room froze on nine thirty. I was entertaining friends, my best friend C. and her family, and I jokingly mentioned the clock and the fact that I felt my grandmother was trying to send a message to me. When you're surrounded by skeptics and non-believers, you always add a giggle or full-out laugh to anything that sounds preposterous to them. It keeps you looking like you might be sane, after all. The next morning, my grandfather was dead, having walked to the nurses desk at three in the morning, telling them he had seen my grandmother and she'd come to get him. The nurse gave him some juice and told him to go back to bed, and he shuffled back down the hallway to the room and disappeared through the darkened doorway. About ten minutes later, she went in to check on him, and there he was, lying on his back in his checkered shirt, red suspenders and pants, a slight smile on his face. Gone. His heart just couldn't keep beating.

I sat on the bed with him for a few hours until the coroner came. I stole some looks at him while my mother sat weeping in the chair across from the bed, and I studied his face, knowing I'd never see it again. He did look peaceful, as though he were asleep in instead a vacant shell, and I again found myself incapable of crying. He didn't want to be here without my grandmother, and now he wasn't.

When my friend C. called me that afternoon, sounding a little sad and weepy herself, I attributed it to friendship and sympathy. Why was she taking it so hard? I wondered. Then, it came out that her own grandmother had died the same day, also of a heart attack and the two of us marvelled at the strangeness of the timing, the mantle clock and the way the two of them seemed to be perfectly okay with going. The funerals were the same day, in different cities with different mourners, and we will always have that in common.

With the end of their lives came the reality that I am no one's granddaughter and I never will be again. The unconditional love has left the building, and even though my parents are supposed to have it, there are points in our history which clearly showed that they didn't always think I was wonderful. Today, when I walked to the park to spend time with my wee one and her friends, I looked around at the summer which refuses to budge and I breathed it in, remembering the long summers with my grandparents by the river, and I was filled with sadness that those days are finished. I will never smell the mix of skin cream and scented powder from my grandmother again, or the cigar or pipe tobacco smoke that clouded the air around my grandpa. There will be no bottles of root beer in a nylon lawn chair, or bags of curd cheese under a poplar tree next to their deck. No more Christmases of flannel pajamas in gift boxes with pictures of cats on the top, and no more tinkling of glasses filled with whiskey, water or soda. There is a gentle kind of cruelty in all of it, the kind that makes you grateful to have the memories, but you are haunted by them, nonetheless.

The tears come up easier now that the shock has worn off, and the reality has set in. The drama passes and all that you are left with is a feeling of emptiness that never fills itself in. Then, you start to worry about which holes will pop up next.

I don't know why I'm thinking of this now. I don't suppose it matters, though.

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