Flying to the Moon

         There were two sounds in the room, the tick of the second hand on the clock against the wall, and the raspy breath belonging to my grandmother. It was 10:27, not that we were looking at the clock. It was the coldest day of the winter yet, but we felt only the coldness of death.  All eyes, all thirteen pairs of eyes, were on the bed. The fourteenth pair, belonging to the frail woman on the bed, looked out, but didn’t see. Her breathing was shallow, and raspy. It sounded worse than any wheezing I had ever done during an asthma attack.  Every breath she took was a struggle; a battle against her fate. The cancer was claiming her. Her body was emaciated and frail, and now her very breath was being taken from her.  My grandfather sat by the bed, holding the wrinkled hand of the woman he had been married to for almost sixty years, as her life slipped away.  Her speech went first, and then her sight. They said she could still hear, and she did show some signs of understanding in the first minutes, but it was uncertain whether she heard still. We had been holding our breaths for the last few moments, knowing that each breath could be her last.
         “Go to the moon and wait for me. We will walk the rest of the way together,” my grandfather told her. I never knew my grandfather could be so poetic until that moment.
         She wheezed once more; it was a terrible, guttural wheeze, like a person being suffocated. The tears rolled down my cheeks; they rolled down all of our cheeks. Her breathing had become labored, and her breaths were farther apart. With every breath she took, we had held ours for fear it was her last. We were all there; all of her children and grandchildren, watching as the life of the woman who was our hero, who was the strongest, most vibrant person we knew, slipped away.
          I willed her to breathe once more. “Breathe! Just breathe. Please breathe!” I silently pleaded with her. At the same time, I wished that she would be at peace. It was a terrible contradiction, because each breath meant that she was still with us, but the sound of her breathing and her struggle to breath was unbearable. How do you will someone to die?  My grandfather was stronger than I.  Maybe I was selfish, but I couldn’t will her to die, I couldn’t tell her it was okay, because it was not okay. My heart seemed to stop in that very moment her breath failed, and I felt it break. The person who loved me most in the world was gone. The second ticked away, and then another, and another. It became clear that she was gone. There was no following breath; no last words for her voice failed long ago. There was just the silence of death.  She had flown to the moon to wait for him.