42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

The road stretched ahead of us, endless. In a couple hours, we’ll be home again.
My mind is numb. My face and eyes ache in the way that say I’ve been crying, and am holding back crying now. I know this time will never end, but it will end soon.

Time has a peculiar way of contracting, entangled with our memories and grief.

My grandmother, my dad’s mother, died last Tuesday. It wasn’t unexpected. I knew she didn’t have long after I visited her in the hospital a couple weeks ago.
I wasn’t ready to let go until I saw her. I kept deluding myself, thinking she would get better.
Sometimes the body gives up, and the mind along with it.
Grandma had reached her time.

It doesn’t make it any easier.

I found myself flying back to Michigan, but not with the same sense of joy. I had to pack, but every bit of me didn’t want to pack, to go home again. I normally enjoy flying, but now it was a chore. Subconsciously, I had to be fighting that final step, the look at the hole my grandma left in our lives.

Much of the time leading up to the memorial service was filled with avoidance, or mundane details. I didn’t want to think about that emptiness in my head, my heart. I wanted to be strong for my father.

I think I did pretty well, except for the memorial service. There, I sat with my youngest aunt, only 8 years older than me, and we comforted each other. I sat near picture collages of Grandma, and tried to place the time, the people. The oddest phrases or thoughts would trigger my heart into tears again.

It was the return to the house now referred to as Grandpa’s, that hurt the most, though I couldn’t show it. The time for crying is over.

Everywhere I look, I see Grandma, and her absence. She’s just around the corner, in the bedroom, or perhaps on a recliner, nodding off when conversations continue late into the night. I hear her calling my Grandpa in for his meal. In an echo of her care for him, I fixed him a plate at the family dinner after the memorial.

I see her clothes still hanging up. I see the decorations hanging on the walls. I see her kitchen, see her orchestrating a big family meal, breading and frying some vegetarian chicken or directing one of us to wash vegetables. I hear her voice telling me to be nice.

I see her writing thank you notes to all the people who came to visit, only this time, she can’t write the notes. She was such a gracious woman, had such lovely manners, and wouldn’t take much bad behavior from her grown kids. A beautiful smile, one that would light up her face. 

Several people at the service told me how much I looked like her, but I don’t see it. I did see, in her skeletal features shortly before her death, her strong resemblance to her youngest daughter. Their eyes, their cheekbones.

Yet I don’t want to see this Grandma in my mind, the grandma who is suffering, who just wants to go in peace. I see the healthy Grandma, the tall woman a little shorter with the years, with the close-cut mix of gray and white hair. She’s always well-dressed, never casually. Wearing a sweater, perhaps, and a skirt. Sometimes pants, but mostly skirts or dresses.

I’m oddly drawn to the velvet bag sitting on the mantle, holding a temporary box of her ashes. I want to touch it like a talisman, but I don’t want to be seen. In the end, I don’t touch it, just stare at it covertly on occasion. I know that she’s not there, she’s not anywhere, but somehow, it would anchor me back to her.

I spoke at her memorial service briefly, my voice breaking, my face contracting, trying to express how I felt about her. I’m not sure I was coherent. I remember saying she always told me to be nice, and how sometimes I probably wasn’t nice. My grandpa interjects that she told him the same thing. I say how she had that beautiful smile, how she was always kind. How I wasn’t ready to let her go until I saw her for the last time. And how that I will keep trying to be nice.

What I didn’t say because I couldn’t think, was that Grandma always accepted me for who I was. She never pressured me to change.
I’m told she prayed for me, but for what, I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I know no matter what I believe, or what she believed, that kind thoughts never hurt anyone. I’m glad that she accepted me, that she loved me. That she was always kind to everyone she met.

I stared up at the out-in-the-country dark sky well after midnight, talking with my aunt and her husband. About something thoughtless one of the extended relatives said, and then about more mundane things. Even then, we didn’t talk much about the big hole in the house and our hearts.

We still won’t. We get to move on now.
I know grief isn’t that simple. That hole will get a little less jagged. In time, it will grow shut a bit, but it will still be there. It took me many years to even realize that with my mother.
I know it was Grandma’s time. I know she was suffering, and didn’t want to keep fighting her failing body. It doesn’t make the loss any less.

The morning of the memorial service, I dreamed about her. It was as if she was reinforcing what I knew: she couldn’t stay.

There was some sort of attack by giant insects buzzing around. All around, people are running, screaming, running for cover.
My father, stepmother, brother, myself, and at least one of my brother’s children all gather under a big blanket, trying to protect ourselves from the touch of the insects. We force my grandmother under the blanket too, though she doesn’t want to go. She looks like Grandma of old, healthy, dressed well and a little heavy. But as she argues with me, she sounds like the Grandma I saw in the hospital: hard to understand, moaning a little bit as she says, no, please. I don’t want to stay. Leave me.