My Grandmother

I saw her three weeks earlier, just before her husband died. And three weeks later, I was back, because she died.

It changes everything, that moment after death, when someone’s home becomes a museum. When someone’s pink satin nightgown becomes an artifact. Their food in the refrigerator, like ingredients from a science experiment, waiting to be discarded in hazard bins.

There was blood next to her bed. I’m not sure why I needed to scrub it off. Why it couldn’t have been left to people who got paid to scrub such things.

But somehow it became my job. To scrub something so real from a floor I’d been walking on my whole life.

Blood that had once been a woman, from wood that had once been a tree. Scrubbed by a woman who had just been a girl. Who was finding herself. Her role.

Not because of any reward or compensation, but to scrub for my grandmother and to scrub all that was still keeping this woman I was from emerging—the sarcasm self-doubt judgment—a catalog I kept in my mind that took so much more space than my ideas and hopes and values.

I scrubbed the blood of my grandmother’s fatal fall off the bed, perhaps after over-medicating because she was too scared to be alone in that house without her husband.

Too scared to be warehoused with the other elderly people who were still just boys and girls with a future, if you could just scrub away all those years.

I scrubbed for the lost connection between my grandmother and my mother, trying to bridge these two women together through me because it mattered to me, still matters to me, what could have been, some continuation, some deliberateness in a world driven by clever avenging of unsaid hurt feelings and grudges that always ends in total disconnect and utter loneliness.

Looking back I see I had created my only custom, my only ritual in what felt like a sea of sitcoms and sarcasm under fluorescent lights, always pulling my attention away from the sacred and into the banal at my own expense.

In the background of staged laughter and better ideas, I forced myself to participate in someone else’s starkest moment.

I forced myself to feel it was real. And in doing so, I realized I was real. In that moment, I felt my own blood flowing. My own tears flowing. And in a private gasp, that could only be heard by the person I was becoming who was learning to listen, I said, “I’m so sorry grandmother. For all your pain.”

-JLK