Driving to the hospital, on that sunny April morning,
I cringe behind my sunglasses.
Struggling to keep my composure.
Foreboding washes over me like a fever.
I cannot show this strong woman,
who is the one enduring the beast,
my enormous weakness.
The sunglasses stay on for most of the day.
Checking in.
A kindly nurse asks her if she has a living will,
asks her to catalog her belongings.
Despair makes me dizzy.
This is only a two day stay.
Yet my heart tells me I will leave the hospital alone.
My heart tells me this is our last day together.
The sunglasses remain on my face.
Once we are in the room, her room, we chat
about life,
and the future,
and she remembers the heart medication she left at home.
I offer to go retrieve it.
I return to the hospital an hour or so later,
after puffing on too many of the things that brought her to this place.
She is such a sport,
my lifeline.
My heart.
Our last hour together, spent apart.
Tests, tests, more tests.
Endless tests.
To locate the demon,
to understand the demon,
to control the uncontrollable beast.
After the tests, we return to the room.
A nurse brings in a bag.
Full of poison.
No, full of pain medication,
the reason she is here.
To regulate the pain.
To discover what dose of this serum
will be enough,
but not too much,
so that I can bring my angel back home.
The drip begins.
The clock unwinds.....
Our minutes are numbered.
Her minutes are numbered.
10, 9, 8, 7,6.....................
a med student asks useless questions,
Grandmom, at first chipper in her answers, begins to falter.
I mistake her delirium for sadness, answering the questions for her.
Until the beeping begins,
and I see the whites of her eyes.
Rushing from the room I am blind,
I am shaking.
I am lost in a nightmare,
but I am not shocked.
I try to speak to the nurses at the station, who look at me confused,
while the med student pushes buttons he does not understand.
And I do not understand why time is moving so slow,
yet so fast at the same time.
A code is called.
A stream of doctors rush by.
The nurses try to lead me away.
But I cling to the wall outside of the room.
The room I could not reenter,
for I had seen too much already.
All that my mind could stand.
Or so I thought.
A sister of the cloth, appears like a dream figure.
Whispering condolences in my ear.
The minutes tick by.
These minutes last an eternity.
This is all of the story that matters.
I do not know if my angel,
my grandmother,
hears the words I whisper in her ear that night,
as she lay in a morphine induced delirium.
Brain dead, the doctors warn us.
Then she wakes up.
Clawing at the tube cutting her lip. We adjust it.
She slips back into unconsciousness.
Brain damaged,
the doctors say.
I stay on, into the night.
Awake for 41 hours,
I am victim to a different delirium.
One a.m......
I am told to go home.
Her daughter,
my mother,
tells me to go home and go to sleep.
Only one of us can stay on at the hospital.
And mother has unresolved issues.
Mother wants one more minute with the woman she ignored.
The woman who gave birth to her.
I want one more lifetime with this woman.
This icon.
Yet I leave.
I kiss my grandmother goodbye,
tell her unconscious figure that I love her.
And I leave.
I go back to her house.
I sleep for twelve hours.
A phone call awakens me the next day.
My grandmother's best friend telling me,
Grandmom is awake,
responsive,
not brain dead,
not even brain damaged.
I take my time showering, dressing.
She is a strong woman.
As I grab my bag and head for the door,
the telephone rings.
It is my mother...
her daughter.
She is telling me something I don't understand.
She is telling me my heart has stopped beating.
She is telling me my grandmother is dead.