“Grief is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give,but cannot.All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes,the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest.Grief is just love with no place to go.”
It is quiet and dark as I creek open the screen door
I’m careful to not let it slam behind me
as the smell of their house envelops me
for what I think will be the last time with both of them alive.
familiarity closes around me like a theology of belonging,
I am home.
He is sleeping in his chair and she is in her bed.
Their hands are clasped together as they wait to see who will be taken first.
Awpa sees my silhouette in the doorway and bids me come in.
They both welcome me with such joy even in the late hour.
Their bedroom feels 40+ years comfortable to my childhood and adult body,
which automatically crawls in next to Mema at the edge of her bed.
Her warm silk nightgown is soft to my traveling body.
Her greeting is familiar,
“aww che’ my Cre-Cre”
I can tell by the frailty in her voice she has aged since I last saw her three months ago.
Awpa looks like it will not be long.
That is why we came.
The hospice nurse says she doesn’t know how long.
“It is better if you come.”
We talk for a few short minutes and then I crawl out of bed and say goodnight.
As I close the bedroom door, I hear them whispering to each other,
“goodnight sham, I love you.”
“I love you too, so much.”
With the morning comes nurses and aides, chaplains, and conversations.
We move Awpa to his chair and instead of coffee we give him oxygen.
He reaches for his rosary to say his prayers.
The circular, silver case is unclasped and lays open kissing the mahogany table,
the engraved image of the Virgin Mary peers back at me,
her arms down by her sides lay open ready to receive what is to come.
I am trying to take it all on before it will never be again.
This image of my grandfather’s morning routine that is slipping from him.
His round, short, sausage-like fingers hold the circular beads in his trembling hand as he fingers through the prayers religiously. His arms are bruised and cut from many falls in the night, he looks like a bull who has fought his way up against death and refuses to be stopped.
Slow and determined much like his breath that pumps through his aching chest. He breaks the silence.
“I am ready to go…but what about Mema?”
Death is like birth,
sometimes it comes two weeks early, and sometimes right on time.
Yet some have bent the ear of their Creator and pushed past their due date.
Death seemingly waits for my grandfather’s release because of how he holds so tightly to every moment with my grandmother.
What is this love that I see and hear whispered between their day and night?
Dehydration and a body shutting down fill the weekend hours into days.
I mentally must open my emotional medicine bag, making myself available to the act of midwifing death.
So much about the end of life is our will versus our organs and what passes through his body shows me that he is hollowed out, like his empty armchair where we would share coffee in the morning on my visits home from college.
Days turn to nights, I sleep in the living room on the couch near his recliner.
Through the night I listen for his breathing.
Sometimes he asks for help, other times he gives himself over to sleep.
Granddaughters and daughters fill the house with cooking and caring.
Grandsons configure equipment and plan to aid with aging.
He makes an upward turn and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Today will not be the end.
I kiss his cheek and make the sign of the cross on his forehead before I say goodbye.
We smile knowingly that this is not the end for us, we are forever.