Be forewarned, this is not about Cambridge or the UK, it's about saying goodbye to my Grandma.
She's quiet now, lying there in that bed. The contours of her skin, the wrinkles worked in with care and her arms blotchy from too many hours spent in the sun speak to a thousand better days. Her breaths are raspy and slow, like the long draws she took from her cigarettes in the soft afternoon light, sitting on the porch swing. Nicotine curbing her hunger and trimming her hips for fifty years of moments. Moments dripping by now like precious drops of water lost in the desert sun. A blanket sliding bit by bit towards the floor, she stares out listlessly, her mind gone to another place, another time, a long time ago. She is waiting. One by one we wait with her. Some of those moments, those long fading moments, blending with a smile, a memory, a reminder of what was and will never again be. But mostly she waits alone. Her things gathering dust in the corners of the garage. Color faded, like her hair is finally fading. The black strands at last outnumbered by the grey. Greasy and oily, she never kept it this long. But now she simply lays there, fussing if they cut it, or touch her, or help her bathe.
The sun dappling through the room curves across the top of her glasses. Thick and heavy the lenses have settled into permanent creases, sinking her empty cheek bones further into her mouth. Her dentures outlined starker than they ever were before, her green eyes behind them, dim and dull. Not like I remember. The grandmother I always knew. The laughter comes now in wan smiles and fits and starts of recognition. the crease at the edge of her eyes starting to turn downwards. Drool now drips from the corners of her mouth. Her mouth that she kept so perfect, settled in skin that is no longer made-up, her eyebrows are no longer plucked and painted and perfect. They are white and wispy and all but gone. A lifetime of sorrow and laughter has worn her to the bone. Shattered by loss, then mended by time the pieces of my grandmother's mind are finally scattered. A face here, a second captured forever there, a memory of a car, of a dog, of a cat named George all jumbled in with the recognition of my brother as her husband, until wait. No. He's far too tall.
She waits, her body still on the bed, draped by the sun. The sound of her roommates television buzzing in the background. Poverty resigning her, the most private person, to share a room. Now, during the last days of life, everything she still is, and all the moments she has left with us, with so many other people. Surrounded by sound, subtle and soft. Surrounded by so many others who are simply waiting.
She waits and we wait. The inevitable is yet to come, with all its dread and pain and release and grief. We wait and she waits, and we push and beg and cry at once for the waiting to end and yet for it never to cease. The moments, slipping slowly by pile up faster than we care to count them, and the stories disappear into the folds of time. Eyes blurred, she's just another woman. Another wrinkled body drifting slowly away. Another soul in a billion that could die today, tomorrow, next week, next year. And yet, I see her hands, the scar running down her arm, the fingers. Crooked, like mine. Her feet, and the place they cut out the tumor. Another human and I might not see the moments. But she is where I came from, my grandmother, the woman whose features are engraved on the walls of my heart. Lying there, as the sun slowly fades, letting the room drift to dark.
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