Stories

My Grandmother is going to die.

This fact has always been indisputable. She is human, just like I am, just like Mother Theresa was and also that guy who fought alligators. It’s inevitable. No matter who we are, where we live, or how much money we made (or didn’t make), we all die.

But what’s different about the inevitable death of my Grandmother is that my Grandmother is now going to die soon.


It’s not like I haven’t had time to get ready. She began slipping away, you see, a decade ago.

First it was little things. She had a bad car accident (not her fault) but then started getting lost driving to the grocery store in her little 1997 white Grand Am. When grapes rotted for the first time on the counter of her spotless kitchen, or when she didn’t ask one of us to take her trash bins down to the curb on a Tuesday night. Standing in her kitchen I asked her what went into the pumpkin cookies next and she sat and stared at me, unsure, at her little table under the 1980s chandelier.  

I stayed at her house, most of one summer. Tidying up here and there and poking around my grandmother's mind. Do you remember Pearl Harbor? Which brother was it on the USS Arizona, was it Guy? Tell me the story about how you met Grandpa again? Was he handsome? Were you gorgeous? Stories that had once poured out of her with the tiniest bit of prompting. Now she sometimes shrugged. “I dunno.” She would say that it was a long time ago. She’d snap. Her patience, previously as endless as the sea, abruptly ran into a wall.

It’s not like I haven’t known. It started when she was 80 and 80 is an old age to be. And she was younger than that, even, when she moved from her house to our house. My mother bought a tall twin bed with a sleigh frame and a firm mattress. It wasn’t the kind of mattress that lets you sink in and envelopes you, but was instead the sturdy sort. The sort that propels you up in the morning. One that it would be easy to get her in and out of. Maria, a home nurse, came in every morning for an hour or two to help us get her showered and dressed. Every morning, when we’d get her up and get her breakfast, she’d sit on the porch, or the couch, listening to Rush and occasionally patting the dog that followed her around like he was hers.

My grandmother was always immaculate. Her hair as exact as her penciled-on eyebrows. The smell of the Pantene spray pervading her iron-pleated slacks and turtleneck sweaters even more than the odor of her cigarettes, the ones she would secretly smoke outside. Or the Avon perfume she once sold to her neighbors, and wore to mask the cigarette smoke, spritzing it on only as she slipped in the door.

Maria helped her become perfect, immaculate, every day. After Grandma burned her hair with a curling iron, because she just sat there, holding it in her hair, Maria would curl it carefully each morning for her. She’d remind my grandmother not to touch the metal rod, that she’d burn herself and then wonder why. But that first time, that time that she burnt her hair, that was a sign. A sign that her mind was wandering away somewhere as she began to leave us, piece by tiny piece.  

She adored Bailey, the dog, and used to sit on the couch and watch Fox News, or ask questions about my day when I wandered in from work. Sometimes we went to the park. But now it was me, not her, driving that 1997 Grand Am. The cushion she had used to scoot her tiny self far enough forward in the seat to reach the pedals was now relegated to the passenger side.

It’s not a surprise, that my Grandmother is going to die. She’s 90, almost. She turned 88 on September the 9th. Many people do not live to turn 88. Or 87. Or even 70. By any measure, my Grandmother held more than her fair share of years in her delicate but hardworking hands. She has had more years than anyone in her family was ever given--except for maybe her grandmother. Maybe, because we don’t know exactly how old she was when she died. She might have been 87, or maybe 89.  But my Grandmother has lived through 88 falls and 88 summers and 88 winters and springs.

No one is left anymore who knew my Grandmother as a young woman. Her brothers died young, but not as young as her father. My great Aunt Fontella, her dearest friend, was the last…and she slipped away just earlier this year, fading into the soft summer nights she loved so well after a series of strokes left her half present and half gone.

There’s a photo, hanging on her wall, of my Grandma at twelve with her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. She’s sullen in the photo. Angry about a beautiful new haircut she thought her mother ruined, just because it wasn’t formal enough for the photograph. Grandma’s mom had combed the curls out with water so that she’d look respectable. There were four generations, sitting in the same room, so clearly just holding it together after a fight, all because the camera was there. It was a special occasion, in 1940.

My Grandmother was born the same year as Shirley Temple. But she never had natural blonde curls. Her hair is still almost black, incredibly fine and softer to the touch than silk. Wrinkles line her face, but they’re not the wrinkles of someone who is 88. If it weren’t for her dentures, which she got at 22 after losing her teeth to gum disease, she wouldn't look particularly old. Not as old as she really is, the age of someone who slips away quietly one night in their sleep, glancing back only to remind themselves that all will be okay. The world will turn anyway.

It isn’t a surprise that my Grandmother is going to die. Because it is never a surprise that anyone is going to die.

And I have had more years to prepare than most. To remember how safe her arms were when I was a little girl. The way that nothing in the world could ever be wrong if I was sitting in my Grandmother’s lap. How much I admired her giant glasses and perfect makeup. How Grandma never wore pajamas or sweatpants or jeans. She was the prettiest, classiest, most beautiful and strongest person I have ever known.

And I have had more years than most to choose what to forget. The times she snapped at me. It stung more than I could bear, because it was Grandma. The cigarette smoke and the semi-constant evaluation of my weight. Those moments happened, but they never defined who we were to each other. They needn’t take over now.

Dementia is a slow, slow death. One that creeps up on you, that leaves you wondering and waiting, holding your breath, and holding their hands.

So I went in, every day I was home. I went in and I sat, or I call, winding up hours and hours on the phone.  I sat and I waited, and while I waited I’d tell my Grandma all the stories that she used to tell me. I’d sit in the chair I dragged in from the hall and propped next to her bed and I’d squint a little bit up at the ceiling, trying to remember the details she knew so well, that used to come to her so easily.

After that I would call from far away, winding up hours and hours on the phone. I’d search frantically for the battery charger and for one last international calling card, with another twenty minutes on it. Punching in the numbers while on the speakerphone, hoping I hit them all before we’d disconnect. “Disculpe, no tiene mas credito.”

She, a firebrand of a woman with a temper as hot as ice to match, now lies in the bed, drifting in and out of awareness, while I talk and talk and talk.

I tell her about how she used to sneak into her mother’s bedroom when her mother and stepfather were sleeping, to take money from her mother’s purse. And how when she’d squirrelled enough away, she’d buy a bus ticket a few towns over to where her Grandmother lived in Twin Falls. How she’d stay there, working on and off in the “hotel” and “restaurant” her Grandmother owned throughout prohibition and beyond. How she’d sometimes tend bar, and how much she loved her Scotch Whiskeys.

I tell her how she ran away at 17 and married a man 25 years her senior. Just to get out. To be on her own. I talk and I talk and I talk about a young Air Force vet, just back from England and the World War. He was from Sugar City, Idaho and mistook her for a date that had stood him up. He chewed her out right there, in the bar where she worked--only realizing she was an employee, and not his date, afterwards.

Then I ask if she remembers when he came back a few days later, carrying flowers, because he’d been out of line. She fell in love. How his apology bled into a first date. Then a second. Then a third. How he stood next to her in front of a courthouse and swore he’d hold her as long as he lived, which he did, even though for him it was only until 50-something. How their honeymoon lasted only a few days and was only a few towns over, but their romance lasted her whole life, so strong it stayed alive long after he was gone.

I ask if she remembers Fontella. How they grew up together and married brothers. How they were best friends before Reid hauled Grandma Shirley off to Island Park, and Vance set out for Washington with Fontella. I trace an 8 inch scar running up her arm, and wonder aloud for the thousandth time how much fun it must have been, attached to a toboggan behind a pickup truck, flying at full tilt across the snow. What, I wonder aloud, did she think of the snow plane her husband built out of old parts? How much was it, in total, that they sold their Candy Apple Red Convertible for? After they’d finally given up on kids, bought that car and moved to California, only to get pregnant with my mom weeks later?

Was she in love at first sight? With that beautiful baby of hers?

I sit and I tell her the stories of her life. The golden succor of my childhood. Reminding her, I hope, of the formidable, intelligent, beautiful woman she has been. Of a life lived in full. Of love freely given over and over and over. Of my Grandmother. Shirley Dene Casperson Haws. Brave, bold, daring and everything I ever wanted to be.

I’m reminding myself why it hurts so much to have lost her so slowly. And why it will hurt so much when the last glimpse of her will be gone.

Reminding myself how lucky I have been, to call her Grandma. And how lucky I have felt every time she has looked at me, with so little else left in her mind, and said “I love you, too.”