We Only Get to Do This Once

Remembering to live a life worth revisiting

I.

“I got to get that cornbread out of the oven.”

My grandma sweeps her hand across her forehead. She sounds so tired.

There is no cornbread in the oven. My grandma is dying.

“June’s in the kitchen, grandma. I’ll tell her to keep an eye on the cornbread.”

“Oh, thank you, Jessie.”

I walk down the hall to the kitchen, and I tell my Aunt June that grandma doesn’t want the cornbread to burn. I do this because I have never lied to my grandma before, and because I want my aunt to have a sense of grandma’s state of mind. My aunt understands what I’m telling her.

June pokes her head in grandma’s room to tell her not to worry about the cornbread. Grandma smiles.

I guess this is dementia, what my grandma’s going through, but what strikes me is how much sense it makes. My grandma’s mind wanders, but it doesn’t wander into fantastic or phantasmagorical territory. When she comes unstuck from the here and now, she’s somewhere in the past. Really, she’s not wandering at all: She’s revisiting familiar places. If I had to pick one thought my grandma has probably had more times than any other, in her life, it would be “I got to get that cornbread out of the oven.” I would guess that my grandma has spent more of her life with cornbread in the oven than otherwise. This synaptic trail is a well-tended pathway.

My grandma is quiet for awhile. I’m quiet, too. I have nothing to say. I’m glad just to be with her.

“Oh, hey, Jessie, is your mom coming?”

“Yeah, grandma. She should be here soon.”

“Is she bringing cigarettes?”

I assume that my grandma is somewhere in the 70s right now, not because she ever quit smoking, but because her children and their spouses eventually stopped bringing her cigarettes. I’m trying to formulate a response when another one of my aunts who happened to be walking by says, “Debby’s bringing cigarettes, mom. I talked to her.”

This is a shock, but I soon understand. My family is no longer trying to keep grandma alive. Instead, they’re trying to keep her happy. Whatever she wants, she gets, and this is a program I strongly recommend for the dying. Under this regimen, my grandma rallies enough to have a rather wonderful season of weeks surrounded by her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. A bag of potato chips is by her side for much of this period, and she enjoys a jubilee of unrestricted sodium intake. She comes to my fortieth birthday party, where she toasts my health with her customary drink: a glass of wine with a couple of teaspoons of sugar in it.

I’m so proud of my family. Unlimited potato chips is an extraordinary measure that I can endorse. Everybody knows that my grandma is dying. My grandma knows that she is dying. We are letting her die as herself, and her excursions into the past are part of this process.

II.

I occasionally suffer from a malady that I call “temporal vertigo.” This is what happens: I encounter a phenomenon so intensely connected to the past that it dislodges me from the present. The result is existential dizziness. Sometimes, I tumble into profound melancholia before I can right myself.

The usual trigger is a song, which is why I closed my eyes and shuddered in horror when my dad emerged from the basement of my childhood home with a recently unearthed carton of tapes and CDs. The CDs were just irritating—physical objects that I can’t quit bring myself to toss in the trash but don’t want to carry back to my house. The dubs of my own LPs and—from a later tectonic layer—my friends’ CDs were mostly just an amusing trip through my musical adolescence. But the mixtapes… I couldn’t even touch the mixtapes. From boyfriends, mostly. Some were mildly unwelcome reminders of dumb youth. Some were too much—just lifting them out of the box would have been like picking up a pebble on Jupiter. I couldn’t do it.

“I can’t deal with this right stuff now, dad. Can we just put it back in the basement?”

Clearing my crap out of his basement is one of my dad’s primary goals in life. I don’t know what he heard in my voice or saw in my face, but my dad put the box back in the basement.

III.

Adulthood can feel like a seemingly endless period of a lot of the same. This changed when I had a kid. Time sped up all of the sudden. Time got heavier. I don’t know what nursing a baby in the middle of the night is like for most women, but I found that it gave me plenty of opportunity to think about mortality. My own. My daughter’s. Everybody’s. It’s dark in the middle of the night, and lonely. In the daytime, I look—really look, for the first time in a long time—and discover that my parents are old, my friends are old, I’m old. I have no idea when this happened.

Going back home changed, too. Home became history. My daughter is creating a new present there, but when I venture beyond my parents’ yard—when I drive down a street I used to bike down, when I go right past a house that, once upon a time, was my favorite destination in the world—I am struck by the horrible irretrievability of my own past.

I am not surprised to discover that going home to wait for my grandmother to die intensifies my sense of history. I take a walk around the block with my daughter and every step weighs a thousand pounds. What is surprising is the occasional burst of lightness. My grandma’s last hurrah is a reminder to live a life worth revisiting.

But still, it’s so strange—so hard to believe—that we only get to do this once.

Life, I mean.

My grandmother, Vera Marie Jernigan, died in December of 2011. I wrote this at the time.