Angel of Death
First it took Harriet. She prayed it would, not Grandma down the hall of their care home. Met her when Grandma moved in, a lively, mixed up lady whose hands shook harder every time I visited. Her voice quivered. Strapped to a walker, her portable phone sat in a little metal caddy on the handle. Once she asked me to fix her computer so she could send a blinky green message to her granddaughter.
“I don’t know DOS,” I told her, punching whatever buttons she said.
“C-colon. Uh, E-X-E. Slash — this one.” Her finger shook the key three times. “Twice. And… oh, I don’t know.” She fussed for a paper beside the screen.
I put my hand on her back. “I’m sorry, Harriett.” And left the room.
We were best friends, Grandma and I. Grew up together. Each other’s fountain of youth, neither of us aged long as we stayed close. That ended April, 2006. She died four years later.
# # #
I left her for the hometown she never knew. Alta Villa Milicia. Her parents left Sicily in the 1880s, her father a shoemaker, her mother his wife. They had six kids. Grandma wasn’t the youngest, but she outlived them all.
That’s a lie. I didn’t leave her for her hometown. I left to live. I left all but my wife and a few friends to move on. To grow. To fail. To fly. Sent her a postcard from every city along the way — London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Munich, Prague, Paris, Madrid, Marrakech, Barcelona, Florence, Rome, Palermo, Venice, Brussels, and Brighton. We traveled the world in eighty days, missing trains, nights on the streets, no place to sleep but at fountains, roadside fields and farms where we didn’t speak the language, as Grandma withered away without me.
Before we left, she made the case for Arizona every time I came over. “Can’t beat the sun,” she’d say. “In Ambridge, it was always rain. Rain, rain, rain. No sun. No, you can’t beat this,” she’d tell me, pulling back the drapes at her breakfast table to watch quail dance in the water I filled, rabbits nibbling carrots she cut for me to throw beneath the orange tree.
When Nicole and I got back from Europe, we moved. Found a place in New York City, then flew home for goodbyes and a Penske truck. All we owned spread across the Valley, we needed a week to pull it together. Grandma knew what was happening. It was anticlimactic.
That month Dad arranged for a woman to watch her three days a week, stay with her and clean, cook, make sure she was safe. She’d fallen over a dozen times in a year, gotten lucky all but once. It looked bad, fire department rolling up every couple weeks. The beeper Dad made her wear worked well. Got her in trouble and she hated it, along with Aurica, her caretaker. Grandma followed her around the house calling her names, throwing her food away, moving things back the way she had them in the closet.
Aurica quit three months later, and Dad sent Mom to spend Christmas with us in Brooklyn while he moved Grandma into a care home in Surprise.
“Know why they call it Surprise?” She’d ask me every time we passed through town on our way to meatloaf, fried okra and enchiladas at Picadilly’s lunch buffet when I was a kid.
“No. Why?”
“Because you’re driving and driving, then SURPRISE!” She tickled me in the backseat. “You’re in Surprise!” She rode back there with me while Grandpa drove ’til I was big enough to ride up front. Two times a widow, he was her second husband. Died before she did. That’s when I swore to see her twice a week, a promise I kept ’til we left.
# # #
Grandma always gave me money. I still have the last check she wrote. Fifty dollars. Never cashed it. I remember getting her purse from the dresser drawer in her new bedroom. She hadn’t been outside in months, tucked away in a home that wasn’t hers in a neighborhood like any other. Meridian. That was the name of the place, owned and operated by her Romanian caregivers, George and Mariana.
“Marijuana?” Grandma’s face wrinkled a confused smile. “That’s a funny name.”
Three years in hospice with congestive heart failure and DNR in her will, she didn’t wanna be saved. But they loved her. Pumped her lungs, turned her, fed her, bathed her, dyed her hair like she liked, painted her nails like she never did. As the oldest resident, she ran the place. Younger ladies came and went. Harriett, Joyce, Maricella, Virginia, the house held four, then five, now six. They’re all dead. All the originals, the class of ’07. All but Ernestine. Between her wheelchair and recliner, she’s too feisty to die, handshakes gnarled knots of silk-stuffed satin softer than I’ve ever felt.
I take that back. She’s probably dead, too. Grandma is, and I haven’t been back since. All the money she gave me, I visited four times a year, five or six days a stretch before she died. That’s how I met Harriett, and heard this story.
Grandma spent Saturday in a fever. Diarrhea, phlegm, vomit, then slept through Sunday. She was ninety-six years old, out for a day and a half. Thirty-six hours straight, barely breathing. Unconscious. Drowning.
Harriett couldn’t eat. She worshipped Grandma. They all did, a mirror of their lives to come, unable to swallow solid food or sit at the table because she drooled, spoke too loud, and you couldn’t understand her. But Harriett was a believer. She prayed for Grandma, cried and cried, and two days later, she died. What haunted their home that week went instead for the willing woman down the hall, and I saw Grandma one more time.
# # #
“Get my bags,” she’d say toward the end, whenever I visited. “He’s waiting.”
“Who?”
“The little boy.” Her body strained to rise, but couldn’t shift the sheets. “Right there.” She looked through me, raising her finger for the door. “I hear the train.”
She waited years for it to finally come, memories of daylong pasta sauce wafting down the block, love in every layer of lasagna, heavenly mashed potato clouds melting on my tongue, anise cookies rolled into roses, frozen butter tubs of chicken noodle soup, Saltines dipped in milk for a bedtime snack, “resting our eyes” together after washing the car. A Chrysler New Yorker. All gone. Skin and bones in bed, I asked her to rest when she recognized me. Take the train. I’ll see you soon. Looked like she was already gone, and a few days later she was.
# # #
A week ago it came for the lady downstairs from us in Brooklyn. I used to carry her groceries and laundry for her when I had free hands. She could barely make it up. Two flights took her half an hour. Now she’ll never come back down.
Leave that to me. Missed a couple stairs with a belly full of wine, tumbled and broke my finger on her door last night, twisted on a welcome mat put out after she died. Shaking it off, I staggered to the street to find a shrine of candles and garland next to the oil-drum grill the big Jamaican guy with bad knees cooked jerk chicken on in the summer. Spiced smoke filled the streets every sweaty afternoon thanks to him. I always wanted to try it, but never did.
Whether it was my finger, purple in my pocket, Grandma, or the fact I’ll never taste his jerk, I wept my way to the liquor store for the whiskey that’ll one day kill me, weeping my own drunken prayer that happens before the chicken man’s smoke signals summon death and regret any closer to home.
Phoenix, New York, back and forth, Grandma saw it coming, a train rusted to the tracks at the station. Only death’s got wings, circling neighbors, friends, mothers and fathers the same age as mine. And without Harriett to pray for us all, it’s only a matter of time.
