Run Along Now
On lullabies and saying goodbye
She knows it’s coming, and it seems she wants it to. She is frail now, vulnerable to a light wind. An economic stretch of skin covers what’s left, mostly bones.
My grandmother is but an apparition now, except for her hands. They are the same hands I’ve always held — braided engagement ring purchased 60 years prior and now too loose, risen veins branching up to her fingertips, same orange-clay manicure, the perpetual elegance of fall. They are cold to the touch.
An unspoken rule permeates that day: she can do and have whatever the hell she wants. Today, it’s cigarettes and donuts. After decades of wanting her to consider vegetables and a nicotine patch, cigarettes and donuts it is — a last supper of champions. Pall Mall cigarettes, purchased in bulk from Costco and hidden in her jewelry drawer. So she begins her regal, intermittent cigarette puffs, the familiar motion of extending and bending her right arm the source of pleasure rather than any nicotine buzz dulled by 70 years of using. And she nibbles on a powdered Safeway donut with less precision, flakes of sugar now wedged between her creviced wrinkles.
The idea, I know, is to make her as comfortable as possible in the last moments. Yet I can’t help but think the niceties are really for us: playing IZ’s “What a Wonderful World” to send us to a land of Hawaiian luaus where she was once her most vibrant, surrounded by her husband and their children and their children’s children. “Silent Night” to remind us of every Christmas Eve at St. Luke’s and to prepare us for the empty pew seat to soon come.
I stroke my finger across her forehead and back again in the rhythm of slow waves, softly singing the lullaby she used to tuck me in with, my fingers bringing back a memorized feeling of her shriveled fingertips gliding across my youthful skin. Her lips curl upwards in a soft and knowing smile, but still, I know this gesture is for my comfort, too.
Run along now and hop into bed,
Say your prayers and cover your head.
Stars up above watch over you
And send sweet dreams from heaven to you.
Night Night.
“She’s at peace now,” the doctor announces when she arrives 30 minutes later. And yes, she needs to pronounce her dead. Not just for official paperwork, but for us, too. You’d think it’d be obvious, but I’d sworn she was just sleeping.
The mortuary movers come after what seems like hours of an all too empty house. U-Haul, I joke. No one seems to like that one.
Two lanky men come into her room, dressed in generic beige uniforms. Only I stay to watch; she wouldn’t like being alone with strangers. Her braided engagement ring slips off easily, and I unclip her delicate, leather analog watch from her well-manicured hand. That’s it for accessories. They adorn her one back: an ID bracelet with a barcode. A barcode? How lifeless, inanimate. A bit on the nose, I think.
The men lift her onto a stretcher. Not one of those yellow, industrial ones EMTs bring in movies. Just a canvas sheet tautened with metal poles and shopping bag handles at the sides. They cover her body in a baby pink blanket, much like the type used in hospital nurseries. It’s the blanket that gets me. The damned blanket. Seeing it cover her head, contouring her unmoving face, is the deadest part of this death. She is not asleep.
It’s awkward to maneuver the faux-stretcher down one flight of stairs and then another out to a dark tan, dented minivan. I watch from the window as they drive off, imagining her 80 pound body sliding back and forth as the van crawls up steep San Francisco streets. It must bump the trunk on uphills and the driver’s seat on the coming downhills, a teeter-totter rhythm through the city, with a barcode wrapped around her ever-cooling wrist.
The U-Haul comment wasn’t so far off. Quite transactional.
With “Jeopardy!” on commercial, my grandmother takes a Pall Mall break by the newspaper-fueled fireplace. She must’ve snagged my eccentric aunt’s groovy sunglasses on her way over, because by the time she sits down she looks like a 1920s movie star. I take a photo with my iPhone knowing I want this moment of glam and sass and funk forever.
I spend the next several weeks enlarging the iPhone photo onto a 3-foot tall canvas. Her hands are the hardest part for I know them too well, any acrylic stroke obscuring their poise and light touch immediately reflected back to me as wrong, as untrue. Assiduous, though this snapshot deserves to take up space; it’s worthy of being attended to one painstaking brushstroke at a time.
Why would you watch them die? my older brother asked me. When our grandmother passed, I stayed in her room for hours, witnessed the doctor pronounce her dead, called the mortuary, observed the lanky men drape her in a nursery blanket, notified relatives. My older brother played golf with buddies.
When we put our dog down last week, I hand-fed her treats (bacon bits and carrots now instead of cigarettes and donuts) to distract her from the vet’s injections. I observed her eyes become droopy, offered my hand out for her to smell when her head jerked in confusion, sang her Run along now. Draped her in a paw-print blanket — the damned blanket again — that covered her unmoving head and thus pronounced her not-just-asleep. Carried her to the vet’s car in a canvas stretcher. My brother watched ESPN in the garage.
I do not think myself superior to my brother for attending to death as I did, yet he was a necessary foil in understanding my own mindfulness around death. I didn’t have to let myself see every detail, yet some instinct drove — drives — me to stay.
A part of me — an emotional part — thinks that the closer I feel to the moment of death, to the moment of transition, the closer I can be to the soon deceased and the closer they’ll feel to me. That to share in one’s last moments is an intimate act, a gesture that always remains constant and untainted. To share that moment is to know my muse, to know her life at its fullest capacity. She’s been at the sidelines for every life event of mine, and now I’m at hers, with nothing to do but observe and inspirit.
An analytical part of me recognizes my position as family caretaker, my presence one of comfort for them, so as to make staying through every step the most sensible duty. A self-established role of holding a cold hand, a twitching paw, until the heart stops. Always confirmed with a stethoscope, or a blanket covering the unmoving face. Not-just-asleep.
Another motivator to stay, to watch, I’d define as particularly female — the draw to witness the end of what I’ll begin. If I can start a life, it seems I should understand the nature of its ending. My mind requires that I experience the end so fully such that I can experience new beginnings as fully. I’ve always thought in extremes like that: the pendulum swing is necessary, or so I tell myself. Here’s the catch: you must see the actual swing of the pendulum, its journey from one point to another.
If you see a house’s blueprint as your only intermediary step before seeing the house in its final stage, ready for market, you only have access to those two extremes, the before and the after, with no connection to its in-between. With only access to extremes, it’s inconceivable to understand the before and the after as one entity, their connections to one another made invisible by the absence of any transitory stage. If you witnessed every beam go up, however, and watched the concrete being poured, it’s easier to make sense of its holistic completion; you were present for its development to this final stage so the completion is not so sudden, not so shocking.
By witnessing the moments of transition before the end — by observing with deliberation — I see an orange-clay manicure on hands with risen veins as a reminder of shriveled fingers wishing me goodnight rather than the ever-cooling hands of death, the infancy of a draped blanket a sign of transition rather than one of ending.
Messages and flowers and Edible Arrangements arrive at the doorstep. Until they don’t anymore, whether for your grandmother, dog, son, brother. The prayers from strangers who see the newspaper articles scatter.
And they seem farther and farther away from us each day. But that’s just as well. They never belonged to us, after all.
