colors

yesterday was a gray sky day--cloudy and overcast. that always changes the colors of the world--the lighting, i mean. if it's sunny, the grass is a brilliant green and the sky, a bottomless blue.

on overcast days, it seems as if everything takes on a layer of fog, mutes the bright hues.

the annointing was moved to saturday at 1130, as the priest had prior engagements on friday evening. dan and i met my parents for breakfast a few blocks from the homes in which grandma presently resides. sara and her husband, brett, met us there as well. and for any of you out there who are familiar with my late habits, i got there before my sister. (;

the perkins was the same perkins where, when i was about 10 or so, we had breakfast...and came out to our suburban and found that everything in it had been stolen. at the time we lived 8 hours away from the Cities, and we'd stayed for a week at my aunt's house. with four kids and holiday pictures looming, mom had packed everything--all our good clothes, etc. all the luggage was gone, with the exception of a blue hardcase of our play dolls. the area behind the restaurant used to be a junkyard of some kind. now it's an industrial park, complete with parking lots and brick buildings. i remember dad wanted to walk through the junkyard, to see if he could see anyone or any thing, and mom didn't want him to go through it. she kept saying that it was something the police would handle.

the kids--my siblings and cousins, all under the age of 10--were convinced that the brightly colored birthday clown inside the restaurant had been in on the luggage-napping.

after breakfast, always fun with my family, we drove over to presbyterian homes, where grandma is staying until she passes. no one has any idea of when that might be. her lungs are clearer now, but they can't reinsert the IV because whenever they do, her lungs fill up. she's on morphine for pain, another drug to calm her, and another drug to help dry up the fluid left over. when she breathes, she sounds like an old coffee percolater--gurgling, rasping, wheezing. she's too weak to cough at all.

her skin, which two or three weeks ago was pale but rosy, has morphed to that pallor that people get when they're at That Point before Death--fleshy yellow, nearly jaundiced, stretched thin across her poor head. she just grew most of her hair back, and it's thick, dark gray and white curls topping her head, her last bodily luxury.

we took turns at first rubbing her arms--she does not like to have her legs or feet touched, which is a pity because her feet and calves are so dry. i can't imagine she's aware of this; her internal agonies have got to override the rest of the external distress, and i'm sure the morphine takes the edge off of dry skin. i talked to her nurse, mohammed, and he found some unscented lotion that i was able to massage into her right arm--that's the one without the fifteen medical bracelets--and both hands. her skin is like frail parchment, the epidermis so thinned that it's like looking into the ocean with jacques cousteau--clear, you can see sand and fish darting and orange anemones, opening and closing, beneath the surface.

but it was painful to watch her, agitated and trying to talk, mouth moving like a baby bird, grasping at air and words. her apnea has gotten worse; she stops breathing sometimes for more than 22 seconds at a time, but her clinging spirit nags lungs into action.

she kept trying to put her feet on the floor. mostly, she'd get her heels to the edge and then her legs would just slide off the bed.

simultaneous to watching my grandmother suffer is the more active suffering of my father and his brothers. it's watching them suffer her pain that hurts me ever so much more than my grandmother's pain.

there are so many things that run through your head, seeing this all happening. i think of coming into the house in winter, shutting the door behind you, being enveloped in the warmth of the house. you shut the door to keep the cold at bay. i think of death in the same way--you're slipping into the Whatever that happens after your spirit leaves, and you hurry into the heat of Beyond, shutting the door behind you.

that is a quick death--that is a hurried, unknown death.

my grandmother's death is a slow death. unhurried. it reminds me of being warm in summer, the heat clinging to your skin. the slow settle of dusk outside, and then the windows dropping, slowly, slowly, in autumn, until your house is warm for gusty snow.

your spirit is still sneaking away. it's still closing the door on this life, and scurrying into the next. but this death, it's leisurely. it allows you to say goodbye--sometimes on numerous occasions. it's the minnesota good-bye of dying.

the spirit lingers. grandma is trying to go somewhere, with her feeble legs. she's trying to get up and leave. it feels like she has to realize somewhere in her head that she needs to leave her body behind. that after eighty-some years of being constricted to moving in a heavy coat of bone and blood, she's going to get up and walk into the house, and shut the windows, in time for winter.

***

i think too of the tarot card for death. about how you explain it not by saying that physical death is imminent, but that it is a change.

death is not the end of being. it's not the end of existence, not to my mind. the spirit weighs something; your body is lighter when the colors have deserted the shell. where does that invisible soul go? it has to find somewhere. it's displacement--you get in the tub and the water spills over the sides.

it's change for my grandmother--she's not going to wink at me any more, or ask for another glass of watery black label whiskey. she's moving out and moving on. she's changing the nature of her relationship with the planet.

the change is for us, as well. the chapter in which we can have question and answer sessions with her is ending. the next chapter is a mystery to me; her path leads off into the woods. in anne of green gables, the chapter in which anne's foster father dies is called "the bend in the road." you can't see around that corner; it's a blind spot until you reach it yourself.

i was doing okay yesterday. through the service, mumbling the Our Father. family gathered, piled on top of one another in the small room. even while i rubbed white lotion into her skin, i did not weep. a few tears crept in, but that was at the end of the service, when i came to the realization that the priest was putting as much feeling as he could into the service, but for him, the book has been read many times; he is familiar with this chapter, as familiar as i am to putting on a jacket or washing my hair. it's rote. he wasn't inhuman, he was just doing the service as required.

i have a hard time crying or showing emotion in front of other people, even people i hold as dear as my friends and family. at home with dan i just sobbed. i don't want to lose my parents some day. i don't want to see them, colorless on the palette of death. i want to understand why we're put here, if it's just to die eventually.

i know that my grandma's life had meaning; if the only meaning that exists in it was raising my father, that is enough for me. i know for my parents the greatest meaning they can have is in raising their own children.

the thought of being this side of soil without my parents is just plain painful, even if i am not yet experiencing it.

we sat up talking for a while, until i wasn't incoherent anymore. dan said that you'd think after being here for as long as humans have, we'd have figured it all out--life, death, the time between, the destination after life. humanity figured out a gasoline powered automobile, we've conceived of and achieved flight, skipped on the moon and found it inedible puce rock--but we haven't quite got this life-business all figured out. do we die just because that's the way nature is? are we recycled, like my empty plastic milk jug, or my sister's compost pile?

yesterday, he was wearing an old white t-shirt as an undershirt, frayed and rubbed thin in dime-size holes. it's been washed so many times that the colors are not their vibrant store-bought brilliance any more, but i remember when it was new.

the advertising on the shirt is from an old television commercial, in which a Barbie doll ditches her molded boyfriend, Ken, to run off with a GI Joe figure; the three characters are on the back of the shirt. On the front of the shirt, up on the left where perhaps Hanes would apply a pocket, is a little logo. Barbie and GI Joe are in some kind of red convertible, and below them is a little saying that was just too close to the truth of yesterday:

Life is a journey.
Enjoy the ride.

that is all there is to it. at least, that's my truth for today.