last rites

tomorrow night they're performing the Annointing of the Sick, one of the seven catholic sacraments, on my grandma. it used to be known by a much longer name: Last Rites of Extreme Unction. sounds nasty, but it's just a way to say a spiritual farewell. it's something that is done not just for the old, either, but for the very ill, both mentally and physically.

in grandma's case, time has crept into her body.

i was telling dan today in email about how it felt like suddenly my dad's side of the family was going to be rudderless--the matriarch, soon gone. saturating all my memories of grandma is that smell, her parfum of choice. it's going to drift off into the air, smudged free of its rootless bonds.

and yet i think of a family tree--the lines remain, even if the person is no longer there.

i'm tired of this waiting line in which i have queued my life. wait for a job. wait until i feel ready to move. wait until i feel ready to marry. wait, wait, wait. i waited to get to know my own grandparents, waited to open myself up to them, until it was far, far too late. i honestly can say that by the time i was ready to know my grandmothers, by the time their wisdom and tales became something for which i could no longer wait, they were done waiting for me.

am i just waiting to be annointed one last time?

i will stand in a room tomorrow and say good bye again to my grandmother, before she "gives herself permission to die," as my uncle put it. the last time i remember actually visiting with the woman i consider my grandmother--feisty, whiskey-drinking, opinionated--was more than 10 years ago, when my family lived in hermantown. ten years later, she is a woman whose acquaintance i make anew every time we meet.

tomorrow i'll meet her again. i'll be another person in the room, another body praying, another spirit wishing hers well on its journey.

this has been a difficult year for my dad's family. my uncle, jed, is still in rehab for a massive stroke. no one knows what the outcome of that will be. he's got a strong spirit, a positive outlook despite all that life has dealt him. he will not be able to come back from the west coast and say good bye to his mother--i remember when he was back last summer, he hugged us before he left. it almost felt as if i said good bye to him then, too.

i feel as though i am waiting for the phone to ring, and tell me she is gone. i don't want to hear that. i don't want to see it in an email. i'm waiting in a line in which i never want to wait.

all of my body is tense--my neck and shoulders are the worst. my eyes feel as though they are waiting, too, for the tears to come free. i feel like i don't want to cry too much, and i feel like i'm going to cry a lot.

i crave dan right now, crave being held, the touch of another person's flesh on mine. it reassures me that i am here, now. that i can still care--that i don't have to give in to my overwhelming desire to fall into apathy. i can feel myself trying hard to push the emotions away, when in reality i should be working through them--finding ways to understand and comprehend them.

i find myself tallying up the number of things that have gone on this year, find myself numbering and listing. this mental list is all made up of bodies--my uncle, made physically infirm. losing serena. finding dan, whose body is as familiar to me as mine, but whose soul i had to locate among the midden of our long relationship. my father's surgery, cleaning out the detrius of my grandparents' house, the frayed edges of my own unknown body finally pointed out by doctors. and now my grandma, who is ready to leave this adam-and-eve house.

how dear others' bodies are to us, how dear their spirit. my grandma margaret always smells elegant and lovely, elizabeth claiborne's red door perfume. on grandma's skin it becomes something ephemeral.

i think of this in terms of the blessed oil that will be dipped onto her head tomorrow by a stranger's fingers. i think of my grandmother, turning the bottle of champagne-colored water on her wrist, rubbing parchment thin skin together, dabbing it onto her slender neck.

all these memories coalesce like dusk. just as she annointed herself for years with that perfume, so i annoint myself and bless myself with memory.