Olivia Bennett
“I wish you’d walk in again, imagine if you just did.”
My grandmother died on a cold day in March. I remember because I had to bundle up on the long walk across the hospital parking lot. The buzzing bulbs overhead created islands of light in the concrete sea, littered with cars. Inside: a small hospital room, crowded with people, flooded with warm evening light. Every so often, a nurse would come in and rub vaseline on her cracked lips, gaping open towards the sky. “So her lips don’t dry out,” she said. Does it matter? I thought.
I spent the day down there, in Champaign, Illinois, because my father had called me that morning, explaining the situation. A subsequent text from my mother said that this might very well be the last time I would ever see my grandma Bev. At first, I didn’t believe her because Grandma Bev had had health scares like this before. She’d been in and out of the hospital, floating between the plane of the living and the dead for years now. I imagine it was a line she was familiar with. I always had this thought that she’d be the first to go. It’s an awful thought and I never told anybody, but if you think about it, it makes sense.
The sun went to bed early that day. We all went out to eat at a nearby Cracker Barrel and pretended like things were normal for a few hours. I don’t remember eating, just talking and drinking raspberry iced tea. Then, it was back to the hospital room that felt too small to contain the impending grief, with its soft edges and muted colors, as if that could dull the intensity. No, I think that only makes it more profound. When there’s nothing else but white walls and baby blue blankets and beige, vinyl-coated chairs, you feel trapped in the oversaturated, loud colors of pain. The blackest black, an incomprehensible red rage, greens and oranges of conflicting emotions, all swirling together to make a garish landscape I can’t make sense of.
“But I like to think you hear me, sometimes.”
We all got to have our last words with her. I was last, because I wanted to be left alone. I don’t know why. My mother and my father, even his wife of fifty-plus years, my grandpa, had the courage to allow their last words with my grandma Bev to be public, shared with the rest of the family. But for some reason, I didn’t want anyone to hear. Maybe I felt embarrassed because I didn’t know what I was going to say until I said it.
I firmly believe that people in comas are still aware of what’s going on around them, to a certain extent. I don’t have any scientific or personal knowledge to back this up, but it just seems like that’s how I’d want people to treat me if I was in a state like that. Like I was still a person.
I remember saying a lot of things, but also a whole lot of nothing. Nothing I said would have been able to change what was going on. Was this just for me? Did she care what I was going to say? What would she have said to me, if she could?
And then it hit me: I couldn’t remember the last thing she had said to me. The last time I had seen my grandma Bev was when we came down for our annual Christmas/New Year’s visit. She was okay, then. At the house, still able to walk around a little bit. I remember things from that day: walking to the nearby lake with Welby, my brother, and my cousin. Throwing rocks and sticks into the ice, rocking the small wooden dock with our weight. But I don’t remember what Grandma Bev’s last words to me were. Not that either of us knew that they would be the last, but still. I’m angry that I can’t remember.
“You still had your nails red.”
I’ve never cried in a hospital. Not when my friend Dallas was in for Crohn’s disease, not when my grandpa got in a car accident, not when I was in fifth grade and had to go in because I had strep throat so bad, my fever climbed to 104. I don’t know why, I just can’t seem to cry in there. It feels wrong.
Maybe it’s because I’ve never been in for anything that bad. And when the people close to me were, I wasn’t there for it. I mean I was, but I was relegated to the sidelines, always sheltered from the truth. But each time I have had to walk into a hospital, I have felt far enough removed from whatever was going on that I had to be the strong one. I was able to hold it together, because my dad shouldn’t have to hold it together when his mother is dying. Dallas’s mother shouldn’t have to hold it together when her son is in the hospital. My grandma Jo shouldn’t have to hold it together when her husband gets in a car accident. So, I was always okay. Just okay. Never enough of a mess in the moment to warrant any tears. I knew the emotions and the pain and the grief would come later, but they weren’t big enough that I couldn’t put them on pause the moment I stepped through those automatic, sliding doors.
So, that’s what I do. I hold it together, for my brother, ever the sensitive soul. I hold it together for my dad, for my grandpa, talk about my life and what I’m up to and happy memories. I hold it together for Dallas, who is going through so much more pain than I could ever understand. My pain can come later, and it certainly does.
“Always trying to keep warm when you’re the sun.”
That night, I left the hospital and Champaign, mostly because I wanted to sleep in my own bed after all that, and I had to work in the morning. In the dark, I drove home, head lights piercing through the evening navy darkness. I listened to Nana by The 1975 on repeat, and finally, the tears came. She wasn’t dead yet, but for some reason, I just knew. It wasn’t any sort of spiritual premonition or anything like that. I just knew that was it. There didn’t seem to be any other options. The streams of time had converged, and soon, in the early hours of the morning, my grandma Bev’s river would flow into the sea, emptying a lifetime of memories and experiences into the deep.
I cried once more at the funeral, but mostly because it was so goddamn sad. Touching and simple, it was a gathering of figures familiar and strange all clad in black. Nothing out of the ordinary. It felt safer to cry there, I think, because the sky that evening was so beautiful, a hazy smear of lavender, pink, and orange. Two weeks after her death and it was spring, and the roses were beginning to unfurl. The first daffodils bloomed beneath red-budded trees. The grass in the graveyard was green, and so long it tickled my bare ankles. The country road near the funeral site stretched on forever in either direction.
“I got my pen and thought that I’d write a melody line for you tonight. I think that’s how I make
things feel alright.”
It wasn’t until months later that I truly cried, truly grieved over the passing of my grandma Bev. It was a regular day, filled with regular things and regular problems and regular stressors. I put on some sad music, locked myself in my room, and journaled away my problems, unwilling to leave until I felt better. As Saturn by Sleeping At Last played, all the energy sapped from my body and I gave in. Kneeling at the foot of my bed, tissues clutched in hand, I realized I wasn’t crying about the pressures of school or the stupid squabble I had with Welby earlier or even the tumultuous relationship with my parents. I cried for her. Buried beneath all that was the grief, and how deeply sad I was. It colored all the layers above with a dusty blue that I sunk into, leaning into the indescribable experience of loss, an amorphous, looming being that we only touch briefly, for moments in time.
Finally, I felt removed enough from it, and felt safe enough to let the grief move through me like water, a river flowing from my eyes, down my cheeks, and onto the sheets my friend Charlotte had so kindly tie-dyed for our new home. Grieving in those public spaces, so immediately after it happened, didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel like it really solved anything within myself. But that evening as I cried—alone with myself, I was able to see my own grief more clearly. I understood more truly how I felt about my grandma Bev. I was able to sit with the regret that comes in so swiftly with grief, something I was unable to face head-on in the aftermath. It didn’t matter how I felt about Grandma Bev anymore, because she was dead. It was over for her. It didn’t matter, the ways she had hurt me, or my father or my aunt, or anyone really. It was still a life lost, so rich with years and experience and people that I had never known. Her life was an entire world, an entire universe, a criss-crossing of other people and their lives and their worlds, all bumping into each other. A tapestry of sorts, one we weave collectively with others, as we move through our lives like ships passing in the night, creating a fabric that’s never truly completed until we fall into the deep, as it softly embraces each andevery one of us.
“How rare and beautiful it truly is that we exist.”