A Warming Stillness

  
They posed for pictures grins wide and kisses puckered with their dying grandmother who looked in her nineties but was in her sixties. The cancer wilted her hair and sunk her skin. The drugs killed the little sanity that remained after the stroke. Grandma was as unresponsive as the static photo. I stood aside preferring a quiet moment away from flashing lights and captured death.

I just held her hand. It was all I knew or could muster. I didn't really know her even though we lived less than a hundred miles apart. I sat there feeling her soft loose skin warming with each passing moment tuning out the conversations about haring San Francisco and football games behind me. This was my quiet moment with my aunt before she passed.

She snapped awake and pulled her hand out of mine. A flash of confusion turned to clarity which brought a deeper sleep. I kissed her forehead and we left.

She left the hospital the next day and returned home. She died about two hours later. I don't have a photo to remember her. I have my memory and that moment of warming stillness, and it makes my own mortality a little less scary.

My Dad's Tears

    
His temper exploded and threw me against the wall. I was pinned there staring into his red ready-to-burst-with-tears eyes. He wasn't himself any longer, but he looked like my dad. I hated him not for the explosion but because I still felt small and childish. I was small and childish.

He let go and turned away embarrassed by the outburst and anger. He promised himself no more, but biology and upbringing got in the way sometimes. I cried partly because I was scared and partly because guilt was stronger than anger. A couple seconds of violently kinetic silence, and we returned to our supper. The meal passed and so did the silence.

He cam to me crying one night, or I found him upstairs crying. He had spoken to his mother, and she revealed the true nature of his conception: to keep his alcoholic father around. He looked just like I had, and I hated him then too because it was easier than empathy. He was a small child.

He visited California because his sister was sick and dying. My husband and I took the train to San Jose to meet him for the afternoon. We exchanged hugs, and I saw those same tears behind those same brown eyes. We both stayed silent, but this time it was the silence of empathy and understanding -- the kind of silence that is needed in times of death and decay by are rarely given. Then, we ate lunch, visited my aunt, and watched a crappy movie. He dropped us at the train station amidst more silence and contemplation.

"I love you, Jason," he said as I exited. I've heard those words many times before, but this time I understood them.

I love you too, dad.

Dia de los Muertos

 
I haven't really lost anyone. There was my grandmother. She passed a couple of years ago. She was in her 80s and still full of life when she died. Or at least that's how I remember her.

We were close; she helped raise me as grandmas do. It is from her phone I dialed 976 numbers when I visited after work. We worked at the same retreat center. It was a short walk from her senior housing apartment complex to the center. I was the dishwasher, and she was the cook.

She was the one that got me the job that eventually led to me borrowing (or was it stealing) a Total Recall VHS tape. I got to watch it just once before my dad took it from me. I was in the eighth grade and not allowed to watch R movies, especially ones that showed boobs. He threatened to throw it away. He didn't. I found it in his underwear drawer next to the condoms.

My grandma and I grew distant when I moved to San Francisco. We weren't the best conversationalists over the phone, and I rarely returned to Minnesota. She visited California twice. We both still loved each other dearly. It just happened to be the quiet and rarely spoken kind.

The funeral was the first time the entire (or almost entire) family came together. It was good to see everyone and awkward. Besides blood and blue collars, there isn't and wasn't too much that holds or held us all together except empty promises to call. As in life, it was grandma that connected us. Such are mothers, regardless of gender.

I miss her. I miss her stories most of all: the ones about dancing in spite of Depression, how I looked like my grandfather who died when I was three, her unquestioning faith in God. She was life-blood to history.

It is because of her I tell stories. I want to keep my history alive.