I learned this watching my grandmother after her second stroke. The healthy woman I had dinner with a few weeks before was now on her back, in a hospital bed. And it bobbed like a boat.
In the movies there is drama. Even in books, there is drama. Last words. Fingers outstretched towards the sun. Not going gentle into the night. And so I thought she would be able to speak until the end. Instead she just slipped away, getting weaker and weaker until she lay there breathing, dehydrated, weak.
I slept in her bed. She was next to me, in a borrowed hospital bed that smelled like cigarettes. And my uncles dog slept beside me and we stayed watch during her final night. Neil Diamond played in the background.
I like to think she knew we were there, watching over her in the dark. But that isn’t likely. And so when she died I didn’t cry, because my grief was already soaked and rung out.
The most I cried was in the ambulance.
The vastness of her life. Of Greece and America and rules broken and children raised and husbands lost. The sadness of being there in an ambulance taking her home to die. The enormity of my own mortality. That I will one day be in her position. That one day I will join her in the void.
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