Uncontrollable Goodbyes

The lights inconsistently flashed, paining my eyes as they stared out the foggy glass. Two hours in the car with an emotional barrier between us all, the pressure started getting to me. My forehead bled for the coolness of the window to sooth the burning I felt in my stomach overflowing into my throat. It started tightening when
I thought of her form unmoving on the hospital bed: limbs stilled, heart rate slowing, breathing faint. If only the car could go faster.

At the same time, I (with all my will) wanted to escape, run to a warm bed to be comforted, knowing though that the stiff, chill wind would hunt me down. My mother was quietly weeping in front of me. I wanted to turn from the heartbreak.

Hope hurt even more. I wanted desperately to think that she would make it through and live for another twenty years. That she would see another Christmas, another grandchild, another summer. But my logicality knew better. Eighty. Lung cancer. Pneumonia. These words kept revolving like a merry-go-round in my head. Like my Dad when it was time to go, death was ready to end the ride.

Through all the sadness, despair, and premonitions, I felt a strange exhilaration. Thinking of the strangeness of hospital rooms, and the clean smelling hallways. The thought of that time when grandma helped me and my sister rake the leaves in the chilly, face-burning fall. These hand-in-hand inspired a strange calmness, a bubble of solitude. Near excitement.

That bubble ripped and turned into falling dust as soon as my Mom’s cell phone rang.

Five minutes away: “Sis, I’m sorry, you’re too late. She’s already passed.”

The hallways didn’t smell clean, but rather like putrid bleach. The rooms weren’t exciting, but dull and dead. Just like that body that lay where my Grandma took her final breath. Where Grandma’s soul left her body to meet her Saviour.

I couldn’t cry. It felt like I was dreaming. I was dreaming. This was a nightmare from which my Mom would wake me up; we would travel to Grandma’s warm home. She would sit us down with the feast she would always make (according to the unspoken rules of Southern comfort); no matter how much my Mom would argue. She would think of us as we were, kids running around the yard ten years ago. She would love us when we were unlovable; encourage us when we were discouraged.

It wasn’t till I sat in a room full of strangers and people I recognized but didn’t know; when my Dad started crying when he explained the first time he met Her; my Mom when she talked of her childhood; when I realized that not again in this world could I sit with her and dwell on her every word; when I thought of all the times I was a disappointment and she cherished me still; when I thought of all the times that I was too busy to talk to her, talk about her life, her feelings; then, I started to weep.

When they lowered her casket into the dirtiness of her grave; the clean perfect casket into the mud, I could almost scream for them to stop. So that I could breath magical breath into her nostrils and she would rise like a Lazarus. But I would have to be God. And He wasn’t going to raise her, at least for now.
I sat in my room again, hugging a pillow that wasn’t a replacement for Her fragile self, and hid from all the “Don’t worry, everything will be ok”s, and the “She’s in a better place”s.

I knew that, I believed it too, but right now I could only dream of the past. Tomorrow I would deal with this passing life. For tomorrow, or the next day, I would die too. And my grandchildren would mourn me.

Life is so short…but so precious.

All we can do is have a trusting HOPE.