There is a wooden rocking chair in her living room that I sit in every time I go to visit. I rock myself to the sound of her stories, drifting in and out of family updates and who married who this time. She promises the rocking chair will be mine someday. In my mind someday is a long ways away.
I get the text on a Sunday morning. The same morning, I go to bed at 5:30 am and wake up with a killing head ache. I do not quite believe it at first. Maybe I’m not reading it right? Your grandma is in the hospital with the flu. What does that even mean? I had the flu a few months ago and almost died, or felt like I was dying. If an 87-year-old woman has the flu…I didn’t want to know the answer. I roll over and try to go back to sleep. As you might guess, I don’t. Turns out she has influenza.
She was born and raised in Jersey. If you are from there, you leave off the New when you talk about it. She and her sister were Tony Twins, but not many people know what they are anymore. She met my grandfather on a blind date and married him. He loved the mountains and places like Alaska and she loved the shore and places where she could hear it. Their 66th wedding anniversary was a few weeks ago. It amazes me they can still remember the weather that day.
We are born on the same day and somehow that makes us special. More special than the connection we already had. When and if I have children someday, I know I am going to have twins. Just like her. Identical. Nobody else in the family has yet.
She is beautiful. She is vain. She is pristine. She wears lipstick to the hospital and makeup in the mornings. When I look at old pictures of her she reminds me of a classic Hollywood Actress. She is gorgeous and graceful; a Julia Robert’s smile and white hair the color of clouds. A star carved out of the Jersey Shore and sand between her always painted toes.
She tells me the same story. Over and over again. Of how she cried the day my mother and father tell her they are having another baby. After seven years of the last one. My grandmother was getting another grandchild. Her last granddaughter. I will be given her middle name, Viola, and a V will divide our first and last names forever. I love the look of it when I write out my initials.
She hates my nose ring. She calls my mother in protest after she sees the silver ring in my nose. The tattoo on my wrist, she detests more once she notices it. She still doesn’t know about my second tattoo, but not many people do. She prefers my hair long, rather than short, and every time she sees me now she comments on its length. Even in the hospital, when my hair is twisted in a braid she realizes it has grown a considerable amount since the last time I saw her.
I think that is what got to me the most. That I couldn’t remember the last time we spoke. The last time I visited. We are usually good about talking. She’ll call me one week and I’ll call her the next. Our conversations don’t have to be long, but they are meaningful and I can at least hear her voice and wage how she is doing. We can at least say “I love you” and bask in the joy of our upcoming birthday. February is always our favorite month.
I am reading Tuck Everlasting to my fourth grade class during lunch. It is the part where Tuck is explaining to Winnie how life is like a wheel; always changing, always turning. How dying is a part of living. A few tears fall and I pray the wise guys in the back row don’t see. She can’t die yet. I haven’t seen her. I haven’t been there to hold her hand. All I want is to say thank you. Thank you for always calling, for always checking in, for making me feel like a little princess all my life. All I want is to say good bye.
She used to keep out a bowl, on the kitchen counter, of these pastel colored mints that would melt in your mouth. Do you remember? Sometimes restaurants put them on top of your check book. I used to eat them like candy. She stopped buying them a few years back and I never knew why. She used to keep a pack of Lifesavors in her purse. The red ones were my favorite. She used to take walks with an umbrella to whack any stray dogs that came her way. She used to make rerun for every family event. The pink dish made of cottage cheese, mandarin oranges, and mini marshmallows. Believe it or not, it was good. She used to tan at the beach, delicately paint hollow goose eggs, and watch Pretty Woman. I think I still have her VHS copy.
I come home to say goodbye. My sister buys me a ticket because she knows I need to. I need to say a few more things; look at her a few more times. Hold her hand and kiss her forehead. I need to put our relationship to rest. Have it end in peace, or else I might hate myself if I don’t. The only thing is, when I come home, she wakes up. She sits up. She opens her eyes and talks. It’s like nothing ever happened at all. It’s a miracle, all the nurses say. “I think she was waiting for you,” my mother tells me. I think she is stronger than we all think.
I was born in a blizzard. On a Tuesday at 9:12 pm. She was at a church meeting up in town when she got the call. She cries when she hears the news and what my parents name me. Mallory Viola Garretson. In her eyes, I was an angel who came out of the snow. My mother her favorite daughter-in-law from that day on, for giving her the gift she never asked for, but always secretly wanted.
“Is Mallory behaving?” She asks my cousin, after the tube has been taken out of her throat and she is awake and talking again. She keeps asking this question. “Is she being good? Is she behaving?” I often ask myself that same question. Am I behaving? Am I being the best person I can be? I go to see her in the hospital every day when I come home. I pray for her health every night. I like to think I am behaving. Wouldn’t you say?
Our favorite color is purple. They put a purple bow in my hair when I was born. I’m not sure why her favorite color is purple? We are just purple people. It’s the color of violets, of spring, of royalty. In a past life she must have been a Queen and I, a princess. Like the story of Anastasia. A music box she would wind to drift me off to sleep.
Scrambled eggs, rye toast, 3 slices of bacon. Hot chocolate with whipped cream. She got me my first job as a dishwasher at the Breakfast House we would go to every Sunday. It is closed now, but she still goes out to breakfast once a week. She calls my grandfather from the hospital to tell him to take my sister and me out to breakfast. She doesn’t remember this. I order what she’s been ordering for me for years; minus the bacon. I don’t eat meat anymore.
I often wonder what she thinks about all alone, in her hospital chair. If she is even thinking at all. Maybe she is remembering? Remembering all her great grandchildren’s birthdays, all her sibling’s anniversaries, all the states her nieces and nephews live in. She doesn’t forget. It’s amazing really. If you were to ask her what I wore to my high school graduation she would know the answer. A long purple dress. A crown of flowers in my hair.
The day after her 88th birthday, and my 25th, she calls me. My mother holds the phone up to her ear and lets her talk into it. She is crying. Wondering where I went. She forgets about me visiting every day and telling her that I have to fly back to Michigan on our birthday. She doesn’t know that I cry as my plane takes off, as I leave again, wondering if this will be the last time I see her. She doesn’t know that while I am dancing the night before, a piece of my heart pounds harder and I can feel my blood flow thicker. Like pieces of her are mixing with mine. On the night of our birthday I feel a spark, a connection, that leads me to her. It’s stronger this time. Maybe I had to be 25 years old to feel it? Maybe she had to be 88? Maybe we needed something to scare us into this feeling that we might not always have the other. Maybe we needed to learn that there are threads of us that live within the other and those are what keep us alive. Threads of purple and snowflakes and mints that melt in your mouth. Threads of February and scrambled eggs and the number 23. Threads of her, threads of me. Sew them together and look what you got.
I have this image of my grandmother dying and it is not in a hospital room. It is in the corner chair of her house, the one perched right beside my favorite rocking chair. I have this image she will end there. In the morning, after drinking her coffee, then taking a nap she won’t wake up from. That’s how she is going to die someday. Snowflakes will be slightly falling outside, but they will look more like ripples. From behind the mountainous clouds the sun will shine through saying “It is nice to see you again.” Her feet will leave a trail through the sand, heading straight toward the ocean, the sound of its waves will sing her home.