tonight you can sleep with the light off

Tonight really did not start out looking like a promising hospital visit.

My grandmother was anxious. Really anxious. Her hair had been simultaneously flattened and pulled into a strange kind of matted faux-hawk. She was wringing her hands and almost whispering the words "oggi, mi sento brutta. non mi sento bene" to herself. When I walked into the room, she said she had just been thinking about me. I'm not sure how that was even possible in her state.

I could tell she was more panicked than anything else. There was no pain. Only the sound of someone trying to cram the anxiety back down their throat.

I did my best to be a calming presence. I have stared panic straight in the face on more than one occasion. I did what I could in my broken Italian. A big part of me just wanted to get her talking and keep her talking - about anything, really. Besides, there was a reason I wanted to visit her alone this time. I love listening to her speak about the past. It's just harder to focus when other people are around. Now she had my undivided attention. I just didn't have hers.

She fired off a timely quote about how patients tend to go when doctors are too busy examining them. This from a woman who has been in the hospital for a week awaiting an MRI and sampling various combination of painkillers, sedatives and sleeping pills. In 2012 we try to make the patient comfortable. That's how the gentle Caribbean nurse had put it to us the other night. A guy who comes to the hospital for two hours at a time is in no position to judge that judgment call.

She finally began to calm down. After some unpleasant dry heaves I got her to sit up and we shared a snack: a vanilla berry yogurt for her, a chocolate pudding for me. Then we played Scopa. I dealt for both of us and kept myself at ten points for two extra rounds until she finally beat me.

And then after telling me I should get going, she asked me if I was happy in my new house, living where I was living. There are some questions you never mind answering again and again.

I told her yes, I really was. I told her that Amy and I were planning a trip to Panama and that Davey Cleinfeld was back with his girl and that it felt so nice to be able to walk down the block to get an Espresso whenever I felt like it. She smiled her smile. Her blue eyes welled up. She told me how she never would forget how Amy just sat there without saying a word the day we got into a fight while doing tomatoes some ten years back. We talked about marriage and babies and why I still felt ambivalent about one and unprepared for the other.

When I got up to leave she was no longer frantic. She didn't beg me to stay. We went over the different lighting arrangements one last time and finally settled on lights off except for her small Mother Mary nightlight.

She thanked me repeatedly for coming. I reminded her each time that it was my pleasure.