forever by your bedside

I don't think I was ever so relieved to get to the hospital to visit my grandmother.

I'll explain. I'm no fan of hospitals but I was just coming from a funeral home. I don't remember ever meeting Anthony. He was just 23-years-old. Died of a mysterious heart attack - not that the cause really matters. His mother was catatonic and inconsolable, denying the fact with a numbing repetition that made it impossible to focus on anything else. I watched her call out her father's name in a similar manner two years ago, the last time I saw this side of the family all together. This was a whole other world of hurt.

Then more bad news struck even closer to home. I found out my first cousin tried to commit suicide this weekend. Ingested too many pills with alcohol and then called the ambulance himself. My brain would not compute the reality - even if it had been quietly preparing for this very news for years.

So this is why I felt a strange sort of calm as I made my way through the familiar emergency room at the Jewish, straight to the elevator and up to the sixth floor. I even let myself get lost for a little bit - enough to find a decent coffee, anyhow.

When I finally did find my grandmother, she was just sitting next to her bed finishing off her dinner. Her hair was combed and golden and her face flush with life and colour. I knew it would be just me and her tonight and that kind of put my mind at ease. I was looking forward to just concentrating on her without getting distracted by background conversation - which is unfortunately easier to do with someone who has a tendency to ramble and repeat herself while storytelling.

I'm always relieved to know she still recognizes me and generally knows what's going on in my life. It makes me feel special even though that's probably stupid. I know even those details are getting hazy. (She asked me if it was still snowing outside, then gently brushed off the question) But then she kind of assured me as much when making reference to the old woman across the hall, who asked me to open her pudding cup and then couldn't even remember where her bed was or whether or not she was even in the right room.

"At least you still remember me," I joked in my broken Italian.
"Yes, I always remember you," she replied.

And then we got talking. We started with the funeral and she almost immediately wanted to change the subject. Then she told me how her mother never really recovered from losing her only son Angelo at 12 years old - the fact that she still had six daughters to raise offering little consolation. My grandmother told me the day her mother died, she stood by her bedside and heard her dead brother's name cross her lips as she reached for her light and slipped away for good.

Then she started telling me about my grandfather, who died before I was a teenager. I never heard her say much about him aside from pointing out he couldn't even make himself toast or boil an egg when push came to shove. Nothing like his brother, anyway. But as we were talking about functional and dysfunctional relationships she told me how the only times they really fought was when he would disappear for nights at a time playing cards. She somehow always managed to track him down (with God's help, of course) and finally got him to admit that cards were the one vice he could not control. In her persistent way, I think it was more important for my grandmother to be acknowledged for raising her four kids alone, for slaving over her sowing machine at all hours of the day and night and for never having to ask her husband for a cent. She was always a proud woman, though maybe too wise to believe she could change the man she was with.

She was repeating herself quite a bit but I was loving every minute of it. I kept thinking that I needed to get home to get this all down. Because this magical conversation - which was somehow everything I needed to be hearing right now - could not be lost or smudged to my poor memory.

And then she said something that blew my mind and nearly broke my heart.

She told me that even if I didn't think her words were important tonight, that I would wake up one day and realize they were. Then she took her right index finger to her right temple, her blue eyes wide and ablaze, and predicted that I would remember everything she said tonight because my brain could not afford to let it go. Maybe the pointless details, but not this. And she promised me I would even remember sitting on the hospital bed in this particular hospital room - the way she still remembered things her mother had told her with perfect clarity - when she was dead and gone.

And then she started to tear up, the way she always does. Releasing the unspoken emotion for the both of us. And she asked me for a glass of water and I gently massaged her arm and smiled.

And did my best to capture every last detail of that beautiful moment.