Grandmother Frances, Finally

My grandmother Frances had a chiseled chin and huge, haunting eyes. Maybe her eyes are just huge and beautiful, but because she has always been a specter in my life I feel them haunting me. 

I've always known of her, that she died when my dad was only four years old and that her sisters raised my father until his own father, my Granddaddy Logan, got remarried. But she was not My Grandmother. The grandmother that I knew was my Mama Ann, and she was the kindest and gentlest grandmother ever. She dressed in the colors of a newborn fawn, and her divinity has never been matched. I loved her very much and never thought a lot about the other grandmother, the one that died so long before I was born. Frances was relegated to a family story.

Yesterday I picked up the only picture I have of Frances and stared at it until it came to life and I began to cry. What were your dreams, I asked the picture as I pried it out of the dime-store frame to see if there was anything on the back, a date, a clue about where it was taken. I discovered it was cut out of a page in a yearbook, so I assume it was taken when she was in high school. She was only 18 when my father was born, only 22 when she died of complications from a miscarriage. 

Daddy said he didn't remember her much, and his only memory of her death was standing at her gravesite while people tossed dirt into the hole as the casket was lowered into the ground. It reminded him of the opening scene of Dr. Zhivago, he'd say, and tears would well up in his own beautiful, sparkly eyes. Did he get those eyes from his mother, I wonder? 

Now that I am a grandmother the world is different in so many ways. Yesterday I was hit with the full understanding the young woman in this photograph was really my grandmother, not just a family story. I held the photograph in my hands and willed her to know that the little boy she left behind, the four year old Robert would follow his burning dream and become a renowned herpetologist. She would be the grandmother to me and my brother, the great-grandmother to our three daughters, and the great-great-grandmother to Annabelle and Ruby. Ruby, incidentally, is four years old now. The idea that she could lose her mother and the memories of this rich life they have together is wrenching. 

You did well, I said to that photograph. Your sisters raised your little boy until his stepmother could take over. She loved Robert and he was happy until the day he died. I want her to know all these things and if I could just get in a time machine and go back and tell her I would go in a New York minute.

I think about my own tender role as "grandmother," and the stark reality that I will not be alive to see my grandchildren when they are the age I am now, 56, and the tears start up again. 

I cry a lot these days. Maybe it's the pandemic and the fact that I have not hugged my mother or even seen her except through a window in nine months and likely won't for six more. My Mother! Maybe it's the emotional battering I feel from hearing people up in arms over wearing masks while also hearing about parents and other loved ones dying.

My tears today for my Grandmother Frances? Maybe it's just plain sad that a young woman died back in 1835 from complications following a miscarriage, leaving behind a four year old boy, never seeing him grow up to be a man, a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather himself. 

Life is splendid, raw, and searing if you feel anything at all. Breathing in, I love this life. Breathing out, I am all these people, forever and ever.

 

B is for Baby Birds

One day a friend from work dropped by unexpectedly. She handed me a Tupperware container. “Here,” she said, “I thought maybe you could do something with these guys.”

I cautiously pulled back the cracked plastic lid. Inside was a little nest with three naked, shriveled baby birds in it. My friend had found the nest in a tractor she’d borrowed the day before from someone who lived two long-apart towns over. “I found them this morning. I’m afraid I’ve moved them far away from their mother.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. I knew how futile this would be, but somehow, I just could not say no. I took the baby birds in my hand, not allowing myself to register how cold and still they felt. I put my hand under my shirt and pressed them to my skin. Sure enough in about five minutes they were squirming. Just barely, but enough to light something in me. Maybe they would live.

I made a new nest for them in a cardboard box and shone a desk lamp with a hundred-watt bulb on them for heat. I set about feeding them tiny bits of bread soaked in egg, offered on the tip of a toothpick. They ate. With every crumb that slide down one of their stringy little necks, I rejoiced in spite of myself. There was hope in this world after all.

This dunking bread into egg and feeding tiny gaping mouths was familiar ground for me. There had been many baby birds in my life: baby wrens, jays, crows, and a killdeer to name a few of the ones who made it to adulthood. There were just as many who did not.

When I was in high school my stepmother Janie and my Dad raised a baby owl. That’s even more illegal than raising baby songbirds, or even baby wrens. Whoever was the first to stumble into the kitchen in the mornings, pre-coffee, was greeted by the ravenous little hoot owl, who would open his mouth wide and make the most endearing and awful screeching until someone plopped some liver down his throat. We lived like criminals raising that little owl. After work, Janie and my dad would take the owl and disappear to friends’ houses until my brother and I were in bed. “If anyone’s looking for us, it’s better if you don’t know where we are. That way you don’t have to lie.”

I thought it was overkill until someone from the Department of the Interior managed to get Janie on the phone. He demanded she surrender the owl. “Look,” she explained, “I’m just raising this owl. As soon as it can fly, I promise, I’m giving it back to God.”

“Lady, that owl doesn’t belong to God,” he responded. “It belongs to the Unites States of America.”

Somehow we beat the USA, though, and raised that owl until he was ready to be released. As with all releases, it was bittersweet but beautiful to see him fly back into the tree tops.

All these memories flooded my brain like an easy balm as I tended these baby birds. Thinking back on the owl especially tickled a part of my brain that thrilled to have a baby bird in the house. Still, I stressed to our three young daughters that it was highly unlikely these little guys would live. “We’re doing it for the birds, not for us,” I reminded them as their eager faces peered into the cardboard box. “Be prepared. They will probably die,” I said over and over, but in my heart I recognized a tiny flame of hope.

In the morning I raced into the kitchen, desperately hoping to find three energetic little creatures hungrily awaiting their morning meal. Instead I found two very quiet birds, and one who was stone cold dead. Before anyone else woke up, I took it outside and quickly buried it behind the shed. Oh, the poor little thing. Brave little thing. Tiny, defenseless little thing. I pushed my sadness down.

I tended the other two with even more fervor, making sure they did not get chilled, and offering them food every few minutes. I stared at their odd little scrambled egg lips, which I found especially cute. “Eat,” I willed them. “Eat!”

“Will these two live?” the girls asked all too hopefully.

“Probably not, but it’s our job to do what we can, and keep them comfortable no matter what.” I felt a terrible responsibility to the mother bird, who doubtless was confused at finding her nest gone without a trace. I pushed the image of her, scraggly insect hanging out of her mouth, sitting on a nearby piece of machinery, panicked by her trustworthy bird instincts failing inexplicably, out of my mind.

The next morning I cautiously peeked into the box and lifted the small rag off the nest. Another baby bird had died. The last living bird lay resting its head on the dead bird’s body, huddling for warmth and finding none.

I tried not to think about it. They barely even had their nervous systems yet. They were fresh from the egg. You could see their veins through their skin. They were rubbery-necked still. They certainly had no attachments to sibling birds, no sadness, in their little brains.

I buried the second bird behind the shed next to its sibling.

I wanted the last one to live. I wanted him to wake me up at night squawking for food. I wanted him to poop all over the house while he learned to fly. I wanted him to sing and feather a nest. I wanted him to live high in the trees, to fly with his friends, to live free as…a bird.

“Let’s go see the bird guy,” I said to the girls. We piled in the car with the bird in the box and took him to our friend who is the local expert.

“No way,” our friend said. “These little insectivores are almost impossible to raise.” He took a little bug he had on hand, tore it apart, and tried to shove it into the baby bird’s mouth. The baby bird did not respond. “He doesn’t have the strength to swallow.”

The car ride home was very quiet.

At home, I just sat and held the bird. The thought of putting it back into its nest alone was more than I could bear. Eventually the tiny bird slowed and cooled and died in my hands.

In one forgiving bit of grace, the girls took it better than I did. I guess they believed all my warnings and assurances that the birds likely would not live. I’d worked hard to convince myself of the same thing. I knew all along the birds would probably die. But still. But still.

Back out to the shed I went, this time with the last little bird wrapped up in a paper towel. I dug his little grave, laid a rock over it, and bound two sticks together to make a cross for the three of them.

And then I cried.

I cried because their mother did not know what happened to them and I couldn’t tell her. I cried because I couldn’t save the baby birds. My chest heaved in heavy, choking sobs. I could not save the birds. I could not save my brother. I could not save anyone, not any anguished mothers and sisters and fathers and brothers. I could not even save myself.

I lifted my face to the darkening sky and cried because the world is sad.

I Want to Remember

This blog wasn't intended to center around the death of my father. It was just the timing. Even when it was happening, it was hard to write about this death for the simple reason that it's just so normal. When your parents get old, they die. He was 85, lived a good life, and he died. So banal. Everyone goes through this. But as I started to write, and also listened to people talk about their own experiences, I found comfort in our solidarity. We are all tending to the details like a hidden tribe, cult rites, we know how to keep up with and administer all those prescriptions, we know that sweet comfort when the Hospice people come and get rid of them all, we understand the strange calm of the quiet between small talk, and how well we will always remember the odd smells of hospitals and age. No one really wants to hear about it until they're in it. But for those of us in it, now or past, there's a strange reassurance hearing how others reacted to the same passage. Or at least there has been for me.

I don't know if I'm done with this blog. But if so, there are things I don't want to forget.

Like seeing the eclipse. For at least five years, I'd been waiting for the total solar eclipse in August,  but once that date was near, it didn't seem likely I'd be leaving his side. I didn't see how I could possibly make a two night trip up to Tennessee. I wasn't so much worried that he would die while I was gone, or that he'd need something. I just didn't want to be away from him. It was primal. As anxious as he was when I wasn't around, I was as anxious not being there. Daughter Emma was having none of it, and arranged hour by hour care and promised me he would not be alone. Emma would stay back and share solar eclipse glasses with the Hospice staff and lie out on the lawn outside Papa's room and watch the partial solar eclipse herself.

I went up to Tennessee and saw the total solar eclipse, and it was as magical as anything I've ever imagined or seen in my life. The next day I went straight to Bethany House to tell my dad about it, made a four hour beeline. He was still quietly conversant. "I saw the total eclipse!" I said, and described the minute the sun slipped behind the moon and the bright silken sheets of the corona appeared.

He listened, closed his eyes, smiled. "I saw one once, in Korea," he said. "Didn't know it was going to happen, but when it did, we knew what it was. Beautiful!" Is this true, I wondered? I can't find any total solar eclipse that would have been visible in Korea during the time he was there. But had he seen one some other time or place? So many things were mixing up in his head.

He'd begun to talk about things he'd never talked about before. His grandmother Iris. His favorite dog, who turned out to be Scrappy, not my own childhood dog Bowzer, but his. He chatted with the dead, and seemed at first amazed and then accepting that his friends were always on the TV, and there was no convincing him otherwise. He talked a lot about his time in Korea, in small bits.

There are things I don't want to forget.

I don't want to forget his crazy hallucinations, which began in January when he went into the ICU with pneumonia, before he broke his hip in May, before he broke it again in July, before he went to Bethany House in August, before he quit talking in September.

That very first day, January 1, 2017, he lay in the bed in the ICU and told me about this publication which had kept him up all night. He read about all his friends in it, about me, Joe, Janie, Husky, the Babishes (his words for his grands and great grands), everyone! "It was supposed to put you to sleep, but it kept me up all night long!" he said. He was laughing about it. He was pretty much a straight shooter; I'd never heard him say anything fanciful before. It scared me, especially when he began thumbing through an imaginary book, saying, "Page after page after page!" The doctor assured me it was not anything to worry about.

Later that day when we got moved into a regular hospital room, he confessed, "Mary, I'm convinced you were right. I was having hallucinations." I smiled. Admitting he was wrong was not his strong suit. But then I saw his eyes focus on something over my head, something obviously beyond the veil.

"Look at that," he said, pointing to the ceiling, and naming the scientific name of all the baby turtles he saw hatching.

Sometimes it was turtles, sometimes alligators. He saw so many things on the ceiling. Snake of course. In and out of hospital visits, all through the nine month decline, he'd drift in and out of his hallucinatory fun house. A nurse offered to give him something that would stop the visions. "Oh no," we said, "we're all enjoying them!"

"You see that?" he asked me one evening, pointing up. "There's a frog on the ceiling."

"Daddy, we're in the hospital. How would a frog even get on the ceiling? That's just a stain."

"Well. Okay, you're right."

The next day, the first thing he did was call me to his bed and pointed up again. "Remember yesterday you said that was a stain? Well it's not. It's a frog. A flattened-out frog."

"Daddy how would a flattened-out frog get on the ceiling?"

"Flattened-out frogs can fly," he said, and because he was the eminent herpetologist of the Southeast, he of course had the last word.

One night he drifted into another world and gave a 20 minute lecture on natural selection. It was like someone just pushed a button on a tape recorder. Every inflection, every pause was just exactly the way he'd delivered it in the classroom 30 years earlier.

All these things I don't want to forget. Of course I want to remember him in his prime, a thousand details about him, and how alive he was. I don't worry much about losing those memories. I'll write them down someday. Good healthy brains, however, tend to repress traumatic memories. That's why I keep writing about the death.

Today is exactly one year since he died. That night, just after he died, we went to eat at a Mexican restaurant. Tonight we're going back to the same one to raise a glass and mark a day that marks a year.

Last year I came home from the restaurant and waited for Hurricane Irma. Just sat in a chair, waiting on a storm, feeling the weight of death and the calm. This year Hurricane Florence is bearing down on the East Coast, a category 4 storm threatening to make landfall. Our vacation to Edisto in South Carolina had to be called off, and the governor's called a mandatory evacuation of the whole coastline of that state. Waiting on storms.

It's 5:58 pm as I write these words. In eight minutes it really will be exactly one year ago that I saw him take his last breath. I'm a hopeless dreamer, making connections like a crazy spider where connections don't really exist. Maybe something will change tonight at 6:06. Maybe I'll take off this silver snake ring I've been wearing for a year. Maybe nothing will change. Maybe I'll stop writing about that year.

Maybe I'll decide I'm just getting started. There are so many things I want to remember.

In the Weeds

We have moved along through the year now. I’ve moved along as well. For six months, I cried every day for missing my dad. And then I just stopped. When my brother died unexpectedly at the age of 36 (19 years ago), I cried for a year, unstoppable. I still cry over him. But now, six months after my dad’s death I’m feeling more normal, though I often well up, especially thinking of our long, quiet times together in the end, his eyes looking up at me with the strangest, faraway look, glazed over and watery, clear and light. He’d raise his eyebrows like he was asking me a question. Anyway, that’s what can still get me springing the tears. But I’m getting used to it, just like everyone said I would.

Speaking of spring, it’s here. Our house is officially on the Azalea Trail. Here is what you see now at the edge of our lawn, that part closest to the admiring public.

In this beautiful neighborhood of trees, plants, flowers, and tidy lawns, we put our weeds right out there. We have a beautiful house, which makes this worse. But when am I going to do yard work? No one else in my family is inclined. So the weeds come. Hello little red clover.  
                                 
This time last year I had no idea what was about to happen. My dear friend from high school, a man I love very much, killed himself. Just days from this time last year, our youngest granddaughter was sick with RSV and had a very scary febrile seizure while they were staying with us, and we had multiple trips to the doctors and the ER. Soon after, my dad had the first fall and hip break, and we were told just a month later that he was dying and would not live out the year. My husband had to have his own immediate surgery after a trip to the ER. And my dear friend who is like a grandfather to me was spending time in and out of the hospital and rehab. My mother, thank you dear universe, was healing after her own year of a frightening bout of lung cancer, a fall which broke her shoulder, and acute pancreatitis. I think of myself this time last year, poised and unknowing about the strangling future months ahead. And then boom, I was in it. Up to my head and over. Swimming in fear and stress and emergencies. When you are in it, you cannot see over it. There is no horizon. But I knew time would move us on, forward, and here we are, a year from a year ago.

If you look closely in the picture above, you can see the house behind the weeds. The house is messy too. Just this morning we found a dying field mouse in the kitchen, sending my husband into a small emotional trauma because he’s become extremely sensitive about animals, and I had to act brave but I didn’t like it one bit either. So yes, the house is messy. This table is cluttered, and I never clean. We have a house guest coming next week and I’m not ready. 

Here is another picture. 

We have the most beautiful trillium all over our front yard, and it just keeps coming back year after year without any coaxing. I say it’s because we don’t do yard work, that must be why. This time last year I dug up a bunch of trillium for my friend Kent, and took it to him. That was the last time I saw him. He is the one who killed himself just a week later. 

The trillium is back, the grand baby is fine. My dad and my friend Kent died, and we just went to war with Syria. I can hear the birds today, and soon I’ll hear the croaking frogs. Yes, spring is here, everything is coming alive and taking over the crunchy winter landscape. 

Where are You?

When my phone rang recently and I saw it was my stepmother Janie, I realized with a start that I didn't have to worry about it being some scary news about my Daddy. I even said it out loud to Joe. "Well it's not about Papa. He's dead." I didn't mean for it to sound calloused or funny, it's just true. It's been five months now since he died, and I am still waiting for phone calls about him, maybe even from him. 

I got a lot of calls from Daddy last year. No matter how much I tried to prepare him for the days I wouldn't be with him, which were few, he still would call and ask where I was. 

"I'm going to work tomorrow, Daddy."

"Okay."

"Call if you need me. I'm never more than one hour away."

"Umhmm." He'd act nonchalant, always adding, "Thank you."

But then he'd call. He'd call in the middle of the night, he'd call on the days when I went to work, and one night he called when I was on the way home from the ER where my own husband had landed. "Where are you?" he'd begin, and then he'd go on to tell me he thought he was dying.  

And no matter what I'd get in my car and drive to him. "I feel like I'm dying," he'd say, "this is it." I knew those times were not it, I didn't imagine he'd call me on the phone to come attend his death. When I'd arrive, he'd say he had "crippling anxiety," and I'd stay with him until his happy pill, his Xanax, kicked in, or longer. I hated leaving him. Not because I was scared, but because I just wanted to be with him for as long as I could. I am stunned even now at the clarity I had about this, and at how easy it was, really, to push everything else aside. 

I saved the last two messages I got from him. I wish I'd saved more. Those last two are both the same. "Mary? Papa. Where are you?" I cannot bring myself to delete him as a contact, and sometimes, just to torture myself, I'll click on his name and see the picture that used to light up every time he called. I can hardly bring myself to write the words, right now, that I can't believe he'll never call me again. 

I heard his voice unexpectedly the other day, listening to an episode of Discovering Alabama on my headphones while working. All of a sudden I heard my Daddy saying something about gopher tortoises. I looked up and there he was on the screen, smiling and chatting, wearing his white sweatshirt with the fox on it. 

Where are you?

It's been a warm wet February. I can stand at my open kitchen window and hear the chorus of frogs right now, rising up and swelling beautifully in the night. 

My Father's Death

I'd been crying for a week before this picture was taken, which is the day before he died. I cried knowing we'd had our last conversations, and that everything from now on would be quiet, tiny bits of talk. "Do you want some water?" "Are you cold?" and "Are you scared?" His words, tiny answers, "No," "No," and "Maybe a little."

"There's a huge hurricane brewing," I told him the day before he died. "Irma." He'd always loved weather watching.

How bravely we go about our daily business, which of course is anything but our daily business, in the company of death. Smiling at the people who work at Bethany House, chit-chatting about the weather. The day this picture was taken, we'd just moved him into another room because the door to his old room was broken. As if he could linger on for days, weeks, we wanted to be able to use the porch. My friend and I put all the pictures and get well cards back up on his new wall. "I like this room better! He can look out the window," I said, tacking up a photograph of an Eastern Indigo Snake.

Throughout the day he responded very little, with small whispery grunts, opening his eyes slightly. Mostly he slept. A nurse came in and cheerfully asked, "Do you need morphine?" and he said his last sentence, "Morphine's good stuff."

I did tease him a little, asked him, "You do know what we're all going to do now, right?" No answer. "We're all going to get snake tattoos." He smiled. His last smile. His last communication to me was humor. Lighthearted. A ribbing from me, a smile in response.

When I left him that night, the day before he died, there was an ominous feeling all around. It was the hurricane, and the knowing that Daddy was dying right in it.

In the morning, Sunday, Sept. 10, he was completely non-responsive, breathing heavily. Every exhale carried with it a slight moan. The nurses asked my permission to give him morphine in response to the moans, that the moans might possibly mean pain. I of course knew he was not in pain, but eagerly encouraged the nurses to give him as much morphine as they legally could to move us on the next stage, on to death. And as I gave these instructions, they were planning their day, because the hurricane was now posing a serious threat to our area. They had their own families to think about.

Bravely, bravely, I went into his room and held my father's hand. The day moved like the days do in hospice, some visitors came, sadness was now heavy on us all, the day stretched out to afternoon. "It could be anytime now," the nurse said, "now, or even days away."

Janie and I looked at each other. "Days?" We both sat up and ceased our death-bed hand-holding vigil. We checked messages on our phones. We had conversations about this or that, and tried to be brave. Later, it was just the two of us again, and we found quite without realizing it that we were back to the vigil, the hand-holding, listening to him breathing, watching his feet and hands grow mottled, waiting for a change.

Janie finally got up to get some fresh air. Her phone rang and I answered it, then went to the bathroom. When I came out, Daddy was still and quiet. 6:05 p.m. "Daddy?" I whispered, rushing to him and putting my hand on his chest. He breathed. One, two, three breaths, then an intake that stopped in his throat, a little hitch, a rise in his Adam's apple that did not fall. And that was it. In an instant he was dead, where just the very moment before he had been alive. I watched the life leave him, watched the infinitesimal steady movement of his living body stop and so suddenly, so suddenly it didn't seem like it could really happen that way, he was still. Still as a stone, still as a statue. How could those shallow breaths have made him so alive? Now I know the movement of the living, and the stillness of the dead. There is no stillness like that. What was the movement that so dramatically ceased when he died? I'd have told you he was so so still, death-like, just before he died, until he was as still as death. That slight pulsing of his living body now seemed like an ocean of movement.

And oh, the loneliness that crashed down then, in that moment when he left! He was gone! Already I missed him, the him that had been alive just one second before, missed holding his mottled hand, listening to him breathe. Missed even the terrible smell of his bedsore, missed his caved-in chest and sunken cheeks! There was the body, all those parts still there, but without that tiny river of life. I kissed him goodbye, but felt no fondness for his lifeless body, which the nurses propped into a formal pose I thought was silly. No comfort in the body, no comfort in the family afterwards, no comfort in the night, the next morning, the hurricane keeping us all at home, waiting for the lights to go out. Daddy was dead and I missed him, that's all. There would be no comfort, only the balm of time. I've done this before.

The storm didn't come. We did lose power, there was some rain and some wind, but nothing extreme. I put on my boots and walked outside after the danger had passed, and noticed a red flower in the yard I'd never seen before. And there it was, just as its name portended, blooming in the middle of the yard, two actually, and even more on the banks of the creek, a Hurricane Lily, the official flower of the afterlife.

A Decline

For much of my adult life, I have had imposter syndrome. Today I am pretending to be an adult, although I know I cannot possibly be an adult. I'm sitting here in the hospital room with my dad, so many days that run endlessly into so many more days, and I think, I'm here, I'm an adult, finally. I'm worried and tired, and not amused. Daddy is beside me, lying in the bed in a deep morphine induced sleep, morphine needed to ease the pain after the nurses changed his dressing on his pressure sore and removed the wound catheter from his incision site left from hip replacement yesterday. This is the second hip replacement. The first was two months ago.

When they fall and break their hip, that's when things start to slide downhill everyone told me. And I shook my head in agreement, because I'd heard that story over and over, and yes I knew it was true. The story of someone falling and breaking their hip is not a glamorous story, not a beach read, but it is one who many have experienced, many more will, and it's universal. I too may fall and break my hip someday, and one of my daughters may have to sit vigil at my bed listening to my moaning and mumbling as I sleep in an easy cloud of opiates.

Here's the thing. When they talk about the falls, and the decline, they're talking about old people, people who don't know what's happening, people who might even smell of hospital disinfectant already. But that's not my dad. As you can see in this photo of us, he is young and vibrant. Actually this photograph was taken about 28 years ago, but to me, he looks the same.

Here is the only picture I have of him in the hospital with the second hip break. He is insisting on breathing into his pulseoxmeter, as if it is a breathing treatment. I try to take it out of his mouth, but he insists and puts it back in, and I give up because he is, after all, my Daddy. The nurses rush in and scold him, as they do when the old folk become the infants, and I just shrug, my adultness falling off of me like a heavy cloak. I'm glad to be rid of it, to take the scolding with my Dad, to giggle a little at the rebel still in there, to be his childish partner in this crime.

(July 30, 2017)