A touch that binds

I scanned the signs directing me toward the parking lot I needed to turn into. To my left, in parking lot A, was the Maternity ward. To my right was the Cancer treatment center. My heart sank as the voicemail my aunt left me replayed in my mind: “your grandmother is sicker than we thought. Come to the hospital now!”

My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. That voicemail was two days old. Yes, I had seen the missed call. And yes, I noticed the icon on my phone, begging me to take notice, but I ignored it. I had spoken to my grandmother that same day and she had said she was fine. Under the weather, but fine. Since then, I have laughed with my friends, gossiped with my co-workers, fussed at my children, and engaged in every other foolish, insignificant thing that people used as fodder to fill in the gaps between one existence and the next.

Now guilt and shame took turns furrowing into my heart like two eager badgers. She was not “under the weather” as my aunt had later explained. The breast cancer that she’d undergone a unilateral mastectomy and weeks of Chemotherapy to treat five years prior had returned and spread to her ovaries. Her condition was terminal.

A car horn blared behind me, causing me to nearly jump out of my skin and knocking me out of my reverie. The signal blinker of my car blared like a steady, urgent alarm, coaxing me back to the present. The choice between life and death floated before me and I could no longer turn away. I swallowed hard, blinked tears from my eyes, and turned right. 

I lumbered up the pathway leading to the information desk, my car keys digging into my palm.  The security guard stopped me, his eyes glazing over my face once before heading back to his cell phone.

“May I help you?” he drawled, a bit of an annoyed edge to his voice.

I had to clear my throat before my voice could emerge. “Yes, uh, I’m here to see my grandmother. She’s…” I trailed off, my mouth unable to form the words my heart knew I would have to eventually say. “She’s here,” I finished and bit my lip. I wore a purse and heels and a wallet filled with credit cards and old bank receipts, yet I had never felt so young, so childlike. The possibility of living in a world without my grandmother had sent me racing backward through the years. There I stood, a grown toddler in desperate need of a nap and a hug.

This time, the guard looked up to stare me fully in the face. Whatever he saw in my expression caused his eyes to soften. In a tone that sounded loads lighter, he asked “What’s the name?”

I stammered my name and began to fumble around in my purse for my driver’s license.

The guard’s lips curled up slightly. “No Miss,” he said, holding out a hand to steady mines.  “What’s the patient’s name?”

“Oh” I breathed, embarrassment fighting with my budding grief. I muttered my grandmother’s name, moisture filling my eyes. The guard typed something on his keyboard and a list of names filled the computer’s screen.

He recited the room number, pointing to the elevators down the hall. I was sure I thanked him, though I didn’t remember my mouth moving. The elevator ride was short, my strides were even shorter. Before me, room numbers floated past me in a swirling haze. Two-hundred and eighty-three, I counted. Two-hundred and eighty-four followed.  My knees knocked together painfully, halting my stride. But I told myself to keep moving. There was no telling how much time the woman who raised me-- my best friend--had left on this earth. Room two-hundred and eighty-four. I placed my hand on the handle, paused to still myself, and pushed the door open.

My grandmother lay on her deathbed, her breaths shallow, her eyes closed. It takes the grace of God to hold me upright. Once the living embodiment of a thunderstorm, rolling over peaks and valleys to be a blessing or a curse to the land before. The woman before me is a husk of her former self, the hint of rain among scattered clouds.

I searched the side profile of the woman lying before me. Did she have any idea I was there, seated beside her, with hot tears now falling steadily down my face? I squeezed her hand again, and once more, she did not respond. I did not, could not understand how this was so. How could a person who owned a quarter of my heart not know that I was there with her? The torment of it crawled through my guts like ants through a farm. Why wouldn’t she squeeze back?

I looked down at our intertwined hands, and a memory struck me suddenly. I was seven years old, and I was now old enough to be left unattended. I didn’t know why my capability to be left alone was a good thing, but I didn’t care. Members of my family were traveling to South Carolina for our annual reunion, and I wanted to go. My uncle, My Aunt, my grandmother, several cousins, and I packed into the car and rode for hours. And hours. And when it felt like I would never regain the feeling in my backside again, we pulled up in front of a house that looked like it could fit into the backyard of our house back in the city.

There were trees everywhere and animals I had never seen before running around my feet. I knew what a chicken was from pictures, yet seeing its plump body flap its wings mightily, just barely leaving the ground, before it sauntered off was such a sight for my young eyes. I decided right there and then that I would be a chicken. And for the rest of the day, I chased and flapped and hopped just like my new friends did.

As the evening approached, and after I ran inside to grab a quick drink of water, I raced back outside to find my grandmother near my new friend’s birdcage-which was little more than a wired enclosure. She didn’t hear me sneaking up behind her because I was eager to show her how I saw my chicken-friends pecking for food. I watched as she coaxed one of them from its cage and held it firm under one arm as she would one of her heavy church purses. She stroked the top of the chickens’ head, smoothing down the feathers.

And then with a swiftness I didn’t know she possessed, she gripped the chicken’s neck and wrenched it to one side. The chicken went limp in her arms. I cried out, too startled to stay quiet. My grandmother spun, and ran to me, chicken still in hand, its limp neck bobbing up and down. She knelt so our eyes were level and asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t answer. My eyes refused to leave the chicken’s dangling head. My grandmother followed my gaze, looking from the chicken, and back to me, a slight smile playing on her lips.

“It's okay.” She pulled me to her, gentle yet firm, and patted me on the back with her free hand. Her fingers glided up and down my spine with ease. I sagged into her arms and cried, letting her touch and shushing lull me into a daze. I did not understand. The experience left me completely torn. Was my grandmother a killer? The snuffer-outer of life? If so, how could her touch provide me with such comfort?

I look at my grandmother’s hand now, at the monitors and machines breathing for her, and the thought hit me once again. How could those same hands be both life and death for me? I was no longer that seven-year-old, watching my grandmother kill an innocent creature. I was a grown woman and a mother. I knew that what I had witnessed was merely just the natural cycle of life. The chickens were raised and caged to be food. And in that – my little buddy-- had served its purpose.

Yet here I was again, wondering the same questions decades later. How could my grandmother’s hands be both death and life to me? Life in how she felt along my forehead and chin for phantom fevers.  Death in how cold she now felt. Life in the way she cooked and kneaded dough for drop biscuits and sweet potato pies. Death in how my heart would not pump right ever again until she opened her eyes, until she squeezed back. I had seen first-hand the power in those hands. Where was that power now?

And I suddenly understood. My grandmother was leaving this world and I was going with her, tethered to her by my hope that if she could only hear my voice and know my touch, that she would come back to me.

The room door opened. Footsteps filled the space behind me. My husband knelt beside me and gently uncurled my fingers. He rubbed the back of my grandmother’s hand, smoothing away the crescent-shaped indents my nails had left behind. Then he took hand and kissed my palm, our fingers interlacing.

Was that what life was, the gripping and letting go of hands? The constant hold and release, the give and take, the exchanging of one grip for another? If so, how will I ever know when it was time to let go?

My grandmother didn’t tell me if it was time to hold tight or be free. She only died, with me forever grasping.