A Touch That Binds

By Tykira Renee

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 sent me replayed again and again 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 to 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.

When my grandmother was first checked into the hospital, I paid the situation no mind. She was strong, happy, healthy, and even in her late seventies, had a more active social life than I did. In my eyes, she was strength personified. My rock. My pillar. When the challenges of my life became too much for me to bear, she was the one I looked to. And it never ceased to amaze me how she was able to be there for me at the drop of a hat when she’d already had to deal with so much.

When my mother came home with a high school math book under one arm and a newborn baby under the other, my grandmother stood strong. The oldest of twelve siblings, she was used to taking care of everyone, and this was no exception. Even when my mother brought home two more mouths to feed without bothering to even look for a job, my grandmother pulled her shoulders back, got another job to make ends meet, and pushed ahead. She stayed up late to help me with my homework, even though she had never graduated from high school. Whenever I was down with the various and numerous childhood illnesses (flu, chickenpox, etc), her face was the first one I saw waking up, and the last I saw going to sleep. And yet, when she needed me the most, where was I? Where?

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 backwards through the years. And 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 mine. “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 tell 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 breath shallow, her eyes closed. And 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 a 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. I was eager to see more than the four light poles lining the sidewalk of my block, each standing guard like sentinels my grandmother had hired for my protection alone. And I was determined to see something other than my mother’s back as she left the house to do God-knows-what. I was ready to see a world that lay beyond my small avenue, and I could only hope the world was ready to see me too.

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 had run 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 sneak 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 chicken’s 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 to 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 over my scalp, up and down my spine, and the back of my neck 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 to my grandmother’s hand now, the monitors and machines breathing for her, and the thought had 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 of my own. I knew that what I had witnessed was merely 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 there I was again, wondering the same questions decades later. How could my grandmother’s hands be both death and life to me? Life in the way she cooked and kneaded dough for drop biscuits and sweet potato pies. Death in how she didn’t squeeze back when I squeezed. How had she not acknowledged my presence in the slightest? 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, 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 mine and kissed my palm before our fingers interlaced. Was that what life was, the grasping and letting go of hands? The hold and release, exchanging one grip for another? And how would I know that it was time to let go?

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

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