My grandmother died two days after Christmas and I’m not sure how to stitch myself closed again.
Nanny was on my speed dial and we’d talk at least once a week. I remember the last time we talked before her stroke a few months ago. We were laughing over something Red had done, and she said we needed to come down to Harlan and visit soon. But the next time we visited her, she didn’t remember who Red was anymore. Or me. She called me Phyllis and squeezed my hand over the hospital bed railing.
It was horrifying because Nanny had always had a sharp mind and unfailing manners. She was so humiliated by the way her body and mind had failed her, made her confused and unable to take care of the most basic hygiene tasks for herself.
On Thanksgiving, I ended up being the only female in the house when Nanny’s constipation meds finally worked their magic. I had to see my grandmother naked and wipe her behind after a 15-minute bout with diarrhea. Wiping a grown-up’s butt is no picnic, but what made it nearly unbearable was knowing how awful Nanny felt about it. She covered her face with her hands while she sat on the portable toilet seat and cried, saying, “I can’t believe this is happening to me. Who’d a ever thought this could happen to a body.” I hugged her then and we both cried. Then I put on the latex gloves and did the necessary. That night, I prayed she would die soon and hated myself for it.
Two days later we went back to Lexington, and that was the last time I ever saw her alive. Those days are not how I want to remember her: curled in on herself in a wheelchair, trembling mouth and hands. That was not her.
This is Nanny:
She had a razor wit and twinkling hazel eyes that said she was up to no good. Every pillow and sheet in her house smelled like Clorox, and every militantly clean room was full of family photos and weird knick-knacks.
She was a great lover of arts and crafts, and her creations were legendary in their awfullness. My big brother has never forgotten the time Nanny made him a clock from a big straw hat. The clock face was at the top of the brim; the rest of the hat was covered in hot-glue-gunned lace, ribbons and pearl swags. Her only sop to my brother’s masculinity was to make sure the ribbons and lace were blue.
She was an aggressive hawker of her homemade fruit salad during holiday dinners, and she could not abide a skinny boy. She was happiest when people (especially growing boys) were eating her home cooking.
She was a maverick at checkers, a politics junkie, and owned almost every Stephen King book he wrote.
She had a notorious mouth on her. When Hubs and I told her that we were going to start trying for a baby, she stomped her foot, looked at Hubs impatiently, nodded at his crotch and said, “Well?? Get that bird a-workin’!”
A few Christmases ago, we did Kahlua shots together on the back deck just before dinner. That was the last Christmas I saw her on. The year after that, Papaw had just died and she wanted to spend Christmas with another grandson in Virginia. She said coming to see us would just remind her too much of Papaw. And this Christmas, she was in the hospital, ready to slip the cocoon of her body without ever regaining consciousness.
The funeral was horrible, as funerals are. But the worst part was the night after the funeral when I sat in Nanny’s living room, the last one up. Nanny and Papaw always had a thing for clocks. When it gets near the top of the hour, the whole house sounds like the beginning of that Pink Floyd song Time.
And I sat there on Nanny’s couch until the chimes died back down a few minutes later. Missing her so fiercely I could barely breathe. Still thinking about that Pink Floyd song and listening to the relentless seconds ticking by on all those clocks.
