The Light

My grandma died yesterday morning. It’s a weird thing to write, that someone died. It carries with it so many connotations of suffering, ugliness and finality. And those certainly are a part of the dying process. But, is it death? Is death ugly in itself, or is it this long, arduous journey towards it, and our perception of it?

When I arrived to my mom’s house early Monday morning, I knew that I would see my grandma’s frail, lifeless frame resting quietly in the bed she died in. I knew all the sad stuff, the creepy feeling of facing death. I was scared to face it. I didn’t want to encounter the fear and discomfort that accompanies physical death, and I never really have faced it like this.

I stared for a long while at her jaundiced face, a yellow intensified by the warm hues of sunlight cascading onto her shiny skin. Gamma had the most amazing skin on her face. For a woman enslaved to her cigarettes, she glowed like she was fresh off a healed chemical peel. I asked her, 2 nights before she died, what her secret was to such nice skin. She was already fading into eternity at this point, with occasional responses between bouts of sleeping and confusion. But she heard me, paused, and from her mucous laden mouth said, “There’s no secret,” then slipped back into her slumber. My mom has always said she was religious about her Ponds, slathering, massaging and faithfully applying the greasy lotion to her skin every night. I’ve always been afraid of acne. Maybe I should try it out.

As I continued to gaze upon her face, her neck, her shoulders, I kept waiting for the bellows of her chest to rise and fall. We’d spent the past 3 days by her side, day and night, attending to her pain, excretions, medication. Our lives revolved around her breath, carefully watching for any shift in rhythm and sound. We knew the transition in sound meant death was lurking closer. I think we were all wrestling with this bizarre desire for her breath to shift, but for it to remain the same. Change in rhythm meant closer to her suffering ending. Staying the same meant longer until we had to let go.

For days, the blinds stayed closed, afraid that the light would somehow disturb her process. I’m not sure that she ever even noticed the light shifting. As I lifted the shades, I had a moment of worry that it was going to bother her eyes. I had to remind myself that she’s not there. Her body was, but everything that made Gamma who she was, was gone. Something about the light flooding in made everything feel better, like some deep, dark secret had suddenly been illuminated and all the burden that it brought, lifted.

I think a lot of things are ugly, scary and fearsome in the dark. Sleeping in an unfamiliar room, walking in pitch black, stepping into unknown situations. Death has been that for me. I’ve been fortunate to not have many people around me perish. Those that have, have been older and expected to pass. But, even in the deaths I have experienced, I’ve been sure to keep a distance between myself and my exposure to the reality of what it looks like to die. The mystery has festered and produced a sort of denial of its existence. If I can’t see the ugly, maybe it’s not there.

Like any secret, denial produces more bondage. It takes my own will, my own feelings, and hooks them to a tight leash of fear. This whole death thing was like a secret between God and the dying person that I was too scared to find out the truth of. If I knew the truth, I might be scared. I might feel uncomfortable. I might be mad at God.

When the mortuary arrived to the house, my mom scurried to the back room. Understandably, she wasn’t ready to have revealed the secret of what her dead mom’s body would look like being hoisted onto a gurney and taken away forever. I silently debated about whether or not I was ready to lift the veil of what this looks like, too.  I decided to stay, help answer questions, and direct them in whatever way they needed. I thought I would be shaking in my shoes, hiding my face in a pillow to avoid the reality that she was gone, and that physical death wasn’t pretty. Somehow, I stayed with it all, kept my eyes open and faced reality.

While they prepared outside, I tiptoed into her room, the same vibrant, morning light reflecting off her perfect, Ponds laden skin, and placed my two hands over her two hands, politely stacked on one another beneath the thin sheet. It felt like holding skeleton hands. I whispered, “I love you, Gamma.” For the first time, I accepted that she was gone, and that I was looking at this puppet of a body, that was, for some reason, carefully constructed to carry the soul of my precious Gamma.

I left the room before the well suited grim reapers came back, sat on the couch and waited. It wasn’t special or monumental. They wheeled in a gurney, wrapped her in a white sheet like a mummy, covered her with a blanket, and took her away. I followed them out and paused on the front porch, watching them to the car. What was I following for? Was I still holding on to some hope that she would pop up from the gurney and start doing a little jig? Did I think she’d ask me for another cigarette, or a strawberry shake?  I caught myself, turned around, closed the door and took a deep breath. Now, all of her was gone, body and soul.

The weekend of work, monitoring, questioning and waiting, stood starkly against the stillness and listlessness left by the void of her leaving. I passed by her room, stood at her door and stared at all her stuff which lines the walls, the floor and every other horizontal surface. The only thing I really noticed, though, was the wide, horizontal surface in the middle of her room, her death bed, laying empty, and all I could see atop it was the Light.