ava

tomorrow, father’s day, marks one week since i lost my grandfather.

i sat beside his bed nearly every day for over a month. from the first hospital, to the rehabilitation facility, back to the hospital, and then, finally, this week, his casket.

it has been written before, and will be written plenty more times, how small these beds can make someone look. a tyrant is reduced to a feeble, folded up human being, made uniform in a row of hospital rooms with identical gowns and IVs. this man, who i had stared up at as a child, i was now trying my best to smile at as he struggled to breathe. i would tell him he looked great, and then wonder if he found it condescending. if he did, he didn’t show it.

a doctor, one day, came in to give us a medical update. he had had a tracheostomy, and because of it, he now developed pneumonia. they were explaining what they could do, with the port infected and all, but he didn’t seem hopeful. i asked why. the man looked at me from the other side of my grandfather, never once addressing him although he was listening, and said, “you have to understand that this is a sick person.”

something happens to you, once you’re designated as a “sick person.” it’s a title that bestows on you lesser treatment. him being almost 90 didn’t help his cause, of course, but the hospital employees, as lovely as they were at that last hospital, began focusing more on making him comfortable than fighting for his life. but how could it be, that this fighter i’ve always known, was no longer engaging in the battle?

after getting the tracheostomy and getting transferred to the rehabilitation center, i watched my grandpa, this funny, spirited, fiery man, become depressed. my granny wept every day, always on my shoulder and never in the room with him. “that’s not him,” she’d tell me. and it wasn’t. no matter what we offered him, he’d wave us off.

and i didn’t blame him. he could no longer speak, or drink water, or eat, or hold things, or sit up, or even wear clothes. it will haunt me for the rest of my days, how the fight left him. his death was not due to old age, but rather a series of missteps from the healthcare providers he trusted. yet, at every turn, they treated it like an inevitability.

all day, every day, since he entered the hospital the first time, i have been grieving. to mourn an alive person is a process not unlike trying to climb up an escalator going downwards. time was up, yet there he still was. i couldn’t answer those calls i’d missed. i couldn’t ask him to tell me those stories he never got the chance to tell me. i couldn’t even tell him all the things i knew i’d want him to know when he was gone, lest i panic him. everything i would regret was already a specter in the room with us, while the two of us sat, me breathing the sterile hospital air, and him unable to remember how to breathe without the aid of a machine. even now, it still feels like i’m living in that limbo, where i could visit him whenever i wanted.

i did what i could. i watched television with him. i told him i loved him, told him to rest. asked him what he needed, and tried to provide it. i knew it would never feel like enough. i hoped it felt like enough to him.

and the bad comes back when you least expect it. you remember the worst things that person has ever done, come to you as intrusive thoughts. you remember that you love them anyway.

i didn’t expect it. my mother knocked on my door at 1 am, and i said out loud, “no, no, no, no.” i opened it, already shaking. “he’s gone,” she said. i could tell she was in shock. to avoid upsetting her, i said, “okay.” i drove her and my granny to the hospital, shaking and on the verge of puking the entire time. we three went in there, arm in arm, and said goodbye. it didn’t feel real. it still does not feel real.

grief has come to me in waves. the day after he passed, we had to go to the funeral home. i watched my granny sob over a ten thousand dollar bill while we stared blankly at a binder of prayer cards. they offered us a catalog of necklaces to put his ashes in. we cried and cracked jokes that left the funeral home director slightly worried for our sanity.

at the wake, i realized what a great tragedy it was, to have so many people love you and to never say it until it’s too late. or even just to get together. do something kind. make the extra effort. the time i have spent with my granny in the last two months surpasses the amount we’d spent together all of the last three years, when i’ve been busy with work and school. it shouldn’t take until tragedy strikes to be together, but where does the guilt trip end? how far can you take that spiral down until you’re eaten alive by the endless obligation to live without regret?

these revelations, the ones that come at our most trying times, could either be the purest form of truth, or our biggest forms of delusion. i’ll be pulled down under the current of school and work again soon enough.

but now, these days spent enjoying each other’s company, the ones that have come too late—these provide a bubble. a shelter for my grief. tomorrow will mark one week. and then the bubble will burst. people will start expecting me to be okay again. i want to scream in their faces and tell them that it isn’t okay, it’ll never be okay. but that’s no way to live, is it?

so, i’ll continue closing my eyes and seeing it all. sitting beside his body and wondering why his heart rate wasn’t showing on the machine i’d seen accompany him for weeks now. staring at his chest and tricking myself into seeing a breath. waiting for him to open his eyes and let me know they made a mistake. going to hide my water from him so that he wouldn’t get upset, then remembering he wasn’t there to see it anymore. and i’ll see what came before. waiting for his updated blood pressure. receiving a mouthed “love you” or blown kisses. and what came before that. watching him sit at the dinner table, asking my granny for coffee, watching videos on his phone, listening to me complain about one thing or another. every blink of mine contains all of this and more, 24 years of memory to carry nearly 90 years of life.

i can’t say exactly what i’ve learned so far. maybe to be mindful of nurturing the relationships in my life. maybe hospital advocacy. maybe to be gentle with myself and appreciate what i have while i have it. or maybe i didn’t learn anything at all.

this won’t ever feel fair. even if it wasn’t preventable (which it was), it wouldn’t feel fair. i hold my own grief, as well as the grief of my granny, mother, aunt, great uncle, and everyone else my grandpa knew.

and right now, i’m angry. devastated. listless. longing to isolate, or make sense of things that won’t make sense to me. but i’m also open. i’m wanting to create. wanting to cultivate things worth cultivating in my life. i’m grateful for a presence which will, in some ways, always stay.

they said he went peacefully, but there’s no way for us to know if they mean it or not. the three days leading up to it, his eyes would find the ceiling, and he’d stare upwards in awe, eyebrows raised. i do wonder what he saw.