Slumber Party

4/27/14

Slumber party

If God or the world see fit or I have the strength to hold out, this afternoon I don't believe I could ask for more of passing then a fine clear day, and those I love close at hand, having had the chance to make their peace with my own going. 

Grandpa died behind a sealed door jealously guarded by hospital staff and an eldest son who seemed to me then too officious, against all of which it took the weight of forty some odd cousins grandkids great-grands sisters-in-law grafted familial by time - and of course the six more sons and daughters to prevail with the urgent notion: That second to the body itself, the next thing in line to lay claim to the space of death over a person is his family. Not this institution that doesn't seem to want to just let an old man and his family let him die. 

Today it's different. 

I suppose having a loved one die in the house you share is next to haunting. But they remain yours, and no dumb persons or things claiming to precedence in over their space and whom to allow into it.

You take the pulse of the dying one's preference and, in this case, the husband: Three young children, gently guided and shored but allowed each to find their own way each through grief and to their mother’s side; the mother (grandmother) bereaved now barely three years of her husband (rock) forced to say goodbye to her last, her youngest, her “bonus baby”; alongside her the sisters (daughters), their claim to proximity the fruit of patient attendance (the ugly monotony: chemotherapy, getting dressed, draining the fluid off the lungs to make space again for air) silently presents itself for recognition. She still present faintly like the whispers she still utters, but with greater wind in the women like branches hedging her in fierce claims of love and presence; the brothers (uncles) brought in (always after consultation among her two sisters with her husband and their own). Presence in her passing mediated to this network of blood by their own judgement. 

We others and our grief wait attentively. Are called in after the hospice nurse has called in, to notify us all signs point to "Soon." 

A gently and haphazardly ordered procession after husband children mother sisters have each a piece of time together then alone at their preference to whisper all their lives together out away with her as the oxygen machine turns a sibilant hiss and flop, and her larger gasps punctuate the consistent shallow rise and fall of her belly. 

She has ceased to whisper, but the hospice nurse assures us hearing is the last to go. 

We are all in their bedroom, all forty years of her in a rocker; we gather, cry, love, console - Tina: “I've been seeing Grandpa"; tears. And after this and we all move out to give her space, a sense of relaxation as we know that we have had from her while still with us about as much as any of us can ask: To say in word and looks, alone and in pairs, and then all at once, "Goodbye" 

(And in song - the only way somehow to force the words to Edelweiss through my teeth imagining Christopher Plummer’s Von Trapp singing through the memory of his wife. Please tell me you will all sing to me when I leave you?)

A cooler of drinks; food from all quarters; two tents; thinking to myself, should not most of us leave? But no one is making any clear indication this this is how it feels. 

I come back after a walk and wish the young girls (nieces, cousins) gathered around her easy chair would just stop singing - so she doesn't have to keep fighting to stay around for them. But maybe it's just the time they need more of to say goodbye. Maybe they're calling up the people she's been talking to all week; or maybe Grandpa's there again like he's been showing up to Christina these last few days: Telling aunt Mary he can't wait to carry her over to him; and Tina telling Mary and telling all of us that she doesn't go alone. 

Tina, our oldest sister, who spoke words at Grandpa’s side that sounded more than anything I’ve ever heard like someone speaking for my own heart. 

Grandpa who told Bea and Joyce he wasn't afraid. 

What consolation, at the last, and whether you believe or know or don't what more or less or anything is waiting, to know you have a predecessor in love and in the hard crossing. That you aren't the first of your own world. 

And if gathering about me for love on a fine clear day they likewise find each other around my cooling form and pass on to a great celebration, I don't know what more I could ask for in passing. 

Watching Mary pass away with us I felt less afraid of death than I ever have before.