Dear Internet 6: A Respect for What Time Can Do
Dear Internet,
Have you ever gone to an open casket funeral? I never much cared for them, for no other reason than it creeped me out as a kid. Most funerals are for old relatives: grannies, grampies, great uncles and aunties, great grampies and great grannies, etc. Don’t those people look weird when you’re a kid? Maybe this is just me because most of my older relatives we were close to died before I turned ten. But old people always looked weird to me as a kid. I mean, most of the people you see on any given day are either your parents, who wouldn’t be old yet, and kids your own age – siblings, classmates, cousins, characters in the shows you rot your brain watching. So when it’s that time of the month to go visit great auntie Jo in the nursing home, suddenly your narrow view of how humans should look is twisted and distorted and smothered in funky smells and ribbon candy that no kid I knew would be caught dead partaking in. Old people don’t even look like people to little kids! They have no teeth, their skin is sallow or white with baby powder, their hands are shriveled and spotted. Their faces are a physical representation of a topographical map of time. Old people look scary! And then you want us to look at them in an open casket? All formaldehyde and glue-mouthed? And Jesus take the wheel if you have to kneel down and kiss them on the cheek.
But then you grow up. You get into your mid-teens, your perspective of time and biology has matured and you begin to realize that people get old. You get old. All those wrinkles that terrified you five years ago are now something you start to notice in your mom’s face. The bulging veins that grossed you out begin to appear on your father’s hands. Your aunts and uncles get a few locks of gray. Your history teacher in eighth grade homeroom announces they are retiring at the end of the year. You end up as a freshman in high school and abruptly, you realize that your first fifteen years of life have gone by. And if you had the same peace of mind I had, you realize that your only surviving grandmother may only have fifteen years left to live. And that’s when you begin to engender a respect for what time can do. I’m twenty-three. I attended an open casket funeral for my grandmother last year. She didn’t even have ten years left to live.
I had seven years to get to know my grandmother before she died. More like five years if I’m being honest, because once the Alzheimer’s set in, she wasn’t the same person most of the time. She had the classics, the greatest hits if you will. I won’t. What kind of fuck would will the strip-mining of a person’s consciousness? There was the confusion, the delusions, the depression, the inability to compose a single coherent sentence, the sleeplessness. I remember once she woke up in the middle of the night and screamed and screamed, waking the neighbors, who of course called the police. When said cops arrived, they found my grandmother huddled in the corner of her kitchen, holding a pair of salon scissors in both hands, shaking, terrified literally out of her mind. That was a rough couple of days afterward. She was pretty lucid then, and she told us she thought she was back in her childhood home where, from what I’ve heard from my mother, her father was a bit on the abusive side. We, along with her doctor, tried to convince her to move into an “assisted living” facility. She said to hang the idea. My parents eventually talked her into hiring a caretaker for some of the housework she wasn’t capable of doing anymore. Towards the end however, she agreed to move. Those were the last two years.
So the five that preceded them? Awkward, really. There was no base to build upon, no scaffolding there, hardly a worker on the site. But all I had to do was show an interest in getting to know her. She was a grandmother after all, so of course she would take the opportunity to get to know yet another estranged grandson. I had to work for it, though. She lauded hard, honest work above most other things. Honesty was pretty high up there, respect, integrity—you know, the generic mantra of every elementary and middle school in America. But where did all those school board members get those money words from? Their grannies, of course!
She asked once if I could spend the weekend over to help her out around the house. It was the day after Christmas and she wanted to take down her decorations early this year because she had a trip to Canada planned the following week. My parents agreed to let me stay over. It was my first time spending a night not at home. Really, we had never gone on any family vacations, so no hotels or motels, and I didn’t have very many friends ever, so no sleepovers at a friend’s house. I didn’t know how to act that weekend. Do I ask her if I can pour myself a bowl of cereal for breakfast or should I just wait? Do I ask to take a shower each night, or is she one of those people who only shower every other day? And what the hell do I do for fun around here anyway? All those questions and more were answered in their own awkward fashion. She put me to work almost right away on the first morning. We had the decorations up in the attic and the tree down in the basement by lunch. After our lunch break, it was time to tackle the lights outside. Well, it was time for me to tackle them. She remained inside to take down any tinsel or wreaths and then to start on dinner.
I’d go over to visit with my parents once a month and there’d always be something she’d ask my father to fix or get rid of. Before, when I was young and shitless, I’d fandangle my way out of helping (“But Dad, I don’t know how to hold a ladder”), but now I was ready to put a good foot forward and help out. I mowed her lawn, shoveled and sanded her driveway, trimmed down the branches of the very old trees she loved to admire—you know, menial work. But then there was the fun work too. I’d help her cook dinner, bake cookies or a pie for her church, pick out good deals at local yard sales, erect the Christmas tree, and set up the lights outside. She even began letting me put the tree topper on after we decorated the tree. She was an avid reader as well, and that rubbed off on me. She handed me a book once, said she really enjoyed it and would like to hear what I thought of it. It was Brave New World. I thought it was fucked up; she agreed. We traded books back and forth for a while. The next book she lent me was The Grapes of Wrath. I think she liked sad stories, but those are the most relatable. After that I got heavy into Kurt Vonnegut. I lent my grandmother The Sirens of Titan, but it was only so-so for her. I thought it’d be hard to get close with her, but all it took was a little effort.
I remember one of the last times I saw Nana at the nursing home she was searching through her drawers. I walked in, and all the drawers were open in her dresser, in her little tea table under the window, in the kitchenette. That’s where she was when I came in, standing over an open drawer, cabinet doors swung open above her head.
“What are you looking for?”
“My hairdressing scissors. I can’t seem to find them anywhere and I’m supposed to give your father a haircut Sunday,” she said.
“You don’t have hair dressing scissors.”
“Of course I do, I just don’t know where I left them.”
What are you supposed to say to that? My parents made sure she didn’t have any scissors with her when we moved her to the home. “Oh yeah, let me help you.” Can’t find them. Won’t find them. Would she wake up then? What if she doesn’t? Well then, someone took the scissors. That’s the only thing that makes sense. But who, and why? She asks the staff; they say they haven’t taken anything. Now she doesn’t trust the staff. That could spiral to other things, other belongings of hers. She moves or misplaces something, can’t find it; she blames the staff, gets belligerent, maybe even violent.
“Nana,” I took her hand, “you don’t have a pair of scissors.”
Her face broke. The wrinkles on her face cracked like I had just punched a mirror. She cried, fell into me and wailed. I visited her one other time, a month later, and she was gone. Couldn’t tell me who I was, couldn’t actually speak; friendly but in that kind of way someone is when they are meeting someone in an elevator. Two months later, I was at her open casket funeral trying to convince myself this was normal and that she was still beautiful.