I knew my Grandma best in the days of her dying, while holding her by the forearms, pushing her into the shower stall to be cleaned of the black diarrhea that had smeared up and down her leg. And when she stood in the shower, naked from the waist down, seeing the sparse weeping hairs left on her mons, still dark, the body that would be my own some day.
I knew her as she sat on the toilet, silent stubbornness, her legs spread wide, the Parkingson’s shaking her hands as she tried to clean back to front while we warned against the inevitability of yet another UTI if she didn’t wipe front to back, and breathed through a surgical mask that did nothing against the stench of crap.
I knew her best as she shoved back against me, her naked legs standing firm and her wobbly voice fighting, as I repeated We have to clean you while I feared that I would hurt her if I pushed harder, and then that my strength would give out, that she would see how I was shaking, my heart pumping painfully in my chest, a cold sweat dampening my neck in lieu of the tears I wanted to cry. And it was no longer a wonder how, frail as she seemed, she was still able to strip the sheets off her Queen-sized bed, wash, dry and refit them to the mattress with precise hospital corners and tightly tucked blankets.
And then while she sat on the couch, a 93 year-old Sour Patch kid finally broken in, her drooping left eyelid lazy with effort, her arms folded across her fresh Alfred Dunner top, a crumpled tissue shaking in her hands and a 70s game show playing on the tv screen. I’m sorry I’m such a brat, she said to me when I sat beside her to say goodbye. I kissed her on her cheek, downy and smooth of any wrinkles, even at her age, and then on her constantly trembling jaw and I loved her more.
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