Part One: Unexpected Trip
By: Christine Sweeney
Thumbnail by: Josh Hild
This is part of a three-part series on the writer’s grandmother. Part Two Part Three
What do you pack for a trip to be with someone when they die? During a pandemic? During mass protests against police brutality?
It’s summer. Is a summer dress appropriate or too much skin? Where’s my black dress, the summer one I wore to Alice’s funeral? This funeral is near the water. Will I need a swimsuit? Is swimming too frivolous at a time like this?
I stared into my closet late at night, delirious with sadness and anxiety, packing for a cross-Atlantic flight in eight hours. My parents had just called and said that Nanny was in the hospital again, for the second time in as many weeks. I knew it was serious because my dad gave the news, my mother unable to tell me her mother was dying.
For the first time, I saw my mother cry over her mother. Up until then, she had been a master compartmentalizer. A career nurse in nurse mode, taking vital signs, measuring doses, lifting and wiping and checking.
But her professional-grade nursing was not enough. She was an O.R. nurse. “In the O.R., no one dies. You don’t let anyone die on the operating table,” she told me. “There is always a way to keep them alive and get them to the ICU. They can deal with death. I don’t know how to tell when someone is ready to die,” she’d said matter-of-factly.
I threw clothes in a duffle bag, disassociated, and proceeded to over-clean my apartment before sleeping and waking.
In an airport during a pandemic, facemasks make it easier to cry in public unnoticed. If my eyes are red and glassy, will people think I have the virus? Is it worse to look sick or to look like you’ve been crying?
Will I make it in time?
The grandchildren fly in from the four corners of the earth. There are no visitors allowed in hospitals during a pandemic, with two exceptions: End-of-life and Births
A hospital visit used to bring me hope. They will get better. This is temporary. Now, a hospital visit is conditional on being near death, at the doctor’s discretion.
We can be with her in the hospital as long as she is dying. But if it’s not really the End, what’s the use in visitors? according to the pandemic policy. With all this company and conversation, her grandchildren feeding her gelatinous juice through a straw, she takes a turn for the better. She improves, she is stable. No more visitors.
She sits without visitors, alone for two days, no one to cajole her into eating.
“One bite for each grandchild! That’s seven. You’ve almost finished your potatoes! Another seven for each great-grandchild.”
Her condition worsens. But not enough to bring back the visitors. It improves enough to bring her home.
Home, to a place she never considered home. Since my grandpa died nine years ago, and my parents could no longer maintain her house with its leaky pipes and flooding basement, they moved her into their lower-level. They brought her favorite harvest gold velvet loveseats and floral drapes. Candy dishes and heavy wooden bedroom sets. They don’t make them like that anymore.
Her bedroom, living room, and dining room are carefully recreated in the finished basement, like the set of a sitcom. Christmas Cookbook 1983 alongside Preventive Health Living 1992, stacked haphazardly on wall-sized bookshelves. Rows of photos of grandchildren and great grandchildren, posed on auburn piles of deciduous leaves, holding fake apples picked from real trees. Cozy and welcoming, but not home. Not really. “You can sit and visit in my living room,” she advised her unexpected visitors.
A service, All American Ambulance (triple-A (AAA), but for roadside assistance for people), picks her up and brings her home. Uber for the sick and dying. Two hearty technicians who have “seen it all,” COVID masks half off, carry her in a stretcher down the hill in the backyard, leading to her bedroom suite in my parents’ house.
We don masks to protect her from our germs and potential asymptomatic viruses. “She has a mask from the hospital, do you want it?” says the technician. “No, that’s not necessary. She’s the only one who’s been tested and confirmed negative,” says my mom.
Do you act cheery or human? A stern but encouraging coach or a sweet and tender caregiver? “If she’s going to get better, we need to get her to eat. We need to get her on her feet, even if she doesn’t want to,” says my mom.
“UP! UP! UP! Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Come, on! You’ve got to pull your weight! We can’t do it for you.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, dear, is this uncomfortable? Let me help you with that, I don’t want to see you in pain.”
Stern or sweet, how do you treat someone who has decided they are ready to go, but you don’t want to let them?
She’s called Nanny, but she was supposed to be Nonna, an ode to her loose Calabrian roots. Born to a Calabrian and a Napolitan in Western Pennsylvania in 1932, amidst a Great Depression more bearable than what they left behind. But when the first grandchild couldn’t pronounce Nonna, Nanny sufficed.
Nanny with a daughter. “I wanted a boy, not a girl” she always said of her firstborn; one son, one stillborn no one talks about, one son-in-law who grew on her, one daughter-in-law who is a saint. Nanny with seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, but two unmarried grandchildren. “What will we do with you and your brother?” she says. “We need to find you a nice tall, unselfish blonde, like your grandfather,” she says. Unfinished business.
Her stories are of women and who they were married to. “Did I ever tell you about Minnie?” she begins. Filomena is my cousin. We all called her Minnie. She made the best pizza in town, and everyone knew it. She had ten kids.
Then, her husband cheated on her with some hussy at the post office. He came crawling back. She made the best pizza in town, he knew it. Can you imagine? Having ten kids with someone, and then cheating?
But she said ‘No!’ She retrained as an X-ray technician. He died 20 years ago. She’s funny. Everyone loves Minnie.
The woman has been retired for 32 years, over a third of her life. She never earned money for her work. She tried to be a nurse, but nursing students in 1950 got kicked out of the program if they got married. She chose marriage. She’s good with numbers and tried to be a cashier, for the heck of it. My grandpa didn’t like the thought of her having to stand in a store without air-conditioning in Miami and talked her out of it. So, she cooked and bathed and balanced and planted and trimmed and scolded and sewed full-time.
She rode passenger in an RV, visiting each of the lower 48 in the 80s, “RVs are cleaner than motels, because you don’t know who stayed in the motel room before you.” She accompanied my grandfather through his retirement.
They cooked, they sat, she clipped coupons and recipes, they watched TV. She picked up the phone to tell you “a program about Italy is on public television.” She decorated with pillows dictating the stages of her life, “Just When A Woman Thinks Her Work Is Done, She Becomes a Grandmother.” “Grow Old With Me, The Best Is Yet To Be.”
How old can you grow with someone before they go, and you have to live on?
But Catholics don’t really die, they wait until they can be together again “in Paradise,” as an old Italian great aunt once said as parting words, “see you again in Paradise.”
She is foisted out of bed and onto the commode. Pivoted from the commode and onto the chair. She is shuffled from the chair to the commode and back onto the bed, slid into place to sleep another night. And does it all over again in the morning.
I noticed a grin on her eyes one morning while she was rolled from side to side,
“Is this fun for you?” I asked.
“Yeah, kinda.”
“Life is hard but at least it’s funny,” she added.
I sit with the would-be Nonna as she waits, refusing to eat more than just enough to give us hope. We watch Food Network, which prompts her to share recipes.
There’s a really easy recipe. You take olive oil and a crushed clove of garlic, put them in a frying pan, and then heat (don’t heat the oil before the garlic, it will burn).
Then, you add a pound of spinach. You’ll think it’s too much, but it shrinks, and you’ll eat all of it. One time, Joanie and I ate the whole thing. You’ll see.
Anyhow, you take day-old bread. The bread you’d almost feed to the birds. Crumble it onto the spinach and add more garlic.
This is what she’s always done, read recipes aloud from magazines, or from memory without measurements. Mashed potatoes are made with boiled potatoes, mashed with some heavy cream and butter. That’s it. That’s the recipe.
My brother asks for her Italian sausage recipe, “a pound of ground pork shoulder, the good stuff. Oregano, Onion.”
“Is there fennel?” he asks.
“Of course there’s fennel!” She looks away, offended. He adds it to his log, along with the eggplant parmesan and lemon meringue pie.
“This is my grandson,” she tells the home health aid, “he’s trying to cook for me.”
She holds on to her recipes. Maybe she’s not ready to let go, as if to say “No way! I’m not giving you my recipes and being made redundant! Good luck recreating my home-cooking, assholes. You need me!”
Maybe, if she isn’t giving them up, she’s not ready to go, and that means there’s hope.