a Month of Sundays

The past is a belly full of lore and myth of violence and pain in the form of familial drama. An unbreakable pattern, many generations thick. But the day the phone rings, all of that stops quicker than garlic burns. My uncle calls to tell us that Grandma’s kidneys are failing—soon the toxins would leak into the rest of her body and poison her into death.

My mother and I stop life and race to the Bronx faster than kidneys. We set up an air mattress on Grandma’s floor that night, giggle like girls as the plastic bed squeaks each time we try to get comfortable. We didn’t know it yet, but this is where we will sleep for a month. Where we will tread water, pump our knees against the ebb and flow of death like tides. Against urine, moaning, cloudy delirium.

Grandma asks me constantly if her bathroom is in the hallway. Mistaking her new studio apartment in this senior-equipped building for the one she was a young mother in (the tenement building down the block.) Suddenly, she’s seeing Aunt Theresa in the armchair across from her (a relative of ours who died many years ago.) She’s asking for Ping (her pet ghost who lived in the radiator of her old house.) She’s hosting visits with spirits over tea (which can only mean, she’ll soon be one too.)

In the twenty four hours before she dies we all gather as she prepares to leave her own skin. She smells slightly sour but mostly powdery like an infant. We hold vigil, kneel at bedside, link hands and hum Ave Maria.

What must it be like to be alive while approaching death? Do you hear the tickticktick of a film reel as the images of your life flip by? Do you feel suddenly still, quiet, cool? Surrounded by the acoustics of a snowy night? Do you release your grip and go towards the light?

The day Grandma dies, I wake up to the nostalgic ring of a landline phone. My first couple blinks leave me disoriented when I find myself on the floor of this room I barely know. Mom let me sleep in, but it’s clear she’s been up for hours; all the lamps have moved around and a portable CD player bellows with the honey sweet sound of Jimmy Roselli’s operatic voice, round and full in Italian dialect. Grandma isn’t gone yet, though she’s drifting close, and will leave us later that night. Yesterday she changed from a person to a body in a room. Strangely though, the morning feels warm, like a fresh plate of fluffy pancakes. Usually I wake up crusty-eyed, stumble to the bathroom for a splash of water, stretch out the aches sleep leaves behind. But today, I smile, roll off the Aero Bed, lay on the carpet for a few minutes and let myself feel like it’s a holiday or a cousin’s birthday or just an old fashioned Sunday morning. And Grandma is just sleeping in too.