“Hey, I just wanted to let you know that your grandma went into a nursing home Saturday,” my uncle Dave texted me.
I received his text in the mid-afternoon of Monday, October 19th, a day I thought I might escape unscathed, it having been dubbed Doomsday three years prior following Sue’s collapse in my bedroom doorway. The news seemed grim at first: Dave detailed how Sandra, my father’s mother, had asked him and my aunt to come help her combat a nosebleed that she couldn’t stop, the living room scanning like a “crime scene” upon their arrival. Her nose would get plugged to end her immediate discomfort, but tests confirmed she had a pulmonary embolism pressing against her heart and various malignant tumors spreading throughout her body. Her time at the colossal home she’d lived in since 1967 had ended abruptly.
Much like my grandfather, she was moved to the same facility a mile from their front door, the unpaved parking lot and nondescript exterior a decoy for the impressive order and cleanliness inside. A cute, bespectacled girl with maroon hair greeted me, her Halloween-themed undershirt giving life to the black scrubs adorning her.
“How is Mrs. Friday doing?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she responded with a wan smile. “She’s not one of my patients.”
“Well, that’s okay. I’m gonna find out in two seconds anyway.”
“I have someone here to see you,” the nurse said, her voice pacing into the room before her trailing feet.
“Sandra Friday, as I live and breathe,” I said as she turned her head slightly.
“Ohhhhhh, hi there!” she said, her top teeth missing, not that she sounded much different than usual.
Despite not having a roommate the bureau at the foot of each bed had the same Panasonic television sitting atop it, both playing The Golden Girls. When I muted the screen on one television it immediately unmuted the opposite television, a bit of cat and mouse that could only be remedied by lowering the volume to zero.
“Whatcha got there?” she said about the plastic bag in my hand.
“I brought you some white roses,” I said. “The yellow ones were already bloomed, so these’ll have to do. Happy early Birthday, Gramma!”
“Aw, thank ya, hun,” she said, two days away from completing her ninety-fourth trip around the sun. “Those’re beautiful.”
“I should’ve brought a vase, but I figured you’d have a few.”
“There’s one more somewhere around here. The next nurse’ll find it for ya.”
“Looks like these flowers from Deb and Robin are all desiccated. You mind if I replace ‘em?”
“Go ahead. There’s a bathroom across the hall if you need water.”
“Well, there’s a shared one here, too, but I dunno if I should use it.”
“You can go in there,” she said, unaware my bladder was primed to empty itself on my pants.
“I’ve made a mess,” I said upon reemerging. “Now it looks like I spilled a bunch of dill in your sink.”
“The hell with it. They’ll clean it up.”
“I know, but it’s my mess. Gimme a second.”
Once I settled into a tall-backed wooden chair, I crossed my legs at the foot of her bed and began asking questions. About the visitors she’d seen (Linda and Doug, my great uncle Owen’s daughter and her husband, had traveled from New Hampshire the previous afternoon to spend time with her), about how the food was treating her (“I had chicken for lunch with a baked potato, some vegetable I forgot, and, gosh, what was the dessert…oh, right, ice cream!”), and about how she felt (“I’m doing okay, I guess”). Floral wallpaper lined the top third of the yellow wall with a view of some crimson leaves withering on the vines outside her window, a row of brightly lit bushes guarding the property’s edges, the sixty-degree sun blazing on a fine autumn afternoon. Spotting a book of her cherished crossword puzzles, I inquired if she’d completed any since arriving.
“Not yet,” she said. “I’ll get back to ‘em.”
“When did you start doing them?”
“Well, Mother was always doing them, so I probably sat with her trying to help when I was maybe ten or eleven.”
“Did you start filling ‘em in on your own then?”
“Oh, no. I got into them once I’d had the kids and had some free time in the afternoons.”
“And never looked back. By the way, and I don’t mean any offense by this, but I’m impressed by the lack of any malodorous smells in here. I've been to a few too many of these facilities and none were this pleasant.”
“Really?!”
“Unfortunately, yes. Anyway….”
We discussed my other uncle David, her son, not Dave, her son-in-law, and how his inability to walk anymore inhibited him from visiting her. I’d enjoyed cigarette breaks with him, a fresh dip of Skoal tucked in his bottom lip, on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve for many years, the guy’s outsized sense of humor and love of sports leading to lengthy holiday chats, and told her how I’d spoken to him last December on his birthday, his stammering voice playing in my head and causing me to smile.
“I hope you don’t watch too much news,” I said to change the subject, realizing it wasn’t any more chipper than the last topic. “It’s wall-to-wall awful shit, isn’t it?”
“And there’s one guy to blame: Donald Trump. He’s such an asshole,” she said, mouthing the final word like censorship mattered.
“We’re gonna see some changes in nine days.”
“Gosh, I hope so!”
Aware of her hatred for the man, I changed the subject again, this time attempting to outline the back story and machinations of the new documentary You Can See Everything, a film I’d seen on Tuesday and instantly regarded as a masterpiece, its layered approach to the truth mesmerizing for all three hours. Quickly regretting my attempt to explain the convoluted details, I reverted to a more satisfying role: familial journalist.
“Do you have a favorite movie?”
“Has to be Gone with the Wind.”
“You read the book, right?”
“Sure. It’s as good as the movie. You should grab it from the house.”
“Your house? I don’t have a key.”
“Well, tell Diane. She’ll get it for ya.”
“I would also like that photo of my father above my grandfather’s desk. And that one of him dancing with Di at her wedding.”
“Just tell her whatcha want. It’s yours, hun.”
“It felt so weird driving by the house to come see you knowing nobody was inside it.”
“Yeah.…”
“Can you imagine there won’t be any Fridays on Forest Street someday?” I said, aware the facility we were in was technically on the same street, hoping she’d defy science to make it to her hundredth year like her mother had.
Prior to my visit, I’d thought of one memory from that house, a place I visited monthly for more than two years following my father’s death. My grandfather would bring my cousin Ashley and me to the video store where we each picked something to screen in the living room. I’d selected As Good As It Gets because it featured Jack Nicholson, my favorite actor, and during one scene he nearly knocked my grandmother from her rocking chair, his malicious character insulting the gay man played by Greg Kinnear by calling him a word she hadn’t heard before.
“Dick!” she blurted to my grandfather. “Didja hear that one? Called him a fudgepacker!”
“A what?!” he said.
“Adam, rewind it.”
She laughed the second time, too, not an ounce of homophobia inside her, the old gal simply floored by the wordplay, and possibly hoping it’d feature as an eleven-letter clue in a future New York Times Sunday puzzle. With the screen in her room still muted, the shrieking volume from a television across the hall permitted me to hear a conversation between Bea Arthur and Betty White, I suggested we watch an episode of The Golden Girls together before my departure.
“You like any one of ‘em more than the rest?” I asked.
“They’re all good.”
“I agree. Still, when Rose and Blanche are together it’s this show at its best.”
The episode featured a youthful and ravishing Rita Moreno guest starring and included a discussion of how peace could be achieved by relocating the Palestinians to Greenland, my first thought being that the current president may have gotten some second-term ideology from TV Land reruns. During the final scene, Rita tells her husband in bed, “Promise me you’ll never die.”
“Tough to do,” my grandmother said, a few extra O’s at the end of her last word resting in the air.
“Noone’s done it yet,” I said, “unless you count Walt Disney’s frozen head, maybe. You should give it a shot!”
“Haha. Might as well.”
“Well, my dear, your dinner will be here soon enough. I’m gonna head out.”
“Thanks for visiting me.”
“Of course,” I said while trying to ruffle the matted hair above her left ear as I planted a kiss on her forehead. “I’ll give you a call on Chewsday to say Happy Birthday again.”
“That’d be great, dear.”
When I exited the facility, a curving brick wall decorated with seashells and colorful rocks bookended by two angel statuettes greeted me, prompting a quick photo to commemorate the visit. I’d told my grandmother how Fred had died three weeks ago, that day another temperate Sunday, as she offered her condolences.
“Connie’ll be okay,” she said about my other grandmother after a moment of reflection. “They’ll get to see one another again someday.”
“Something like that,” I said back with a grin, forever willing to bite my tongue for a woman who’s never given me a reason to contradict her.
And so two angels are now left behind, one who lived on Forest Road and the other on Forest Street, a line of shells and stones separating them. Vibrant leaves will continue falling as that lucky old sun beams, the troposphere preparing to adjust for all that added light that may soon arrive even if it’s still not quite ready to join it.