Non-fiction
**WARNING**: This piece talks about death
My grandmother died alone and abruptly. She'd slept in a double bed her whole marriage, which was a long time because she was only 16 (and pregnant) on her wedding day, and her husband died 66 years later. She kept her phone on the nightstand by her bed, the kind with large buttons with even larger numbers printed on them. All the better to see should she need to call 911 in the middle of the night.
She lived alone the last 8 years of her life. Anytime I called her and asked how she was doing the reply was always the same. "Oh... Not good. I'm very lonely without your grandad."
My sister-in-law was her weekly housekeeper and she was the one who found her in the morning, face down in the carpet, her bathrobe on, the pills and things on the nightstand knocked over. The TV was on and her crossword was set up on the bed waiting for her as usual. Undone.
My sister-in-law tried to wake her, called out to her, called 911 and tried to roll over the stiff cold body when they asked her to check for a pulse.
She doesn't like to talk about that day.
At the funeral I tried to imagine what crossing over would have been like for my grandmother. The doctors think maybe she'd had a heart attack, something we had been anticipating, that she had been in her bathroom washing up for the evening, applying her night cream, always so diligent about her skin, when she'd felt the pains and came out into the room, maybe reached for her phone with the comically large buttons and instead toppled, dropping like a stone to the carpet. The morgue had to apply extra corrective make-up to cover the rug burn on her cheek.
What happened after she collided? Did she get up, her spirit leaving her body behind, and stand a little stupefied, "Oh my"? I imagined her retracing her steps and looking in the bathroom mirror only to see a much younger and smoother version of herself reflected back. "Oh my!" And then her name, "Thelma." And she'd look to her right and see the man who had gently, sweetly, achingly called out to her. "Oh my! Oh Russell! Oh! Oh!" And she'd fly to him and cling to him and kiss his face and he would hold her the way he always did, one hand on her chin and one on her arm. And they'd cry together, glad and reunited and young again as everything tangible around them evaporated and my grandfather took his "best girl" home to their next life.
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