Last Three Years

Vince Granata

600 words

Inspiration: Two three year spans (which is technically not a group of three, so I also worked to include groups of three syntactically—through listing, or repetition of sentence structure.)

 

 

My grandmother had a stroke three years ago, weeks before her ninetieth birthday. When I saw her, she looked muted, lying in late afternoon light blotted through hospital curtain. When she spoke, she thought I was my father—her son-in law. She asked me about “my” children. She asked about me.

            “Vince,” I said, when she got caught on my name. “I think you mean, Vince.”

            This, the pauses, the confusion, the search for names, I would get used to. For the next three years, I’d see her search for these threads like something she tried to feel between her fingers, like rubbing her index and thumb could make a word or name or memory reappear.

               I tried to recognize a gift in what she’d lost, in what the frayed ends of her mind had left behind. She never asked for her daughter, my mother, who had died three years before. I don’t know if this was a lucky mercy, the death her fractured memory happened to elide, or if she chose not to try, if the words around my mother’s death were too much for her to unknot, too bound to unwind.

            So my mother never came up. Instead, we’d hold hands, three years of squeezes between sentences, her hand grasping mine like it could tether her to the names she struggled to find—my sister’s, my father’s, mine. As she grew more frail, she aged us—like when she thought I was my father—until we passed her, my aunt becoming her mother, “Mommy,” towards the end.

            This was easier. Easier than my great aunt’s last three years—easier, I mean, for me.

            My great aunt was already in a nursing home when my mother died. There wasn’t a single stroke, a distinct fracturing, like what would fissure my grandmother’s life. Over time, associations loosened, details sluiced and separated from the realities that had governed her mind.

            She was ninety-two when my mother died. My father didn’t tell her, asked the nurses to hide the newspapers, explained to me later, “Vince, I can’t do it. I’d have to remind her every day until she dies.”

            So she never knew. Though, what she knew and what she didn’t know draws too discrete a distinction, that line for her, in those last three years, too permeable for me to understand.

            I didn’t see her during those three years, spoke to her only over the phone. When my father visited, he’d call me so I could say a few sentences, listen while she strained to recognize me, while she blended Italian phrases with memories from decades past. Sometimes, her words would cohere. Sometimes, she’d ask me, “How’s Claudia, how’s your mother.”

            “Mom,” I’d say. “Mom, she’s fine.”

            At my great aunt’s funeral, my family and her neighbors fit easily into two pews of a cavernous church.

            “This can happen,” the priest said, gesturing at the nearly empty nave, “when you live to ninety-five.”

            I’ve liked to believe that for my great aunt, that for my grandmother, the last three years were peaceful, like lingering light after sunset, a quiet coda.

            I’ve liked to believe that what they didn’t know, or what they could no longer know, might have saved them some pain.

            I’ve liked to believe that neither of them felt alone.

            In the nursing home, my grandmother liked to blow kisses while she squeezed my hand, smacked lips and smiles between spoonfuls of ice cream.

            But in the end, she was alone. No one could visit during her last months. No one but a masked nurse could cradle her hand.