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  She wasn’t rearranging the furniture or preheating the oven or turning the stove on or microwaving anything frozen or waving goodbye or buying a book or a newspaper or a magazine or pumping gasoline or driving our car away down the highway or riding her bike up the driveway or running through the backyard or walking through the living room.

  She wasn’t looking through the cupboards or locking the windows and the doors or sweeping and mopping the floors or mowing the lawn or doing the laundry or folding the clothes or closing the blinds or shading her eyes or turning the lights off or lighting matches or planting flowers or watering plants or drinking water or mixing drinks or fixing her hair-do up or doing the dishes or stripping our bed down or unbuttoning her shirt or her blouse or unzipping her pants or her skirt or rolling her nylons down her legs.

  She wasn’t turning the air on or the heat down or falling down and breaking her arm and her hip or getting up or waking up or standing up or sitting down in any armchair or climbing up the front steps or walking up the sidewalk or setting out place settings or sitting down at the dinner table or saying my name or touching my arm or my hair or my face or forgetting my name or my face or looking away or taking her pills or going to the doctor or the hospital or trying to sit up and eat or drink or talk or breathe.

  What Part of My Life I Was Living In

  I woke up and the television was playing the national anthem and the flag was waving on the television screen. But then the music stopped playing and the flag stopped waving and the station went off the airwaves. The television light blurred my eyes and I filled up with static. I couldn’t remember what part of my life I was living in anymore. That we were married was the last thing that I remembered.

  PART FOUR

  How Much He Cared for Her

  My Grandmother Oliver slept on a bed that my Grandfather Oliver had made up for her in their living room. She couldn’t get out of bed or get out of the pain that she was in during the last days that she was alive, but she wouldn’t let my grandfather call for an ambulance. She wouldn’t let him take her to the hospital and she wouldn’t go to any more doctors and she didn’t want any more of them coming over to their house either.

  My grandfather did everything that he could for my grandmother. He tried to make the loss of the use of her body seem less terrible than it must have been for her. He fed her and cleaned her and dressed her and gave her the pills that she was supposed to take. He did anything that she asked him to do, but he was old and sick too. He could only walk and move slowly and sometimes she would get impatient with him. She knew that she wasn’t going to be alive for very much longer and she was probably frustrated that she was able to do less and less for herself.

  She ate less and sat up less. She couldn’t walk on her own and then she couldn’t walk with her walker or with her two canes or with any other kind of help that he could give to her. She couldn’t stand up and then she couldn’t get up, sit up, or even roll over onto her side in the bed. She couldn’t change her own clothes or wash or clean her face or anything else. She couldn’t feed herself or scratch an itch or rub something that hurt. She couldn’t chew solid food and then even swallow soft food.

  My grandfather cared for her so much and I keep thinking about what he must have been feeling then. I keep thinking about how he had to learn how to do those things for her and around the house. He had never done the laundry or the dishes or any other kind of cleaning around the house. He had to learn how to cook. He started with soup and with toast and with other food that was easy for him to make and easy for her to eat.

  He learned about the laundry—what clothes could be washed together, when to use bleach, and how long things needed to stay inside the dryer—but worried about being away from her when he had to go downstairs to put the laundry in or take it out. He knew that it would take him so long to get back up to her upstairs in the living room, even if he could hear her ringing the metal ringer that he had left for her next to her bed. He wanted to be able to sit there with her so that he would be ready for her when she needed him.

  But there wasn’t anything that he could do that seemed to make her feel any better or even better enough to want to stay alive. He cared for her so much, but he couldn’t make the physical pain leave her body.

  They both knew that she wasn’t ever going to get up out of that living room bed again. She stopped eating any more food and only drank water and ate ice chips. She stopped taking her pills and died early one morning a few days later, a few hours before she was supposed to wake up.

  My grandfather stayed with her for a few hours before he called the doctor and the funeral home. My grandfather knew that was going to be the last time that he was going to be alone with her. But he was also waiting until she had been dead long enough so that she couldn’t be revived. My grandmother didn’t want to be only that much alive, even though my grandfather wanted her to be alive for as long as she could be.

  How Love Can Accumulate Between Two People

  My Grandmother Oliver wrote in her diaries throughout most of her life and they were passed on to me after she died. Other people inherited other things from her. People from her church took her clothes and her shoes. People from her quilting group picked up the boxes of scrap material that were never used, a few unfinished quilts, and packets of needles and spools of thread. My mother got my grandmother’s antique sewing machine. My sister got most of her real jewelry and her costume jewelry too.

  There were certain holiday dishes that my mother and my sister and my brother’s wife each wanted—a series of plates with winter scenes on them, a group of bowls made out of colored glass, some ornate serving dishes that were just used on holidays and birthdays. They split them up with each other, but they all seemed to feel some sense of loss in this. Those holiday dishes meant so much to each of them, maybe the idea or the feeling of a whole family being together, but each one of them only got some of them.

  But the diaries were the only things that I wanted from her after she died. I wanted to know what my grandmother had thought about for her whole life. I wanted to know what she wrote about the births of her two daughters and her three grandchildren. I wanted to know what she wrote about her daughter’s scarlet fever from when she was little and her daughter’s cancer that she died from forty years after that.

  I wanted to know what she wrote about her husband’s marriage proposal and about their years of marriage that they had together. I wanted to find out what she wrote about her husband’s years of heart problems and what she wrote about herself in her last years when her body started to fail and it became difficult for her to walk and to breathe.

  But she didn’t write down anything about any of these things in her diaries besides that they happened—that my grandfather showed her an engagement ring and that she put it on her finger, that her daughters said their first words and said other cute things as they grew up, that her daughter Anita was sick with fever, that my grandfather went into the hospital for a heart valve operation, that her sister Billie had Alzheimer’s disease, that Anita was sick with cancer, that my grandfather was recovering, that he came home and continued to improve, that they went to Billie’s funeral, and that they went to Anita’s funeral.

  There were hair clippings from each of her daughters from when they were babies and then little girls. There is also a little bit of peeled skin from my Aunt Anita, from the last months of her life, that is taped into one of the diary entries. But my grandmother never wrote anything down about being sad or tired or afraid. It was enough to go to the hospital and the doctor’s office with them and to take care of each of them when they came back home.

  But even all these serious things made up only a small portion of her diary entries for her whole lifetime. Most of the daily entries only noted daily things—if she washed or ironed, who visited the house, who she went out to lunch with, if they ate at home or ate dinner out, the days that she went to the beauty parlor and the kind of hair-do that she got, the clothes and
the quilts that she made and who she made them for.

  She made and washed and ironed lots of clothes. She ate lunch with lots of different friends and most of her other meals with her family. She visited other cities and countries and hospitals and funeral homes. She knew a lot of people who died of heart attacks and of strokes. It snowed a lot in her life.

  I found myself exasperated by her diaries and what I didn’t find there. But maybe nobody was ever supposed to read those diaries of hers. Maybe the diaries were just supposed to be for her while she was alive and not for anybody else after she died. But I still wanted to read something about my grandmother’s love for my grandfather or about her recognition of his great affection for her.

  That was how I started to think about how love can accumulate between two people over and through two lifetimes. And that reminded me of how, whenever I went over to their house to visit them in the evening, they were always sitting down next to each other on the couch in their living room.

  The Funeral Home that Had Been Somebody’s House

  My preoccupation with the dying and the dead started with my Grandfather Kimball when I was fourteen and he was dead. He was the first person who had died in my life and it was the first time that I was going to a funeral. But my mother and my father didn’t tell me what to expect when we got out to the funeral home. I only remember that I was told that I had to go, that I had to look nice, and that looking nice meant that I had to comb my hair, wear a belt, and tuck my shirt in.

  I got dressed up in my best clothes and the rest of my family did too. We all got into the family car and drove to a little town out in the country where my grandfather had lived. Nobody said anything on the drive out there, but the car windows were open and the driving wind was messing everybody’s hair up and making our good clothes seem worn out.

  My father parked the family car in a gravel parking lot behind what I thought was somebody’s house. I realized later that it had been somebody’s house, but that it had become a funeral home. We got out of the family car, walked around to the front of the funeral home, walked up the front steps, opened a screen door, and walked into what must have been somebody’s living room and had become the front room of the funeral home.

  The screen door closed behind us with a slap against the wood doorframe. The windows in that front room of the funeral home were all open and the wind was blowing through it, but it was still hot and smelled musty inside there.

  My mother and my father stopped inside the screen door and my sister and I stopped behind them. My mother and my father were talking to somebody or somebody was talking to them. I don’t remember what they said, but I remember that I wasn’t included in the conversation and that I started looking around that front room.

  I know now that it was the viewing room that we had walked into when we walked into the funeral home, but I didn’t know what it was then or why I could see my Grandfather Kimball at the other end of the viewing room all laid out inside his casket.

  I knew that he was dead, that his body was going to be inside a casket, that people were going to say nice things about him, and that they were going to bury him in a grave. But I didn’t expect it to be so casual—for the funeral home to be somebody’s house, for the viewing room to be somebody’s living room, and for there to be people standing around talking in somebody’s living room while there was a casket with my dead grandfather inside it in the living room too. I thought that I was going to be able to approach my grandfather’s casket, and that somehow in that approach that I was going to be able to prepare myself for his death, for him being dead, and for how that was going to feel.

  But I wasn’t prepared for it. It felt as if I had been punched in the stomach by somebody that I couldn’t see when I saw my grandfather’s dead body inside a casket and on top of a table in that living room. I didn’t know that the casket was going to be open. I didn’t know that we were going to have to look at him or that the skin on his face would be so limp that it wouldn’t look like his face anymore.

  Nobody told me that grief feels like fear. I kept trying to swallow, but my mouth had dried up. My tongue got thick and stuck to the roof of my mouth. My jaw started trembling up and down. I tried to hold my mouth closed with my hand. My eyes started opening and closing too. I tried to keep myself from crying.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. I closed my eyes tight and wiped them dry. I took deep breaths. I don’t think that anybody else noticed any of this. My mother and my father stopped talking with those other people. We all walked up to my grandfather’s casket.

  I remember that my father made me look at his father. I remember thinking that must have been what we were there for. I think that my father thought that was what we were supposed to do too—that we were supposed to look nice, look at the dead body, and then sit down to listen to the nice things that were going to be said about the dead person.

  I looked, but then looked away. We all turned away from the casket. We all walked back up to a row of chairs in the front of the viewing room and my father told us to sit down there. They were getting ready to say the nice things about my grandfather.

  I’m still surprised about the way I felt when I saw my grandfather’s dead body. My Grandfather Kimball wasn’t somebody that I had any real affection for. I don’t have any nostalgic memories of him. We never played catch or played cards or went fishing. He never pulled any quarters out from behind his ears or had any candy in my pockets. I mostly remember him as somebody to be afraid of, but I don’t think that it was my grandfather who made me feel afraid then.

  PART FIVE

  How They Touched Her As If She Were Still Alive

  I put my hand on her chest over her heart, but I couldn’t feel anything beating inside her anymore and when I leaned my ear down to her I couldn’t hear anything inside of her either. I pulled the blankets down off her body to see if there were anything that I could do for her, but the blood inside her seemed to be draining away from the front of her and down toward her back and into the backs of her legs. It made her face and arms look so pale, but the rest of her turned more purple and more red where the blood started to settle.

  Her skin seemed to fall away from her too. It pulled down and showed more of the shape of her face—the flat part of her forehead, the line of her jaw, and the angle of her cheekbones. It showed more of the bones around her collar and her shoulders and down her arms. It seemed to pull her mouth and her eyes open too, but she couldn’t see me or talk.

  I pushed her mouth back up and pulled her eyelids back down and held them closed until they stayed shut. Her arms were still a little warm, but her hands felt cold. Her skin was a little wet and then it dried out. The rest of her body heat seemed to be leaving her body too, but I tried to keep her warm. I covered her back up with the blankets and I wrapped myself around her on the couch and held onto her too.

  She seemed to feel a little warmer again, but that was probably just the body heat from me warming her skin back up. But then she started to feel colder again and heavy in my arms and it made me feel cold too. The hard smells and the gurgling sounds that were coming out of her made me turn my face away. There wasn’t anything else that I could do to take any kind of care of her anymore.

  I called the funeral home to see if they would come over to my home to take care of my wife for me. I told them that I couldn’t keep my wife warm enough anymore. I told them that I couldn’t lift her up off the couch and that her legs buckled too much when I tried to help her get up and that she couldn’t hold onto me with her arms. They told me that maybe I should wait in another room of our house, but I had to arrange her on the couch before they came over to our house to get her.

  I put her arms back down at her sides. I straightened her nightgown out and pulled the blankets back up to her neck. I brushed her hair out with her hairbrush and put her lipstick on her lips. I brushed some powder on her forehead and on her chin and on her nose. I brushed some color onto her cheeks for her.

 
I heard the van from the funeral home drive up in front of our house and then I heard them turn the engine off so that I couldn’t hear it anymore. They walked up the front walk and they knocked on the front door with a soft knock. They came through the front door and into the living room with their metal gurney. They were going to take my wife away from me and our house and with them to their funeral home.

  They spoke with soft voices. They called her by her name. One of them pulled her eyelids back up and checked to see if there were anything left inside her eyes, but they couldn’t see anything there. He listened for her heart through her chest, but he couldn’t hear it either. He took her temperature and some of it was already gone. He cut through the side part of her nightgown so that they could see where the blood had pooled down into the bottom part of her body, but he didn’t know why she had died. He said that her heart had probably stopped, but it didn’t feel as if it had to me.

  They moved her body slowly. They touched her as if she were still alive. They lifted her up and laid her back down on top of the metal gurney. They straightened her arms out and placed them along her sides. They covered her body up and her face up with a clean sheet. They pulled the sheet tight and tucked it in under the metal gurney and around her body so that it held onto the shape of her. They snapped the buttons of the gurney straps and they pulled the straps tight. They tried to do it in a quiet way, but it sounded loud to me.

  They rolled the metal gurney and my wife out of our house. They rolled her down the front walk and up to the back of their funeral van. They opened the funeral van’s two back doors up and one of them pushed a button that made the metal gurney’s legs collapse under her. They lifted her up and rolled the metal gurney and her body into the back of the funeral van. They closed the funeral van’s two back doors back up, but I didn’t hear the latch click shut even though it must have made a sound.