Story for a grandma

Someone else told me to post a story. A second somebody posted up stories of their own. My muse gave me this one at lunch, and I've spent a little while working on it. Different vein then I normally intend to write, but you don't get to control what your muse tells you. Could do with more editing and all that, but I have to get to sleep. Since this blog was to help me to release some creativity, I figured it would be a good spot for it.

With that, enjoy...

I sit at my grandmother's bedside, holding her hand and uttering the soothing phrases needed when she's conscious. Sometimes I'm me and she's herself and I am reminded of why I am here. But other times I am my mother, no matter how often I gently remind her otherwise. There are worse times, when she mistakes me for people who have moved on ahead of her a decade ago or longer.

It's only when she's fully lucid that she even realizes roughly what year it is. Other times I try, it seems like she's simply agreeing with me without understanding what I'm saying. As though by giving her assent, she might dispel the terrible voids forming in her mind. But I don't push it either. We can not change what time we have left or the form it will take, so we talk when the chance comes.

So here I am like the guardian of a light house, keeping the light lit so that everyone can make it back safe to harbor. Here, in this room I remember from childhood as being filled with the scent of lilac, the feel of fabrics and the bright colors of the cloth. The work that she filled her life with as she made things of beauty for her friends and family.

It's darker now, and cleaner. The nurse that comes once a week chastises me if it smells different. The fabrics have been folded and put away; grandmother won't be working on them again. I keep the room tidy, so that she doesn't worry when she rejoins us in the present. I feel that sometimes, that she's concerned about what has happened in her absence, while she was in a by-gone day.

I wonder what it will be like when I get older. The doctors say it is inheritable. Will I be laid up like this, and taken care of by one of my children or grandchildren? Will they cry tears into the comforter beside my arm. Tears I won't notice or understand while I am busy revisiting these days or even the days that I haven't yet lived?

I wipe away damp salty tracks which run across my cheeks and open the window curtains. It is midmorning and the army base across the bay has all three of their white domes visible today. When I was visiting her house as a child, my grandmother and I would eat our breakfast downstairs and watch the base. The domes looked like giant mounds of snow from her place, the only snow I'd see in our climate. We'd joke that it was too warm a day if we couldn't see them or that it was going to be cold outside when they were uncovered.

As an adult, that illusion was dispelled. I was too young to know of the cold war, and what it meant when they tried to hide the base. It wasn't something that you could explain to a child, so she found another way to let it exist without having it hang over my head.

She was always like that, finding ways to let me live my life without worrying about what was beyond my control. She had a cookie when I was sad, a shoulder when I needed to cry, and an ear when I had to talk. Wisdom when I was lost, a hand when I needed help. All the parts of herself that she could, she used to help me.

She did so much for me and loved me so dearly, that I could not stay away now. Not when she was in her hour of need and not when there was so much that I wanted to thank her for. But it is hard to sit here and hold her hand, to speak the comfort that she needs to hear when she doesn't know who I am, or why I am here. Or even that I love her.

But there are moments though, in those precious few moments that I am me and she is grandma, we squeeze each other's hands and smile. They may not be long or often, but they are moments that live in a time of their own, the moments when she knows my love and returns it.