I’ve heard grown ups talk about sick people before. My mom talks about them a lot because she works with old people clients that are always dying and she has to go to their hospitals or homes or churches to pay her respects and take care of their business. Aunt Martha goes too but I don’t even know why because it’s not her job like it is mom’s.  She just likes it and is probably very good at it by now. But every time I asked mom if I could go too she just said dad was coming home specially early from work and I should stay and help him make dinner, which is a lousy reason because I’m not even supposed to use the stove. So I never saw a sick person until grandma.

 But at least I’ve heard a lot of grown ups talk about sick people before and so I know that everybody says things like how they look so sad and small in their hospital beds. I thought about that a lot when dad took me to the hospital the first time to visit grandma because I was so nervous and I kept imagining how sad and small grandma could be. But then I actually saw her and I thought instead, She makes so much more sense that way.

I told dad my thought about grandma and it was a dumb idiot move of me because it made dad sad. When dad gets sad I get sad too and I was really sorry I thought that about grandma, like she made more sense to me in that hospital bed and everything. I didn’t mean I liked seeing her sick like that. It actually made me scared and gave me this really tight feeling in my stomach like the way my upstairs bedroom must feel when mom puts too much clothes in the washer and floods the basement.

What I meant was that grandma just seemed so much more normal being sick. No makeup, no poofy hair, no shoulder pads, which she probably would have been too embarrassed to admit that she used but I found anyways when we were going through her closet after the funeral. When she was in the hospital bed, lying down in that big drapey nightgown they give patients to use, she just looked more like a regular old person to me than like a grandma. She looked like a real, simple living human being, which my mom said was ironic because that’s when she was actually dying. I tried telling dad about my ironic thoughts but he just got sad again. Even though he didn’t say he was sad, I knew it and this time it made me cry for him.

I cried a lot when we were visiting grandma die. I cried because I would be a dumb idiot and say things like how grandma made sense and it would make dad sad, I cried because I wasn’t really crying for grandma but knew I should be, and I cried mostly because I could see dad wanting to cry but not doing it so I’d do it for him.  When I cried he could comfort me. He was really just comforting himself but without having to use his own tear ducts. Not like Uncle Robert, dad’s brother, who cried through three straight dinners after the funeral. Nobody comforted him though so he just cried while we all ate. He was like a little boy. I told my dad that and he said that little boys tend to live inside big men just like sometimes big women live inside little girls, which made me happy because he was really telling me he loved me so much. It made me feel better about the dumb idiot things I said.

Really dad was telling everyone he loved them so much. But mostly not with words, because when grandma was sick and we all moved in to live with her and grandpa, we wheeled her bed into the living room so we could always sit together and sometimes we couldn’t say words because grandma was sleeping and she needed her rest. So our conversations were lots of times silent and dad was always showing people he loved them without talking out loud. Mom said dad was being so lovey because he needed extra love back and I know too that the best way to be extra loved back is to give extra love forward. Like when my mom drops me off at piano lessons which I actually hate and so I want to hold her hand until she has to leave so that she pays me extra special attention.

We all were like that. Especially grandpa. Grandpa would sit next to grandma and hold her hand even when she had her eyes closed. Not just regular holding hands, or even gentle holding hands, the way everybody else was touching her when she was sick, but real true holding hands. I would watch him put his big clunky hand on hers that was all spotty and to me his hand was yelling, “YOU ARE STILL HERE WITH ME!” I think grandma thought his hand was yelling that too because she would normally smile when he did that and sometimes open her eyes and most always come back to him. Except for the last time though.

I wasn’t there when grandma actually died. I was asleep in a bed in a hotel, which is strange because I was sleeping in the apartment with everybody else every night before then. I wonder if they knew she was going to die that night and so they wanted me to be away. That makes me the most sad. It made me wonder how many people are sleeping in hotels because someone knew something they didn’t and wanted them to be away. Mom said it was for the best though because I would have been too sad and too scared to do anything. My cousin Michael, who is 19 and was there because he wouldn’t be too scared to help, told me that she died at 2:27 in the morning, so I probably would have been asleep anyway. He was trying to make me feel better by saying that but I didn’t even care because you know what I was the first person to realize when he said that? That grandma died on July 22, which is 7/22, which is the opposite of 2:27. So she died on 7/22 2:27 which makes me think something special was going on in the universe. Mom said I was a very clever girl and even grandpa smiled.

After she died things moved very fast, which was tough because things had been moving very slow before that. At the wake there were a lot of faces that I didn’t know but all said they knew me. Dad tried to be social with them but I think secretly he just wanted to sit by grandma’s coffin alone so mom did most of the talking.  At the end of the day they closed the lid on grandma’s coffin and dad was the last one in there. He just stood watching them do everything like take off her rings and put in a letter that grandpa wanted in there for her.  Dad reminded me of one of those guards that stand outside that palace in England and don’t ever move, because outside he was just watching but inside I don’t know what. At the funeral I cried more, kind of because I was sad that my grandma was gone but mostly because I was sad that everyone else was so sad.

Most families go right home after funerals but we stayed out there with my grandpa another week to help him sort through her stuff. (That’s when I found her shoulder pads.) By the end of the week my mom said everyone was exhausted and we loved each other very much but really needed time to breathe by ourselves, so me and mom and dad went home to Chicago. Mom said that grandma would always be in our lives, but it was time to wrap up her death.

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Next winter I heard my dad talking on the phone with my grandpa and I saw him get that face like the one he had at the wake where he’s watching but not showing. Mom told me that grandpa got a girlfriend and was thinking of bringing her to Christmas. I asked dad why that made him sad.

“Well Jessie, it just makes me miss my mother.”

“But now she’s dead.”

“Yeah, she is. And my father’s moving on.”

“Where’s he moving on to?”

“Just in general. In his life.”

“Yeah but grandpa shouldn’t move anywhere he should stay where he is.”

“No, no. He shouldn’t have to stay where he is. He deserves to move on if it makes him happy.”

“But we’re staying where we are, right?”

“Well, I guess I haven’t thought of it like that. I suppose we all have to move on, eventually. In our own ways.”

I bit my lip and asked my question and hoped I wasn’t being a dumb idiot. “Is grandpa hurting you, dad?”

“No, Jess. He’s just being human.”

I didn’t know anything else to say about being human so I touched his hand like grandpa would touch grandma’s hand to show him that I understood what he was feeling and so that my hand could yell, “I AM STILL HERE WITH YOU!”

And he heard my hand yelling that because he used his own tear ducts.