effigy

Sweeping the Clouds Away

I can't find the wings that the flight attendant (they were stewardesses back then) gave me. My first flight on a jet plane, first trip just me and Daddy. We were going to visit all the family people, grandmas and whatnot who hadn't seen me since the accident. I remember the stewardesses passed food out. I can't tell if I really had peas and mashed potatos and meat, or if only Daddy did, or if neither of us did and my memory's remixing images, and I'm just seeing that plate's particular contents because now it's twenty-five years of TV later. What I do know is that I was little and special and with my daddy so they gave me plastic wings. And I wish I still had them now.

I wish like that about spending time with my grandparents. One of mine died when I was eight because she had cancer. She haunts me. Maybe I'm just a hauntable person. Because I was haunted by her long before she actually died. People can forget that a child is old enough to know that cancer means die. Old enough to know that more than a game of house is ending when Mommy comes in the room and tells Mandy to go home because you can't play anymore today. Old enough to burst into tears immediately upon impact of the news. Old enough to cry yourself to sleep every night and wish you could cry into a pan and fill it up and give it to God like a big spilling-over offering plate and say please please please don't take my grandma off the world because she is going to the devil if you do because she doesn't go to church.

I was haunted by her on sunny green-grass-flanked sidewalks that led the way up to sterilized hospice doors. The days could be gorgeous. I will never know how days can be so gorgeous when someone you love is standing in line to exit DAY forever. Visiting her kept me from some softball games, which was just as well since I was totally uncoordinated and humiliated by softball in those days. I was a child who didn't know the first thing about how to drive, how to have sex, how to divide or multiply, or even how to speak sometimes. But don't try to tell me that a child can't love or that a child can't grieve. Seven is plenty old enough to feel a softball-sized lump in your throat that won't go away no matter how gorgeous the day or how many pans you fill full of tears.

We had relief, I suppose. Elevators we ran to like escape pods to take us down and out of sight of my intubated grandma. In the hospice's rec room, they had orange sherbet and a player piano and books and games. There were never any other kids there. Just me and Josh. On a good day we got several cups of sherbet each. One superb day some people brought us these crocheted roses. I don't know why. Mine was rainbow yarn and J's was purple I think. I kept mine a long time. I think I still have that. Not like the wings I lost. Not like the grandma.

When my grandma died I was sleeping on the couch at my other grandma's house. It was a sort of light brown couch and had dark brown flower stems and leaves or something like that on the upholstery. I don't think I had to have plastic under me, but at least a sheet, just like on a real bed. My cancer grandma's couch was sort of a blue-greenish plaid design with wood trim somewhere near the arms I think. It was squarer than this light brown rounded-off one. Except of course there were months and months before she went into the hospital and then the hospice where my cancer grandma had sheets under her and slept all the time, day and night, on that blue-greenish plaid squarish couch. And there was a round coffee table with lids that folded up so you could put your stuff inside, usually books. Josh and I were sitting at that table when he bit a pickle and cried because it hurt his tooth, broke a filling or hit a cavity or something -- I think on Easter. That coffee table got moved to my non-cancer grandparents' log cabin years later. Or maybe that's another memory mix-up. But who cares about coffee tables or pickle tables or what shape the house. My parents were at the hospice and I was on a stupid round couch when my grandma's life folded up and she went to hell.

Maybe she didn't, I don't know. My parents were with her all those last weeks, and they say sometimes she would sing songs about Jesus that they never knew she'd even heard before. I guess when she was a little girl she went to church sometimes. It was too much to fathom as an eight-year-old how it was that my bright-red-lipsticked beautiful grandma in the coffin was once an eight-year-old too. That she didn't always work in an office and wear a red and white plaid blazer and pop marachino cherries in her mouth like candy and make us our Christmas stockings out of felt and sequins and buy us "surprises" at garage sales and collect ceramic pirate mugs and melt caramel in pots on the stove and spank my daddy with that weird paddle. But the only time I actually got furious was at the funeral when my other grandma had her hands on my shoulders and said it was time to go, and we had to turn away from the casket. It was too soon. Of course she had no way of knowing, but it was just way too soon. How could I have possibly been ready?

Stupid cancer. Stupid useless letters I used to write her -- notebook scraps with crayoned pictures of red men with horns and pitchforks and oddly-spelled pleas to love Jesus so she wouldn't "go to the davel." Stupid pans and sunny days and sheeted couches and soft fake roses and bowls of bloody sour cherries.

She had a thing for all things orange. Tiger lilies were her favorite. They haunt me every June. For twenty years now she's been dead and the lilies leap and blare and cackle like girls who scoot up into the infield whenever it's your turn to bat. You haven't got a chance. The one year I forgot the anniversary of her death was the one year I went shopping and ended up buying a vivid orange top from GAP -- something hawaiianish and clearanced and totally out of character. I got home and laid the purchase on my bed, where it finally occurred to me that of course my grandma had died that day, so of course she had to throw a little orange on the sheets and a little sharpness into my slowly rounding-out life.

I know how to drive now. I visit my family this week. The family that hasn't seen me since the new apartment or the new car or the new job -- we're all having a reunion in honor of my two living grandparents. I can't say my non-cancer grandparents anymore, because it wouldn't be true. Between heart bypass surgery and a double masectomy and chemo and radiation, my other grandma has come far in the past year and a half toward disproving my initially well-supported impression that cancer = automatic death. They live in a cabin in Florida now and are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary -- and they chose to spend it camping out in Indiana with all of us. I'm supposed to be making arrangements for taking a big color-coordinated family portrait while we are together. My immediate clan claimed orange for our color early on.

What are our lives? Just a flash in the pan. And we offer up what's in the pan to God -- not because the contents are so great but because the God is. The God isn't deaf to my please please please cries, whether they are for him to keep someone on the world or to just get on with it and take me off. I am learning mercy. I am learning compassion. And these things too have been on my wish-I-had list. I am learning how to tie a cherry stem in a knot with just my tongue, and one day I just might have to learn how to swallow hard news or tubes with grace. Because not every lump will melt out of your throat soon enough, not even on the sunniest of days. There is room at least for a whistle or a bleat, and who knows but that maybe an old song you knew about Jesus will unfold and wing its way out. The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

Posted by joydriven at June 12, 2004 11:29 AM | TrackBack