Grandma.

I don't know if I should post this.

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I didn’t really know what to do with myself, so I just sat there and held her hand and told her to rest easy, and told her that I loved her. I don’t remember if I said that last part out loud, but I thought it, and I’m not sure she would have heard me anyway.
She just lay there, mostly asleep, drifting in and out, waking a little, eyes closed, murmuring words I couldn’t quite understand and feigning laughter under her breath. It was a shadow of the laugh I’d heard from her while I was growing up, but it was the same laugh. I held her hand and watched the people in the hallway whisking past the door.
They were loud, and the people on the soap opera on television were loud too, but Grandma still slept. She breathed heavily, dressed in her light blue sweater, still wearing her slippers and lying on top of her covers. When she’d drift into consciousness, she’d reach for the beads around her neck, and I’d try to help her find them.
On her bulletin board were pictures of all of her family - her children, her grandchildren, her great grandchildren, all surrounding a big picture of her and her husband. I knew that if she woke up and if I asked her about him, she’d tell me it was Adolph, that he was her husband and that he was a good man. Her eyes were failing her, but she’d easily recognize the image. There were a lot of people in the pictures, dozens and dozens of people who would never have been if not for her. They were scattered across the country, now; a few lived around here and would visit her faithfully, daily. But for now, she was alone except for me.
And I would leave, too. I would have to walk away soon enough, because the world was waiting for me. And I wondered how I would leave. Every time I tried to walk away, she would stir, and I would turn around and stare at her again, and I’d convince myself to stay a little while longer.
I sat and tried to talk to her, tried to say something, tried to say the right something. But she couldn’t hear me, and if she could, she couldn’t talk to me. And so I just told her to rest easy.
And so I wondered why I was there, not talking.
But then I realized that this – me being there – wasn’t about talking. For some reason, it was alright that we couldn’t talk. We didn’t need to.

And so I sat, and I listened – to her breathing, to the television, to the people in the hallway - and I held her hand, and I told her to rest easy.
But eventually, I knew that I couldn’t stay any longer, and the world wouldn’t wait. And so I got up and I walked to the door, turning one last time to watch her lie there and breathe, and rest.
And this was when I finally realized that this might be the last time that I would ever see her alive. So I stood, and I listened and I watched. And I turned, and I walked away from my Grandmother.
As I walked down the hall, an old woman in a wheelchair stopped me and asked in a gentle voice, “How are you doing today?”
I told her I was good, and asked her how she was.

She told me she was fine.