A Warming Stillness

  
They posed for pictures grins wide and kisses puckered with their dying grandmother who looked in her nineties but was in her sixties. The cancer wilted her hair and sunk her skin. The drugs killed the little sanity that remained after the stroke. Grandma was as unresponsive as the static photo. I stood aside preferring a quiet moment away from flashing lights and captured death.

I just held her hand. It was all I knew or could muster. I didn't really know her even though we lived less than a hundred miles apart. I sat there feeling her soft loose skin warming with each passing moment tuning out the conversations about haring San Francisco and football games behind me. This was my quiet moment with my aunt before she passed.

She snapped awake and pulled her hand out of mine. A flash of confusion turned to clarity which brought a deeper sleep. I kissed her forehead and we left.

She left the hospital the next day and returned home. She died about two hours later. I don't have a photo to remember her. I have my memory and that moment of warming stillness, and it makes my own mortality a little less scary.

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