Four in the afternoon on Friday. She’s ninety now, my grandmother, and the weight of years seems to pull her down into the sofa cushions. Her eyes are half-mast, her body surrendering to gravity, sinking deeper with each passing moment. Fingers, frail and spotted with age, drift to the floor, searching, grasping at invisible threads, secrets she holds close in the labyrinth of her fading mind. Dementia and the dulling of senses have built walls around her, isolating her in a quiet world. Words are rare now, brief echoes of prompting. Yes. No. I suppose. Sometimes, her lips move, a silent struggle for language, like a fish gasping for air, words just beyond reach.
Bedtime nears, a ritual we’ve come to know intimately. The wheelchair becomes her chariot, my mother the steady hand guiding her down the hallway to the bedroom, a sanctuary at the house’s rear. Music fills the space – Dean Martin’s comforting croon of “That’s Amore” – as I gently lift her from the chair to the bedside commode. A silent ballet of care unfolds as we ease her from daytime clothes into the soft embrace of a nightgown. Then comes the small white pill, the sedative she’s taken nightly for thirty-five years, a nightly descent into sleep that began with a sky turned bruise-purple then black, the night her husband and sons-in-law vanished in a plane crash in the Idaho Floodwoods. A lifetime of waiting at the edge of that airstrip compressed into each swallow. I place the pill on her tongue, a solemn offering, a prayer for peaceful oblivion through the long night. But peace is not always granted. Some nights, my mother finds her awake in the darkness, fingers working restlessly at tissues, twisting them into tight knots. Where did he go? The whispered question hangs in the air. Where is your dad?
My grandmother is a haunting reflection, a possible future self for my mother in twenty years, and then for me, twenty after that. If I ever get like this, my mother confides, her voice barely a breath, promise me you’ll put me in a home. A nod is my only reply, but the unspoken truth hangs heavy between us. Ten years spent within the walls of nursing homes have painted a stark reality. Residents adrift in sleep at dining tables, heads bowed in exhaustion over uneaten meals. Lost souls shivering in hallways, draped in thin bed sheets. Invisible lives behind privacy curtains, in rooms shared with strangers, waiting for a familiar face, a loving presence that may never arrive.
No. That is not an option.
My mother will wake to the smell of French toast, her cherished breakfast, each morning I am there. Days will be filled with the gentle hum of light comedies on television, or the quiet warmth of the September sun on the deck. And when four o’clock shadows lengthen and her head begins its slow descent, down, down, down, I will guide her wheelchair to the bedroom at the back of the house and prepare her for the night.
Children never came into my life. I push away the thought of my own unknown future.
To help her stand, I secure a transfer belt around my grandmother’s waist, a supportive embrace. Her legs, fragile as sweet pea stems, balance precariously on feet with toes curled in on themselves. My mother’s hands are gentle as she applies cream to the delicate, chapped skin of her backside, a shield against bedsores, followed by a dusting of cornstarch, a small act of defiance against the inevitable.
Her gaze drifts, unfocused, lost in the distance.
Where has she journeyed to? Where is the spirited woman who shed the confines of a mid-century housewife in a North Idaho logging town? The woman who went to college alongside her daughter, embarking on a nursing career in her early forties, the age I stand at now?
It’s time to turn her, to pivot towards the bed, to ease her down.
Would you like to dance? The question escapes my lips, a spontaneous offering.
Her arms encircle me, a surprisingly strong embrace, and her head rests on my shoulder, a familiar weight. Dean Martin’s voice fills the room with another timeless melody, and we begin to sway. I rub her back, feeling the sharp angles of her shoulder blades beneath my hand. Her cheek presses against the pulse in my throat, a seeking comfort. My baby, she murmurs, a word that blurs the lines of time and roles. Beside us, the mirror on the bureau reflects our intertwined figures, but I don’t need to look to see. We lean into each other, grandmother and granddaughter, an ancient rhythm, a silent understanding, holding each other as if we were always meant to move together in this dance, swaying gently towards the end. This quiet moment, this tender embrace, is our Dance Me To The End, a poignant waltz in the face of fading light.
