She kept the house, filled its backyard with sweeping banks of flowers and sturdy, manicured bushes. She rode to the grocery store once a week with neighbors. She won awards for flower arrangements grown entirely in her own garden. She kept the birdbath full. When a young neighbor planted a small, struggling marijuana plant just inside her property line, she watered and cared for it, put up a small circular screen around it to protect it from the man who mowed the lawn, and nursed it to strapping adulthood, whereupon it disappeared. She was not the least bit perturbed. She grew flowers to cut them and bring them indoors. Everything was always fresh and changing, vanishing and being replaced before it became the least bit wilted.
The "twist incident" she had clearly marked under the category of Misspent Youth, and shelved away from further consideration or discussion. The injury never stopped reminding her; after a morning in her garden she would get up stiffly from her flower beds, trundle to the house and lay down for a half-hour or so before heading back down to the kitchen. There was a period in my childhood where I was the perfect height to be a human walking support for her; I have vague memories of the time when I would be obliged to stroll around at her right side with her hand gripping the top of my head like an oversized, hairy knob on the top of a whining, complaining cane.
Life slowly stiffened, and she left the house when she couldn't do justice to the bushes and the birdbath. Her eyes grew stiffer, and it was harder to move from one word to the next when reading. She moved into a small apartment, then a smaller one where she ate meals together with the other residents, and then a bed in a nursing home, where people moved her like a puppet and treated her like a pet. We knew things weren't going well when she ignored the flowers we brought.
Timing wasn't her strong suit, and so it should have been no surprise when she got sick around Christmas, changing our family plans and obliging a flurry of desperate phone calls to an airline that never wishes to hear my family's name ever again. It shouldn't have been a surprise when she died three months later, yesterday, on the day before I was about to leave on an intricately-planned, long-anticipated, and extremely overdue vacation. This morning a plane once again took off without me, as I drove back toward home to help take care of the few things left to do.
There had been a few small signs of hope. For Christmas, all she wanted was a "weasel ball", a small battery-operated gizmo that can best be described as a cat toy. When asked if there were any other traditionally-human gifts she would like, she admitted she also wanted an electric toothbrush. I had a hard time believing that fate could be so mean to take away someone who, at the age of eighty-seven, was suddenly developing a new and somewhat eccentric sense of humor.
It's hard to build up the skills that make mourning any easier. When I worked on the ambulance, I sometimes saw people die before my eyes, but I was off scrubbing up the blood or running another call by the time things came around to the shock, grief, and mourning of those left living. Television shows us lots of ways to kill someone and very few ways to learn to accept a death.
I want to make a movie in which death's consequences get equal time. It will be a horror movie, of course, called "Vacationland". For the first hour, the main characters become increasingly aware that something is stalking them. There is a thing, a creature just outside the film's frame. It is without pity or fear, and it whispers to the characters in unexpected places and moments, telling them that it will eventually find them all, one by one, and devour them completely. Halfway through the movie, it kills. A character disappears. For the last hour, the creature is never seen again, granting everyone else a reprieve in which they just cry and try to accept the loss . The scary music stops, and the cast weeps, waiting helplessly for the inevitable sequels.