The Mattress

The hospice nurse stood patiently outside my grandmother's house while a procession of family members, waiting for their opportunity to talk to a woman who couldn't converse back, lined the hallway to the bedroom.

Naturally, I was last in line. Procrastination was, and always has been, my specialty.

I swayed back on my heels, leaning against the wall, humming quietly to myself. Trying, and failing, to stay in rhythm with the whirring machines keeping--barely--my grandmother alive.

Peeking out a nearby window, I saw the nurse. A wisp of cigarette smoke trailed around her bleached-white scrubs. I chuckled, recognizing the irony of the hospice nurse readying to kill herself in the same fashion as her patient.

"Humans will always human," I said to myself. Or so I thought. Other than the monotonous sound of the machines, the house had been quiet for so long I nearly forgot my cousin next to me.

She glanced in my direction but remained silent. There was no animosity. No judgement in my response to the situation laid out in front of us.

What, exactly, she felt, however, I don't know.

And I didn't ask.

We all, it seemed, had come to an unspoken agreement to allow the entire house, including the living, to slip into an uncomfortable silence.

When my grandfather died, only two years earlier, he had chosen to go during Christmas break. It was my freshman year, and I returned to their house and the town I had once called home, after several years away. The friends I grew up with were happy to see me and I them. Difficult circumstances, yes, but at fourteen years of age, priorities are not always what they should be.

Never one to be upstaged, my grandmother decided that taking two weeks to die simply wouldn't do. She went for two years and, timing it perfectly, orchestrated her grand finale over summer vacation.

It would still be a decent summer, I imagined. Another opportunity to reconnect with the friends I had left behind. But, it turns out, they had left me behind. By the time the hospice nurse had stepped outside to smoke in the July Oklahoma haze, I hadn't seen any of my old friends since I'd gotten into town. Three weeks earlier.

"Life is like bundle of threads," the hospice nurse said the day we arrived. "Slowly for some, and more quickly for others, everybody's threads fray and break eventually.

"Your mother," she said, glancing at my dad,"is on her last thread. She's a strong woman, and while she's doing all she can to prevent that thread from breaking, it won't be long now. We just have to wait and allow her to let that thread go."

Three weeks later, the thread was ready to snap.

Too quickly, the muted sobs and "I love you's" stopped coming from my grandmother's room, and I found myself standing at her door. I, too, had come to the end of the rope.

My grandparents lived like many of their generations--separately. They watched different shows, ate different meals, slept in different beds. Rarely did I see them show affection to each other. Even that would have been too much "togetherness," I suppose.

My grandfather's bed had been pushed to the room's side to allow space for the hospice machinery. Yet, the bed was still made: the sheets crisp and smooth. The pillows waiting for a head that hadn't been present in two years.

It was only then, though I had been in the room several times before, that I realized the absurdity--or what I thought of it at the time--of keeping a bed made and ready for a dead man.

I shuffled my feet to my grandmother's bedside, knelt, and stared at her. Silently.

I knew I should cry. I had heard others do so while waiting. Yet nothing came. I took her hand, said my own "I love you," and got up to leave. There was nothing else to do.

"You could help, right?" came a voice behind me.

I turned, ashamed at my own pathetic goodbye, and saw the nurse standing in the doorway.

"I'm sorry," I said. I'm not sure how I said it. As a question? As a statement? As an admittance of guilt for my inability to show any emotions? Even now, so many years later, I don't know.

The nurse smiled. Her teeth were yellow.

"You could help," she repeated. "Moving the old bed, I mean. We need to move it when..." she hesitated and stopped herself.

But the hesitation was long enough for me to fill in the final few words, and I simply nodded my head in agreement.

She smiled again, thankful for my quick response. Thankful she didn't need to finish a sentence she probably shouldn't have started.

"Perfect. Thanks, hon. I only need help with the mattress. Once we get that out, I can roll the bed away. Old thing's even got wheels," she said, shaking her head and allowing a shadow of another smile.

Squeezing my grandmother's hand one last time, I walked to the end of my grandfather's mattress. The nurse gently set the pillows down on top of the largest machine, temporarily muting the beeping, and grabbed her end.

Slowly, we picked up the mattress, sheets still attached, and I began walking backwards. The carpet crunched under my feet. Old. Decayed. Like forest leaves.

Then, it happened.

My grandmother woke up.

I hadn't heard her voice since we had been back. And still, I wouldn't. But her eyes were open for the first time in weeks, and they were now staring directly into mine. I stumbled, stopped, and stared back.

It was as if her eyes themselves were screaming. Terrified. Knowing. Yet utterly confused. Her own grandson, ushering in, making way for, death.

The thread broke the next day.

I went home having never said goodbye to my friends. Having barely said goodbye to the one person that mattered.

And nearly thirty years later, I still see the fragile woman somehow holding together a thread so frayed it should have disintegrated long ago. Holding it not with strength, as the nurse thought, but with fear. A woman who kept my grandfather's bed next to hers, with clean linens, for the same reason. Who held on for as long as she could, only to watch it be broken by a person she loved.

And who also loved her.