Her Last Room

I stand face-to-frontal with this latched door. Somehow, its hold over me is more than the sum of my cerebral parts.

The door senses my hesitancy to move beyond it, to cross a threshold, to clasp its cold handle as a first steppingstone. They say the maiden stage of grief is the hardest part.

They say, do they? Well, they’re fucking wrong.

Mentality is causality, and walking through this entrance into a furnished past is tantamount to squaring off with my greatest regret. The first thing I notice is the walls, shapeshifting cubes of curtailment.

They're colored vantablack coupled with a matte and mottled sheen.

SO devoid of depth.

Overhead, fluorescent bulbs hum with the sterile ingenuity of hospital room modernity. The light is too white, too flat, too clinical, revealing everything.

In the center of the room sits a bed covered in a white sheet and headed with a lone pillow.

My grandmother’s lithe frame lies under it. Her chest barely rises, sometimes it doesn’t rise at all. Her skin carries the waxy pallor of someone who has outlived their body’s mortal contract.

Indeed, she has. This means nothing; it counts for nothing.

I'm not giving up on her. Is it selfish to want more life from a 96-year-old vessel? Selfishness is the reason (and recourse) why I'm back here, in this ruin of a room.

If I had been a better granddaughter at her bedside, would I have peace? Rumination is a beast unto itself, and this battle is duly laid bare in this -whatever it is - I'll call it the In Memoriam Room.

I step forward cautiously, like a child broaching sliding screens between life and death for the first time. “Granny?” My voice trembles as I stutter the sacrosanct word.

“Granny, can you hear me?”

Her eyes remain closed. Gated. Sealed with solemnity.

What happens next is sheer instinct; I grab her shoulders, fingers digging into the frail slope of bone beneath skin, shaking her harder than I ever shook anyone.

“Breathe,” I scream. Then louder: “Breathe. Breathe. BREATHE!!!” Her head lolls. No ritualistic rise. No fateful fall.

Nothing.

Panic-stricken and kinetic, I lift her - she weighs almost nothing - and shake harder, as if coltish force could wrestle love into a body destined for the ground.

“Come back,” I choke. “Don’t do this. I can be better. You can re-live your last year with me.” Her eyes remain shut. Her lips, slightly pursed, are still and stiff.

The fluorescent lights flicker.

⚡️⚡️⚡️RESET⚡️⚡️⚡️

I blink, and she’s back in bed. Unmoved, seemingly unbothered by my breakdown seconds earlier. The sheet is smooth again. Her breaths are back! Hoarse and shallow, yet she's alive?!

A silhouette of a man stands at the entrance to the room. He's tall and slender. Composed like someone who has attended countless tragedies and thrives on the futility of loss. His suit is an immaculate ornamentation of red velvet and a typecast beige bow tie.

“You called,” he says.

I didn’t speak. But maybe I did. Maybe grief has a frequency that infidel thespians can hear. I recognize the musk; it's the scent of hell.

“Mephistopheles?” I ask, but my voice quavers. He smiles gently, like a tutor indulging a mute student. “Close enough.”

“I want her back, name your price.”

He tilts his head, almost bored. “Price? What could a sheepish, doe-eyed girl like you offer me?"

“I’ll give you anything.”

“That,” he murmurs, “is the problem. Anything is too vague. It lacks artisanal flair and imagination. It reeks of desperation."

He lifts my grandmother's hand with one precise motion, examining her limp fingers with dispassionate curiosity. “This one’s contract,” he says, “was signed long before you imagined yourself capable of rewriting it.”

“There has to be a deal,” I insist.

“There is,” he agrees, smoothing the sheet. “Your soul for hers." I hurriedly sign my name on the dotted grey matter of my mind. No hesitation.

"Intriguing," he snickers. "There can be no deal."

I thunder toward his face and incise him with my bloodshot eyes, panicked and disoriented to time and place. "I fucking signed the contract, I've done everything you asked?!"

He doesn't flinch, and why would he? He's a daemon of the underworld. I lipread in slow motion as he opens his cursed lips.

"You have no soul to take."

The lights flicker, then flash in one, finite coruscation.

⚡️⚡️⚡️RESET⚡️⚡️⚡️

I fall to my knees and pray - an act of subservience to the heavenly hope-and-where-art-thou being. I haven't attempted this since childhood.

“God,” I begin, embarrassed by how foreign the word feels in my pithy mouth, “if you’re listening… I need help. I need strength. I need her ALIVE. Please.”

My voice fractures in disavowed motion.

“I’ll believe in your holiness. I’ll change. I’ll be anything. Just don’t take her yet.”

The cube-like room softens at the edges, almost like it's peering over me to listen with intent. The fluorescents hum quieter than before; they're almost sympathetic. Even they take pity on me.

All the while, my grandmother's breath stops again.

God remains silent. Typical, where is he when atrocities pepper the world? Always so fucking silent.

Or maybe grief is too quiet to arouse him from his catatonia.

⚡️⚡️⚡️RESET⚡️⚡️⚡️

Exhausted, I sit in the cold plastic chair beside her, the one too small for comfort, the one that feels deliberately designed to s-n-a-p the spirit of whoever chooses it.

My grandmother's hand lies open on the bed. I slide mine over to hold it tight.

“It’s okay,” I whisper. “If you have to go, go. You've lived long, you've achieved so much. You've been the greatest matriarch I could have asked for.”

A strange warmth settles on her skin, it's not febrile or feverish.

Her eyelids flutter once, in some spirit of awareness crossing her gaunt, sallow features. For the first time, she looks peaceful.

The bulbs dim.

Not a flicker, not a reset? It's just a soft, controlled fade. The bed dissolves into darkness. The walls soften into pools of opalescent white, and they're beading with my tears in unison.

Only her soft, wrinkled hand remains in mine. The hint of warmth in her palm gives way to a chill, and she's gone again.

The idle door in the room swings open, and I'm okay with that.

I step out - not into another loop, but into a corridor of natural light plays, shapes and futures melding into a path forward for me? Nobody can foretell the future, yet I've remodeled the past too many times.

It achieved nothing.

I finally realize what the room was teaching: bargaining isn’t about saving the dying from their final destination. It’s about succumbing to false illusions, ones that deceive us into believing we can change the unchangeable.

This third insidious stage was my emotional blockade.

Grief is a monster unto itself, and now? I'll work with it, side by side. Perhaps there are puzzled pieces of peace to be found on the other side of mourning.

I want to forgive myself.

(c) Edward Swafford 2025

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Her Last Room is a fictional story inspired by my late grandmother. I was her protector, and she my confidante. She spent the final year of her life in residential aged care, and I never forgave myself for failing to be a stronger advocate.

I was twenty at the time. I had the means, yet I didn't have the maturity. I thought her dementia diagnosis meant she was already dead.

I was so uneducated.

After she passed, the facility was sanctioned by the Australian federal government for mass breaches of care. This compounded my guilt.

Whilst I never saw any wrongdoings during visiting hours, I now know they don't happen in full view of family members. I became an aged care nurse to "right" my "wrongs" surrounding my grandmother's situation.

Suffice to say, many aged care facilities are poorly staffed, underfunded, run by uncompassionate managers, and residents suffer as a result.

***Title image hyperlink.