Death

"This is the disease that will shorten your life," the doctor said.

Translation: You're going to die.

That's what the oncologist told Nana last month after her leukemia diagnosis.

At her age and with the treatment they're using, she has a 20 percent chance of remission. But it's not traditional chemotherapy. It's not killing the leuko-bad-cells. It's just suppressing them. So even if she goes into remission, she'll have to continue the treatment that makes her sick.

And the treatment is only expected to work for so long. She'll have a little bit longer if she goes into remission.

What happens then?

She's too old for a treatment as rigorous and risky as a bone marrow transplant; they did tell her that. I think traditional chemo was considered too rough on her body, too. The doctors made it clear that her best option is the treatment she's using, and it has an expiration date.

When it stops working is when she starts dying, I guess.

---

The boys in my third-grade class loved when my dad chaperoned our field trips. He was usually the only dad. When we got all dressed up to go to the theater and a bird pooped in my hair, Daddy was one of the boys. He tried not to laugh as he ineffectively dabbed at the mess with his handkerchief and I sobbed. He couldn't help it, though; he laughed so hard he had to hold his stomach. The boys loved him for it.

So I wasn't the only one annoyed with the inconveniences that sometimes cropped up before field trips. The main inconvenience was people dying.

When the bereaved are scheduling a funeral, their main concern -- aside from grief -- tends to be having the service in the small window of time between when out-of-town relatives can arrive and when the body is too far past death to resemble their loved one. Not the beach field trip to study marine life that the preacher was going to chaperon.

Funerals got priority. And I grew up thinking of them as an inconvenience -- things that put me in a group of people I didn't know well at the last minute, things that called us home from vacations, things that meant Daddy had to write two sermons that week. Things that took my dad's attention away from me.

Despite the large number of deaths I was aware of during childhood, my parents shielded me from the truly awful parts. I didn't go with Daddy to visit people in critical condition. At open-casket funerals, we sat near the back. Our parents discouraged my sisters and me from looking at the bodies.

"It's not her," Momma said at her grandmother's funeral. "She's not there anymore. I want you to remember her as she was when she was healthy."

Death was a wispy fog that my fingers couldn't grasp, much less my mind comprehend. Its fleeting, fuzzy edges were romanticized in books and movies, rosy in its foreignness. Death was something that happened to other people's people. Not to mine.

---

It was my PaPa, Daddy's father, whose passing taught me that death is not romantic or immaterial, as I had always thought of it. It is chilling and solid, like a tombstone. It is final.

In this life, at least, it is final. And that's enough finality for one's first brush with death.

That was nearly 12 years ago, but missing PaPa still occasionally pricks at me. It's not a stabbing hurt, like it was right after he died.

But when I'm not expecting it, something reminds me of him, and I miss him. I wish he were here. I wish I could talk to him and hear him laugh. 

---

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time -- the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes -- when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever -- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

---

I feel guilty that I've started to prepare myself for Nana's death.

At first, I thought it was just the diagnosis that was upsetting me. She's going to be sick for most of the rest of her life. Grandpoppa will wear himself out taking care of her. It's unlikely that she'll know my children.

But yesterday, after a wedding, I sat on the side of the bathtub in our hotel room and looked up at my husband.

"My Nana's going to die, isn't she?"

He paused.

"Yes, sweetheart. Not right now, but sooner than we'd like."

I'm not sure why it hit me then. I sobbed when Momma told me the test results, but it was days before we knew the prognosis. And I accepted that news with uncharacteristic serenity.

Suddenly, it was all those tiny things I loved and hated in Nana that I wanted to cling to. 

The irritating pride she exuded after she fixed a lasagna and said, "It's better than your Momma's, isn't it?" (I said no, just to be contrary.) Her exasperated laugh after she scolded her grouchy old poodle. The same stories from my childhood over and over. Her determination to love us by baking us cookies and making us clothes. The smell of her house that lingered in the quilt she made me before I went to college.

---

Last week, I called her. She asked about Michael, as she always does. I told her about his nursing school award, how his instructors say he has a wonderful bedside manner, how patients love him. I laughed.

"He must use it all up in clinicals," I told her. "He's always picking on me."

"No, Rebekah, that's not fair," she said. "Remember your rehearsal dinner? You were upset because you couldn't find your contact solution. Remember? Michael just put his hand on you, and Rebekah, I saw you relax. You relaxed. He takes care of you.

"He's a good man, Rebekah. It took a while, but God finally stepped up to the plate and sent you a good one."

It was eye drops. I had forgotten. Such a small thing, but I had been worried my eyes would be too irritated for contacts on our wedding day. Michael did calm me. He took me to the drugstore and helped me find the drops. He even insisted that we not rush to dinner.

"They can't start without us," he said. "It doesn't matter if we're late."

---

There's no resolution, no way to end this monologue that wraps it all up neatly. Grief is much more fluid than that -- icy and defined at its most acute, melting into a murky haze with distance. The pain of losing Nana has started, even though I hope she's the exception, the miracle, the first patient for whom the treatment works indefinitely.

On the side of the bathtub, I apologized to Michael for crying on what was supposed to be a happy occasion. I didn't know where it had come from, I told him. I would pull it together.

"It's OK," he said. "This is sad stuff."