The Last Summer with my Grandmother
With my grandmother gone, who would hold up the sky?
Those mornings in June I took my coffee on the long plantation porch overlooking the corral and paddocks. I listened to the barn staff turn out the horses each morning, heard the crushing of frost under their hooves. The last of the spring snows were fading and with them the morning frosts.
I watched as the horses were let out to pasture in the morning dark. I watched them chew thoughtfully and looked up at the morning. My brother joined me on the east facing porch, carrying with him a bag of sunflower seeds.
“We’ve got to go to Gram then, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
That June I was twenty and working as a nurse’s assistant in the infirmary of a summer camp ranch. My younger brother was a camper at the time. Sometimes before the campers woke up, when I took my coffee he stood on this porch with me and chewed sunflower seeds, trying to keep the urge to smoke at bay. No tobacco on the ranch, even for the cowhands.
That was my second summer working on that ranch, in northwestern Wyoming. My grandma and grandfather had worked here in the 60s; she was a trail cook and he was a wilderness trip leader, taking kids out on expeditions through the Teton Wilderness.
We had one phone for all the staff. It was an old cordless thing, caked in dirt from the hands of working people. Reception on the ranch was godawful. In the path between the staff’s cabins and the dining hall, I had to stand directly in sage brush to make out the other line.
It was mid June and I had stopped getting letters from her. The day prior, I rang my mother to ask how grandma was doing.
“Honey, I’ll need you to come home next month. We’re moving Grammy up to us.”
My contract on the ranch was til the end of summer. Next month I would lead youth trips through the Absorokas and Tetons. I wasn’t ready to leave just yet. I had settled into the daily labors of ranch life, of taking care of the children who came through the infirmary. I had been learning how to make stitches, how to sit with homesick children, how to spot mountain fever.
Most of all I had settled into home: a place I spent my childhood hearing about but never picturing quite right. In the wild grasses of the Teton wilderness, I was at home. Overlooking the barn and horses in the dawn, I was at home.
My grandmother had been living with cancer off and on for the last twenty years. When I was just seven years old, I had been told—rather bluntly by my mother—that she would die “any day now.” We had been waiting for that “any day” for twenty years, and it still hadn’t come. I worried the day loomed closer now. I hung up the phone and started gathering her juniper and sage. If she would never see the mountains again, at least I could bring them to her.
After the final rodeo in midsummer, and after I said goodbye to the last of the campers in Boy’s Season, I packed up my things from my cabin and headed south east, toward home.
A week later, in a stagnant town in the outskirts of Appalachia, I walked my grandmother’s dog Dixie through downtown Randleman. I didn’t pass anyone in the street on my walks. I had no proof that others live here, beyond the walls of the Commons. There was no one loitering about town, no lurking at business fronts. Instead the main street stood still, in almost perfect silence, save for the katydids singing in the bush rattle of old trucks passing through like tin cans on wheels. It was all just antiques and consignment and a single general store called Melvin’s Variety. Like the whole of history has happened elsewhere. There was a sinister silence that hung with the humidity, broken.
That town is so still it makes me uneasy, like stagnant water, breeding mosquitoes infinitely.
Randleman is a cotton-mill town in rural North Carolina, raised up by the grace of NASCAR and sustained by the shallow pockets of retirees. It is a town with only retrospective glory–basked in the history of one former resident’s achievements, endowed and housed in the now-closed Richard Petty museum. The museum once held the antiquities of stock car racing, the veritable dream of the American south.
A line of velour crepe-myrtle trees separate the brick of the museum from the brick of the old high school, where my grandmother lived. From the west-facing window of my grandmother’s apartment, you could see the museum and its surrounding lot that pours into the outskirts of Randleman.
At that time she lived in the Randleman School Commons—a two story brick building made in 1904, with just 30 units comprised of old classrooms with tall ceilings. Her apartment was a projection of her persona, an aggregate of her life: stained glass lamps, silk rugs, fine art paintings that loomed large in the modest space. Watercolors from family in Canada and Europe, oils from long dead friends. An expressionist oil painting called ‘The Judges” by Renee Radell loomed over the front great room and gazed in disdain at guests–three elderly figures distorted in oil, sat on a bench, glaring over the room.
My grandmother’s apartment was the picture of old money in decline. She filled it with dusty vestiges of luxury from my great-grandfather, a Canadian railroad tycoon in Ontario (or so everyone says) who clung to the American dream of acquisition. My grandmother didn’t know then the garishness of growing old, only the discomfort of her own body failing.
Because she was still so independent, so in command of her sharp mind, she was out of place with the building’s fellow inhabitants and their nurses–oh god the nurses, with their patronizing drawl and polyester blend cartoon scrubs and ‘sweetie’ and cigarette breaks on the gazebos. I watched my grandmother speak with her nurse and I cannot create for myself a greater contrast of personality.
In her time there, or at least the time I witnessed for a few weeks that summer in 2013, my grandmother was the emotional housekeeper of Randleman Commons.
In those weeks in July I became absorbed by routine: washing dishes in the morning, packing and sorting boxes, and walking the dog. Every evening, after the packing was done for the day and she had visited with all her neighbors, Grammy, my brother and I would walk Dixie through the parking lot at dusk, and two stray cats would follow us. With the hum of katydids in the bushes we walked along, this was our brief, uninterrupted time with her.
On those dusk walks together, we got some lore from the ranch—things she left out in her letters to me. She told me about the time one of her campers wouldn’t let go of his pocket knife and died in a lightning storm.
“You know, Gram, I almost died this summer too. My trail horse Ginger tried to throw me from a cliff —”
“Oh that’s nothin. Talk to me when you fall from that cliff and get back on the horse!” I laughed at how outrageous a reply this was.
The ambient fear of Gram’s inevitable death hung over me like deep summer humidity. I was keenly aware of it, and never knew if we would have five more years or five more days. My entire relationship that I knew of with her was marked by this fear. She was very sick when I was a child, and I anticipated and expected her to relapse at any time. I knew from a young age how precious our time was, how fraught the timeline, how scarce the memories would someday be. And all these years later, I still grasp at silhouettes of that summer and they slip through my fingers like rain.
One night that July, Gram woke me up.
“Kiddo, would you stay up with me?”
I was used to her erratic sleeping schedule at this point. She would stay up all night to read a book, or sit up late with my brother, talking while he smoked cigarettes by the tall east-facing windows. I thought to myself how teenagers and the elderly shared similar sleep habits, or at least, he and Gram did.
“I forgot to take my insulin and need my blood sugar to stabilize. Can you keep watch so I don’t pass out?”
“Shit, yeah Gram, let me get up.”
Fear stirred me to my feet and I crossed over to the bathroom where she kept her insulin supplies. I helped her inject her insulin—something that always terrified me quietly, but in the moment I acted like it was no deal at all—and then we sipped cokes together on the edge of her bed.
Maybe this is it, maybe this is when we lose her. But we didn’t. We reached sunrise. The next day we made an apple pie, too.
For a few years my grandmother kept that old schoolhouse from falling down. She was their healer. I watched as she took her neighbor’s hands, crying and frail, and prayed for them and prayed with them. And gave them, the women under the school house roof, the hope that they wouldn’t die in these walls. I have come to understand that she was at the heart of this ragtag community of wayward, of the elderly, the dying and forgotten.
One morning, I met my Gram’s best friend, Jo. We walked downstairs to bring her some Native medicine books—texts accounting herbal remedies and medicinal song. Jo was a Cherokee woman on the first floor, with long turquoise fingernails and tribal tattoos peeking out from under her collar. Her apartment was a tribute to the old West–it was no wonder she and my grandmother, the cowgirl she was, were friends.
When I first met Jo, she showed me the old pistol she used to hunt rattlesnakes. I rolled the barrel over in my hands, shifting the weight of it upward to examine it closer.
“Oh honey, don’t you ever look down the barrel of a gun,” she chided.
I placed it back on her dresser. I can still see that dark narrow tunnel of rusted gunmetal.
Jo was the human rights activist of this building of elderly, and that summer the deranged management had had enough of her protests for dignity. She’d leave this place some day and live out of her truck, she said, because then maybe someone would listen. Listen to what, I was never sure, but she assured me she would talk to every newspaper in the Carolinas.
When Jo heard my grandmother was leaving with us, she brought her an honor feather—a cluster of three feathers—a deep blue feather surrounded by curled brown hawk feathers. The blue one is for God, the curled one for their love’s embrace.
One afternoon, Grandma and I came to bring Jo some diapers, she came to her door in a daze.
Jo quietly opened the door and made her way to her sofa. When we entered, her tv was on the floor, gently resting against the carpet.
“Hiya honey, would you help pick up my t.v.?”
Her left eye was puffy and she wasn't wearing her glasses. Her usual vibrant self was faded. Calmly she mentioned she had just had a seizure. She had fallen into the t.v. set and brought it crashing down on her, spilling her glass of milk. The t.v. was broken down the middle. My complete surprise contrasted with her utter nonchalance.
She busied herself with trying to find her glasses, and would not sit still for all our protests.
“Sweetheart why don’t you let us take care of you?” my Grandma asked before quietly telling me to call 911.
I stepped out into the hall to ring the paramedics and stood in the fluorescent glow of the old school hallway, trying to imagine how this had ever been the history wing. I thought of school children, taking their lessons in what was now Jo’s living room. Those students would have been her age now.
When the EMTs came, gruff and soaked from the summer downpour, Jo put up her fight before looking to my grandma.
“You really think I should go, Tobey?”
In a room with three medical professionals, I admit a flutter of something akin to satisfaction when she looked over to us with this question. She was a smartmouth with one of the EMTs, “Now I already told you what happened. Listen to me, sweetie, cause I can't guarantee you’ll get another shot.”
As the EMTs pulled her onto the soaking wet stretcher, she turned to me and asked, “Darlin’ can you drive a stick? I want you to check on my horse tomorra.”
“Ahh shit, I’m sorry Jo—I’m not so good at driving trucks.” And so her horse went a week or so without seeing her.
A few days after Jo fell, and she was back home again at the Commons, she came to me with sage, burning in a seashell, and blessed me, from “Father sky and mother earth. That's just God with different names.”
She told me she was blessing me “for protection and safety for your journey.”
I asked her what journey she meant. Jo knelt on the ground before me, bony and limber, tattoos on her forearms and fingers, and four rings in each earlobe—all turquoise, always turquoise, she was a little jeweled bird full of song—carrying her smoke prayers to her knees, and she smiled—
—'life, honey. Your life.'
That July, I sat in the feelings of housekeeping and dying, a gun-shy witness to the dusk of life. I saw us, her grandchildren rising to meet her, in her grey sun-strained eyes. I imagined the humility of knowing her grandchildren were witnessing her before her death.
We packed up the last of Gram’s apartment by August. Grandma would drive north to us in West Virginia in a few days, and leave behind Jo and the other women who lived there.
With my grandmother gone, who would hold up the sky?
I don't pretend to understand how aging takes us all, and how our youth stretches outward to the faint horizon called day and our bodies fail us, and we begin to fold back again into the Earth. But when I see the gathering dusk or the moments before sunrise I think of my grandmother and—
It was late July and I leaned out of a tall window on a balmy Carolina night to watch the sun bleed out. The first pink stain was a blush across the cheekbones of Earth. And the blush deepened like a gash, vulnerable, tentative. A filthy haze drifted above the afterglow, carrying the night storm, dancing with fine lightning like cracks in china. And then our horizon was on fire, dying embers burning through the black of the pecan trees. Stirred coals sank into the skyline and at last the maroon dregs like sweet red wine drained out of sight. The colors passed quietly in revolution, like a slowly-turning shadow-box casting light on a classroom’s walls. This moment, the denouement of light and color—this is what finality looks like. The star passed so quietly into dusk. I came here to watch the ending.