by Jay Howard
Spirit Passing
The phone rang at the lowest time of night – 3am – when the mind and body of even the healthiest individual needs dragging back to consciousness.
“It won’t be long now,” Ruth told me calmly. “I know you wanted to be here with her.”
“Yes, thank you.” I spoke softly, glancing across at Neil, hoping we hadn’t disturbed him. “I’ll come straight away.”
I eased myself out of bed and crept over to the chair where I’d dumped my clothes. I fumbled to sort them out in the darkness, couldn’t make sense of them. Frustration simmered that such a simple task had suddenly become so hard. In trying to hurry I caught my foot in a tangled trouser leg and nearly fell, rattling the wardrobe door when I leant on it.
“Wha..?” Neil’s sleepy voice halted my struggles. He raised himself on an elbow. “Mandy?” He turned on the bedside light. “Is it... now?”
I nodded and bit my lip. “Ruth’s just called. I’m going over.”
“Do you want me to drive you? Do you want me there too?”
I shook my head, let it droop forward so that my hair swung across my face and he wouldn’t see how close to tears I was. “No, I’ll be fine.” I didn’t think I could bear his sympathy, not just now. And I wanted Gran to myself.
I managed to finish dressing without mishap now the light was on.
“Go back to sleep, Neil.” I went over and kissed him. “I’ll call if I won’t be back before you go to work.”
I started to turn away but he caught my wrist. “Promise me,” he demanded. “Drive carefully, and call me if you need me.” He cupped my face and ran a thumb across my lips. “Love you, babe.”
I hugged him, accepting the strength he was offering. I almost changed my mind about wanting him there too, but I turned his light off and went to the bathroom.
I blew my nose, hard, and stared at my reflection. I looked scared. I splashed my face with cold water, ran the brush through my hair, then ran down the stairs to my car. At least traffic would be light, this early in the morning.
I had known the nurses would remember to phone me. In the weeks I had been visiting I’d got to know several of them quite well. They seemed to understand more than most people about what is important to people in life, probably because in the hospice they saw so much death. Gentle, accepting deaths mostly, thanks to modern analgesia and psychological support. Some still ‘raged against the dying of the light’, and nearly all of them still cried at times, privately, but somehow it was easier there to accept that death was a natural part of life. Overall it was a very busy, positive, bustling place. Even children enjoyed their visits to relatives, with plenty of activities going on which they were encouraged to join in. Only in their very final stages were patients to be found in bed.
As Gran now was.
Familiar roads by day took on a whole other nature by night. Lights bled in the rain, reflected shakily in puddles. My car stole through the eerily empty streets and the world held its breath, waiting for me to arrive.
Ruth saw me push open the swing door to the ward. She came over and nodded towards Gran’s door.
“It’s OK, Mandy, she’s still with us.” She smiled gently and touched my arm.
I suppose she’d seen my expression on the faces of many relatives, the mixed fear and hope – am I in time? I went in and pulled a chair up beside her. Her hand was dry and cool, the wrinkled skin loose, tissue thin, bunching with no resistance beneath my rubbing thumb.
“Hello, Gran.”
I’d thought about this moment many times. What was one supposed to say in the last minutes before someone you loved so much dies? I still didn’t know the answer. Mine would be the last words she ever heard. Writer’s block was nothing compared with the emotions stilling my tongue. My blank sheet of A4 stretched for hundreds of pages.
I leaned over to turn on the CD I’d compiled of some of her favourite music. Those wonderful opening bars of The Blue Danube sounded loud in the hushed room and I quickly turned the volume low. As the tantalising three notes rising through the octave led into the dance I raised my arms and my body swayed.
“We used to waltz together to this around the dining table.”
The beds were quite wide so I slipped off my shoes and climbed up beside her, my head next to hers on the pillow. In her prime she’d been a big woman, a strong physical barrier between me and a frightening world, but there was little left of her now.
“Do you remember when I was little and stayed with you the first time? And the house creaking in the night scared me?” I whispered directly into her ear. “I untucked the blankets at the bottom and crept into your bed, up between you and Grandad. Grandad snorted in his sleep which made me giggle, and you rolled over and cuddled me in.”
Now I was big, and she was small, so it was my turn to cuddle her in.
“I was your special little girl and you both spoiled me rotten. It was wonderful. My own variety packs of cereals for breakfast, Viennese whirls in the afternoon, dunking my custard creams in your tea. Every year we went to the pantomime, and to see the Christmas displays in town. Special trips to London for the museums. Hours spent ‘helping’ you in the house and Grandad in the garden – you were so patient. My contributions must have made every job take twice as long, but it was an excellent apprenticeship. I still remember how to scale fish and prune apple trees, and I still peel fresh silver pennies for my winter vases. Every task I do at home brings you both to mind. Perhaps it’s true that we don’t really die while someone remembers us. Is that how you managed to keep going when Grandad died?”
The memories were flooding back. The years disappeared in my mind and I was a child once more.
“Not that I got it all my own way.” I chuckled. “You sure knew how to give a tongue lashing when it was deserved, like the time I found your knitting and it was so fascinating watching the wool bobbling in and out I’d undone nearly a whole jumper front before you caught me! Or the time I snuck the kitchen scissors out of the drawer and made a big pile of tiny hyacinth florets on the table, leaving bare stalks in the pot. Why did that seem such a good idea at the time?
“But there was once – do you know it still hurts that you didn’t believe me? I can still feel that sense of injustice as though it was just yesterday, when you accused me of ignoring you struggling home from the bus stop, laden with shopping, and not going to help you. I truly was totally oblivious of you while I sat on the garden gate. I was imagining travelling with that train that had just gone by. Isn’t it stupid that something from all that time ago still bothers me? Anyway, I hope you can hear me and maybe you believe me this time.”
I brushed her thin white hair back off her forehead and kissed her cheek. I was pleased she still smelled of Camay and lily of the valley talc, just as she always had.
“It wasn’t just my childhood, either. The teenage years would have been much tougher without you to sound off at. I even apologised to Mum a few times because you’d made me see things differently. Not that you said much. You just let me talk myself in circles until the truth dawned. Not that it always worked. Mum and I still have a way to go before we can put some of those rows, the things we screamed at each other, behind us for good.
“I don’t suppose my first year at university helped. I know I was behaving totally outrageously. In fact I was a real bitch, wasn’t I – so self-centred and egotistical. I thought I had all the answers and I knew nothing. It’s not surprising Mum and Dad were ready to disown me.
"You were getting it from both sides. You must have wanted to knock our heads together. But you believed in me. You knew I’d work it out and come good in the end. All you did was give me that money. ‘Promise me you won’t spend it on anything else’, you said. ‘I’ve checked and it’s enough for you to get back here from London, with a bite to eat on the way. You should never be afraid of adventures, but whatever happens in life you should always be able to get back home.’ When I moved back to live here you said I could now spend that mon
ey on something nice for myself. I didn’t, though. It’s still in the little zip part of my purse. It’s my talisman, see? As long as I have it I know I’ll get home safe and sound. That would have made you cross if you’d known, wouldn’t it? A granddaughter of hers superstitious!”
The CD track changed. “Can you hear that, Gran?” I sang along to Moonshadow, wishing she could sing it with me one last time. “And if I ever lose my eyes, weee..eee..ell, I won’t have to cry no more.
“Saying goodbye is really hard, you know? I know it’s the right time for you, but what will I do without you? I love Neil, he’s a good man, but I can’t talk to him like I do to you. You understand me so well I don’t have to explain a lot of stuff: you already know what I’m going through. And as for Mum – well I reckon we’re too much alike, too close, to be able to talk like you and I did. Perhaps it was that degree of separation between us that contrarily made us so close.
“Oh, Gran... How will I manage?”
I stopped talking, gave myself time to force back down the incipient tears. Now was not the right time for that. I rested my chin on her shoulder and leant my head against hers.
“That sounded really selfish, didn’t it? Me, me, me! You taught me better than that. I hope I’ll be able to teach my daughter the things that you taught me. Important things, like never letting anyone else decide things for me, like being able to face fear and do it anyway, like cherishing each and every moment. I’ve been late for no end of appointments because of you! You were right, though, about allowing ourselves the time to stand and stare, to drink in the unexpected moments of sublime beauty that will never come again in quite the same way. Feed your soul, you told me, because that’s the only thing left at the end.
“Now here we are, at the end, and your soul is rich and healthy.”
The gentle strains of Enya’s On Your Shore were playing when Gran smiled, breathed out a soft sigh, and was gone.
How was it that I felt that moment? How did I know so immediately that it was now just an empty husk, so diminished by the years, lying on the bed in my arms? ‘Vital signs’ they called them, the indication of the difference between so much flesh and a living, breathing, person capable of all the emotions we revel in and suffer. Life’s miracle and death’s release.
I got up, ready to leave. Our last time together was over, Gran was no longer on that bed. I respectfully crossed the hands of her mortal remains across her chest, knowing the essence of Gran would always be safe in my keeping.
Then I, too, smiled as I felt the very first flutterings of the life in my womb. My hand crept down to my belly, protective of that new, precious soul.
"You're right, Gran - nature doesn't do straight lines, it's all circles."
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Novels by Jay Howard
Changes:
Book 1 Never Too Late
Book 2 New Beginnings
Short stories by Jay Howard
As the Sun Goes Down
Similar Differences
About Jay Howard
Jay currently lives in Somerset, which she considers to be a gem among English counties. She has lived and worked in many places in England, Wales, Alberta and British Columbia. Holding dual citizenship through her father, who was born in Toronto, a visit to her ‘other country’ included a stay in her father’s city followed by the four day train journey to the West coast. She describes the trip as ‘the only way for an English visitor to start to comprehend the vastness and diversity of this land’.
Whilst admitting that trying so many different areas of work may not be ideal for most people, Jay believes that her experiences have given her insights that enrich her writing. She describes writing as ‘enormously enjoyable and satisfying, but second only to golf in the level of frustration that must be endured to achieve the desired goal’.
