“Behold, I send an angel before thee, to keep thee by the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared.”
Exodus: 23:20
I’m 17, it is June 2004, and I’m spending the summer working at the Crawford County Joint Vocational School in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The school is a block away from my grandparents’ house on Alden Avenue. When I was younger I used to think their house was a mansion. It has a giant sunroom with floor to ceiling windows and a massive prism glass window facing into the living room. The inside has crystal chandeliers and the hardwood floors of the rooms are separated by lovely French doors. Up the oak stairs are three bedrooms and a bathroom that looks like it came out of a catalog in the 19th Century. I’m in love with their mansion house and the idea of living there for a summer. Even though now I realize that it is, in fact, not a mansion.
A few years before my sister, Heather, and I got this summer job my family found out that my grandfather had lung cancer. He beat every “six month” prognosis his oncologist had given him but despite fighting he became weaker and frailer as the years went by. At this point he is almost as thin as me with many fist sized lumps sticking out from behind his robe. They look like they’re trying to break through his thin and ghostly skin like he is birthing aliens. Sometimes I have to look down when he walks by so as not to see them.
I love him but have always been afraid of him. When I was younger I never really saw him. He was nothing but a featureless black shadow moving from the upstairs to the kitchen and then out the door. When I did see him, on holidays usually, I was afraid to kiss him because he had a prickly mustache and I was afraid to hug him because he towered over me. Now it is the opposite. Now I am afraid to break him like he is an infant. I feel like if I were to hold his hand too tight or hug him I would break each one of his bones.
The only intimate thing that I can do with him is hold his travel oxygen tank when he takes a walk a couple of days a week. Heather, who is younger but stronger, stands close by just in case he slips and falls. On these walks he talks about what he will do when he gets better. He will take us golfing. See me graduate. He wants to watch us get married. He wants to meet our future children. He is going to see Heather play golf professionally and he is going to see me be published. He convinces himself so well that he almost convinces me. But I realize they are not plans but they are regrets. He says he is proud to have two very beautiful and talented granddaughters.
“You’ll see,” he says, “when I beat this; I’ll make up for lost time.”
My grandfather was in the Army in World War II. There is a youthful picture of him wearing his Army jacket by a tractor, on the mantle over the fire place. His smiling dark eyes look past his thick Irish nose and at me as I sit in the living room. I’m staring at the picture when my grandfather moans in pain, “Megan pick up that bible.”
I am startled. He points at the end table that houses a bible from the 1880s the only one in the house. I am apprehensive but reach down to grab it. It feels like just the dust on it alone weighs as much as me. I open up the front cover and it hangs sad and tattered on the side.
"Which passage?" I ask staring down at the many tiny words, a bit confused on how this works.
"Any one," he says his eyes are glazing as if he is going to began crying. I open to the middle of the bible where the binding bends naturally and pick the passage that my finger is touching. I've never been particularly religious so I do not know exactly what I am reading but there is something about an angel in it. My grandfather begins to cry and I start crying but I keep reading through the tears and blurred verse.
"That is enough, dear." His gruff voice is now softened with the weight of sadness. He reaches for my hand and I extend it to him. "You are a saint," he cries even harder, "don't let anyone ever tell you different."
I put the bible back into its place and excuse myself from the room. I turn into the foyer, rush up the stairs, and turn into the bathroom to vomit. Despite my grandmother’s pleas I never come back down the stairs that day. I sit in her room and stare out the window at the Meadville neighborhood foliage until the sun sets.
My mother is coming to take my sister and I home for the few days we have off of work. My mother and I never had the most perfect of relationships and my grandfather warns me to be kind to my mother. I promised to try without arguing with him. He smiles and his sick eyes look as youthful as those in eyes in the picture on the mantle.
"When are you going to let me read some of your writing?" He asks.
"Soon?" I smile.
My mother walks in and everything is pleasant for an hour but soon my mother is tearing me down about how I am dressed. Her unprovoked insults lead to her calling me an "ungrateful pig," as she walks towards the kitchen where I am hiding from the confrontation. When this shoots out of her mouth and she moves closer I start to yell back, "Why are you always so mean to me?"
My mom raises her hand to hit me and my grandfather screams, "Cindy, sit down! I cannot believe I raised someone who is so mean to her own daughter."
The way home my mother yells at me, "You made my father hate me, you cunt." She hits me over and over again and all I can do is cry and wish that my grandfather was in the car.
Back at my grandparents I go for a walk alone because my grandfather has become much too weak for walks outside. It is August and school is about to start and the summer job is slowly winding down. I'm listening to my CD player and I head down the brick road we had walked on in July turning down the hill onto some crumbling stone stairs leading to a park. Sitting on a park bench overlooking a creek where children are catching crayfish with their mother, I close my eyes. I can’t stop thinking about the past three months and what will happen in the next three months. Cancer, my grandfather, school, my mother, my life. I feel overwhelmed. All I want to do is pick myself up off of this park bench and run out of this park and out of my life.
My grandmother falls one day after coming home from the store. Grandfather drags himself from his hospice bed in the living room to her side on the floor of the sun room. My sister and I are shaken and cannot think of what to do when my grandfather garbles out, “Get the phone.”
I dial 911 before I hand it to him but when someone picks up he is crying too hard to form words. I take the phone and with my voice shaking I try to speak as clear and as quickly as possible, “251 Alden Avenue in Meadville. Send an ambulance, my grandmother Norma McCormick has fallen. She can’t get up, it look like she’s broken something.”
When the EMTs arrive and drive away with her and my sister who had decided to go along I help my grandfather back to his bed.
“I cheated on your grandmother.”
I stare at him. Before today, I had heard stories from my mom of his cheating but I believed they were only rumors. Now that I hear the words as truth all I feel is bewildered. I cannot form words to respond and as I try to wrap my head around this situation.
“I cheated all the way up to the cancer. Even past it for a while. But she stuck by me, I don’t deserve it.”
I put my eyes to the floor and try not to cry but most of all trying not to see him cry. He seems like a sad child full of guilt. I don’t know how to be maternal. I’m only a child, I’m only seventeen.
He speaks again, “God forgive me. Please don’t hate me, Megan. Forgive me.
I hold his hands and look him in the eyes, “You made a mistake. You are only human. No one can judge you for that and I believe that if God is everything everyone says he is he will forgive you.”
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a
time to be born, and a time to die... a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time
to break down, and a time to build up”
Ecclesiastes 3:1-3
Months go by and because we live so far away from my grandparents I never get the chance to see them. We get a call from my grandmother in November, the day after my birthday, my grandfather is dying.
Standing over him in his hospice bed he looks even thinner than me. I'm 85 pounds and I try not to think about how much he weighs. How much he weighs without the gigantic tumors.
"Say goodbye to your grandfather," my mother says and points at his unconscious body from the yellow Victorian chair next to his bed.
I become meek and scared and grab his hand lightly as if it were as fragile as the old bible. I put my other palm on the top of his head and wipe away the cold sweat that is collecting on his forehead, "Goodbye. I love you."
The day of his viewing I feel intense sickness as if my heart has exploded into a million microscopic shards and is slowly cutting deeper and deeper into my stomach. I sit up on my grandparents’ blue bed staring despondent and shivering from invisible cold as my aunt curls my hair and puts heavy globs of make-up on me.
“Look how lovely you look with a little rouge.” She holds a compact mirror up to my face. My lips are in a soft scarlet pout and my eyes trying desperately to recognize the heavily painted stranger in front of them.
“Grandpa would be so proud of how pretty you look right now.” My aunt wipes some mascara from my eye that seemed to have missed its mark. I want to cry but I fear I will be yelled at for letting my make up run. When she moves on to my sister I let myself fall back on to the bed.
While holding my sisters hair into a blond curl she scolds me, “Don’t mess up your hair, missy!”
Heather looks around at me, “She probably has PMS,” she laughs, “Megan is so fragile, you know?”
In the casket my grandfather looks almost as smothered in make up as me with his once translucent skin now tanned and healthy. I half expected him to sit up and tell us that the cancer was all some elaborate joke. I can smell nothing but death. It gets caught in my nose and I want so badly to sneeze or cough but I know I will vomit. My mother motions for me to grab my grandfather’s hand but I refuse because I do not want to compare the living touch with the dead.
I sit back on the Victorian lounge tucked in the corner of the room and trace the paisley design of the fabric with my finger. A knot begins to tighten in my stomach and my invisible doodles begin to fall from the patterns. Black water stars to drip onto my hand. I’m crying and for a moment I look up at the casket then heave forward vomiting all over the parquet floor in front of me.
I vomit out regrets. Regrets of my grandfather, regrets of mine. I regret not ever reading to him the things I have written. I regret not ever golfing with him, not kissing him nor hugging him. I regret saying goodbye. As I’m carried out of the funeral parlor by hands belonging to people I cannot recall, I feel like my grandfather is there trying to comfort me as I have done for him.
"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more,
neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former
things have passed away."
Revelation 2.4
When I am alone today, though years later, I wonder if he is still with me. If he reads my writing over my shoulder and if he saw me graduate after all. Does he walk the halls of that Alden Avenue house watching over his wife? Does he take care of me when I am sick? I wonder if he will see my sister and I get married and if he will be proud of his great-grandchildren as well. I wonder if there is any truth to that verse I read. But most of all I wonder if he is still proud of me and if in his eyes I am still a saint.
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