Nearly finished and still wet from a coat of Mod Podge finish.

Precarious

Washing dishes just now, stacking things high in the drainer, I was startled when they suddenly shuddered and then collapsed down into a new position. I stopped my scrubbing for a moment, prepared to rescue the hand-blown glasses (a gift from our realtor - we would never buy anything so breakable ourselves), but then realized that no - the dishes had already worked themselves out. Now that they'd tumbled against eachother a bit - unbroken, thank goodness - they had reached an agreement and were now in a more stable position.

And then, as is usual around our house these days, my thoughts turned to death. Or, rather, dying. Both John and I are in the process of losing our last maternal grandparents. My grandmother Ethel - his grandfather Robert (a.k.a. Bum). Both of whom served larged roles in our childhoods.

My grandmother picked me up after school every day when I was young. My mother worked;my dad wasn't around; but I had my grandmother all to myself. She helped me with my homework, took me on long walks downtown, taught me to bake, to jump rope, and how to hold a decent conversation. She took me to Yosemite for my birthday every year, listening to my poems about mustard and lupine as we drove the long way there. She thought I was brilliant.

Now, at 97 years old, she is slowly letting go. After three knee replacements she walks - amazingly - through a combination of cane, walker, and pure will. She hosts my uncle for scrabble and salmon each Monday, and she still maintains her own home - but only with a lot of help from my mother. She's had her share of falls, and her heart is not good. Last week, a scare with pneumonia brought it all into focus, and for a few days I was an absolute mess. It didn't look like she was going to make it and I wasn't sure that I would, either.

But the over-thinker in me had to wonder - why? She's 97, after all. I know she won't last forever, and we don't even talk all that regularly. A phone call every month or so, letters back and forth. I see her once a year. But - when I see her I am still her little girl. And when she leaves, I will be saying goodbye to her from the perspective of my smallest, most vulnerable self.

How is it that parents and grandparents, when they go, have the power to turn us back into children? As the recent flurry of worried emails passed among my family members, it was everywhere between the lines: my uncle Jim railing against the emergency room, my aunt offering expensive and unnecessary equipment, disagreements around treatment and subtly barbed thank yous among the siblings... and barely concealed behind their words were their child-selves rocking back and forth, whispering, "Mama. Mama. Please don't go."

I feel it too. I know my grandma's long since made her peace with leaving earth, so why can't I? It's fear - that's all I can figure. It's scary to lose a parent figure, though their absence may play no real part in our current day-to-day existence. But loss or the threat of loss transports us back - to a time that somehow stands still somewhere inside us.

As children, our parents and some of our grandparents were the absolute centers of our lives. Or - actually - we perceived ourselves as the centers of theirs. Perhaps that's what we mourn - the idea (no matter how real it is, no matter how far we've come since) that we are losing the one person whose life revolves around our own.

As John said the other night - trying to sort through his own grief - it's selfish, isn't it? The pain is not about what the dying are feeling - what they will miss - it's all about ourselves. We may think "they'll never see our first child, or attend our wedding, or see this or that dream of ours realized" but it isn't about them. It's about us. It's about losing that feeling of a person wholly devoted to you - who revels in your smallest and largest accomplishments like nobody else in the world. They saw you born, they saw you crawl, they clapped when you pooped in the potty. It is, in a way, losing the last vestiges of our superego - our claim to the center of the universe. And even if it is irrational; even if it comes from a very childish place, it's real and it hurts like hell.

I take comfort though, in my dishes. They rattle against each-other and slip closer to the sink. But when they come to a rest, they rest softly. And meanwhile, I've got my grandmother's cupcakes in the oven.

Thank you Grandma, and thank you Bum. You do what you have to do. We'll be okay.

working...