That Which Is Burned Onto Our Brains

The last time I saw her, I was nine year old. I stood over her casket, gazing down at this cadaver that used to be my grandmother. My grandma Ruthie, who hated her forehead and wore a green fuzzy nightie and ate her cornflakes with coffee instead of milk and called me Sara-Bara-Bean-Bag. My grandma, who suffered so much pain in the last years of her life, and whom I watched disintegrate and whither away before my eyes.

The last time I saw her, person after person shook my parents’ hands, offering condolences that even now feel so painfully empty. No amount of hearing “sorry for your loss” can make that loss better. If it could, maybe my dad would not have slipped into the alcoholism she would have been so ashamed of. Maybe I wouldn’t have spiraled into an unyielding darkness and used her as justification. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The sentiment was appreciated, I suppose; the handshakes, muffins, casseroles, and pity smiles. But at the same time, I hated them and thought it an elaborate something or other that was, in the end, meaningless — from the waxy, soulless body in the coffin to the pictures of her before she got sick to the lines of people looking at both of those things.

The last time I saw her, I couldn’t help but think it wasn’t really her. It was a cheap imitation of her in life, and to this day it makes me angry. I am angry that the second-to-the-last time was no better, with her broken body and drugged mind hooked up on hospital equipment set up in her room so she could die at home. In both of those moments, her body was there, but all the things that made me love her so much were gone.

So I guess you could say the last time I saw her wasn’t really the last time at all.