Tremors

“White, white, mother I am leaving.
Faces, suddenly suspended above you;
faces that you think it’s your business to love
if only you could remember their names.
Pain and never knowing that you are getting ugly.
The fog of medication and old ether dreams.
White. White.”

~Anne Sexton


I was going through some old photo albums with my niece the other day, and I came across this photograph of my great grandparents.




They eloped in the late 1920’s and were Dust Bowl sharecroppers during the Great Depression. They were very, very poor. Next to the photograph was a little note written by my great grandmother explaining how on the night she eloped, she packed her things in a trunk that her mother had used for her own elopement with her husband in the 1880’s.



I love this note because my great grandmother’s handwriting is so smooth in it, which means she must have written it when she was really young, before she got tremors in her hands. She dealt with the tremors for a good part of her life and it made her handwriting extremely shaky.

The last time I saw my great grandmother was in the hospital right before she died. I remember walking into her room and being taken aback by how white her hair had become. She had always kept her hair dyed dark black and this was the first time I had ever seen her natural color. Brilliant white.

I stood next to her bedside and she stared at me, her eyes searching my face, trying to recall my name. She couldn’t. She was barely alive. I stared at all of her intense white strands of hair unfurled across her stark white pillow. I put my hand on her hand, smooth and dry, almost like a leaf, and felt her tremors through my fingertips. Her eyes focused on my face. I told her it was okay. I said it twice.

It’s okay, it’s okay.

The nurse came in and said it was time to leave.

Just as the sun was rising the following morning, our phone rang and I heard my mom pick it up. I knew. I climbed out of bed and went to the living room window. Snow was falling outside and everything was bright white. My mom placed the phone back on the receiver, but I stayed in front of the window to watch the morning unfold behind all of those swirling snowflakes.

Everything was quiet and still. That’s what I remember the most. The stillness.