Sunsets

It is June. I am tired of being brave.
-Anne Sexton

It is June and the town where I was born is on fire. The flames are over one hundred miles away, but all the smoke drifts across the prairies outside of my kitchen window. Every night, hazy red sunsets bleed into the horizon and we are left in an eerie crimson twilight. It is June: wildfire season. When the wind blows from the south and the west, I can smell the plains burning.

Has an entire Spring really passed since my last entry?

What can I tell you? Four months ago, my grandmother died of pneumonia and respiratory failure. For thirty six hours, her lungs filled with fluid while she gasped for air in the hospital. She passed away late at night, on a freezing Sunday in February.

Shortly after she was admitted into the hospital, the doctors called us and said we had better prepare ourselves, because this was the end. In the middle of the night, I drove with my mother across the icy roads to sit with my grandmother and to say goodbye.

Sidewalks in February are empty and silent. My mother, still recovering from her spinal fusion surgery, held tight onto my arm as we inched through the hospital parking lot, navigating frozen walkways in the dark. The temperature had fallen to fifteen degrees below zero and I felt like I was locked inside a bad dream, guiding my injured mother across sheets of ice one tiny step at a time. I told her over and over, Just don’t slip. Please don’t slip. Moving achingly slow as though we were underwater, my voice shattering the air around us, splintering the cold stillness. Please don’t slip. Streetlights splashing the slick pavement with soft droplets of pale orange; gutters packed with muddy white ice and snow. Just don’t slip.

My grandmother was in a shallow sleep when I sat next to her on the hospital bed. Stiff white sheets and so many beeping machines. Machines pumping air into her lungs (her mouth frozen open, gasping; her chest rapidly rising and falling). Machines recording her pulse (130 beats a minute. 140 beats a minute. 150 beats a minute). Machines monitoring her oxygen levels (low and lower. Low and lower. Low and lower). Nurses passing by her open door, walking beneath the hallway’s fluorescent lights.

My mother said something to me in a quiet voice and my grandmother’s eyes opened. She turned her head and struggled to sit up. She said, It’s you! You’re here! Look at your beautiful face. Then she put her fingertips on my cheek. These were the last words she would say to me. I reached up and touched her wrist, put her hand in my hand. I said, Are you okay? What else could I say? She leaned back on her pillow, closed her eyes. I held her hand while she drifted in and out of consciousness. What else could I do?

I held her hand and she drifted.

My uncle flew in from northern California. He is a brilliant chemist and lives on a ranch with Icelandic horses. He cries in abbreviated bursts; brief sobs that suddenly come and suddenly go. He sat in a chair at the foot of my grandmother’s hospital bed. For a long while, we were silent. My uncle watched the glowing numbers on the machines. He said, It’s like she’s drowning.

I know how it feels to drown. I put my hand on my grandmother’s forehead and wiped away little beads of sweat scattered along her hairline. My mother sat across from me and ran her hand up and down my grandmother’s arm. My uncle said, She’s drowning and there’s nothing we can do.

What could we do? I held her hand. My mother spoke softly in her ear. My grandmother gasped and gasped. The machines pumped air into her lungs and kept track of her racing heartbeats. The nurses and doctors came in and out of her room. My uncle cried in short bursts. We did this for hours and hours.

The following day, in the late afternoon, the sun started to break through the clouds and small slivers of light seeped in through the window of my grandmother’s hospital room. My uncle and mother sat silent in their chairs. I held my grandmother’s hand. It was very quiet.

Let me tell you something about God. When my littlest nephew was four years old he told me one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. Out of the blue one afternoon he said, Everyone is always talk, talk, talking at God. But nobody ever listens to her. If you want to hear God you have to be very, very quiet, because she speaks so softly.

I held my grandmother’s hand and watched soft rays of afternoon sunlight stream in through the window. It was very, very quiet. My grandmother drifted and drifted. I held her hand.

She died later that night.

This was my Spring.

When it was all over, I was exhausted and my head was full of nothing but static.

This is my life.

I came home and lied down on my floor, because I prefer to sleep on floors rather than beds. I don’t know why. I closed my eyes and I fell asleep listening to this song:



I listened to this song over and over.

This was my Spring: orange streetlights on white ice; frozen sidewalks and my mother’s arm wrapped around my arm; my grandmother’s hand in my hand, her fingertips on my cheek. static and a memory of drowning; Quiet sunlight streaming in through a window and pooling on the floor.

This is my life. It is June and the sunsets are crimson.