Last Friday night, I had the television tuned to channel 3.2, Antenna TV. It was on mostly for background noise as I paid bills, washed clothes and dishes, and other exciting first night of the weekend frivolity. As I did these things, Fred Sanford went to Elizabeth numerous times, Archie Bunker shared his rare moving moments mixed with frequent tirades of bigotry, and J. J. Evans did his Dyno-mite thing under the googly eyes of a young Janet Jackson. I don't know why, but the mere sound of the WKRP in Cincinnati theme song made me want to call home. It is the home where the impressionable years were spent learning discipline, honest work, and kindness. It's the place where food and bed and love lived. It's the place where the TV lived. I suppose the yearning had something to do with the way things from your childhood are things that stay with you into adulthood; the things you did, the people you loved, the discussions held on the dusty playgrounds and jokes told around lunchboxes, books you read, shows you watched. The theme song was a trigger, a way back trip to way back. For me, in this instance, the time was the early '80's; the place, home at grandma's.
It took 6 1/2 rings for her to answer, and when she did, she answered with a voice holding back pain. It was a voice of one trying to be cheerful when all they want to do is scream. It was a voice of one I knew and loved, yet somehow foreign. A meek voice. A timid voice. A cracked and pained voice. She said she hurt and the prescription painkillers weren't helping. I told her to lie down and try to rest. It had only been a few weeks since I had returned home from the Christmas holiday. She had only been home herself about a month from the rehab facility she had been in for a previous incident. Her steps were slow and deliberate, aided, and yet hampered, by the four legs of her walker. At one point, the pain in her back that shoots down her hip and into her leg overpowered her strong ability to be silent in suffering, that she sat down in a chair and cried. It was then that I almost did too, as I knew there was nothing I could do to make the pain disappear. It also reminded me that I am not ready to face this eventual and emotional loss.
Often times I am unprepared. I mean, I'm not totally unprepared. The bags are packed for the trip, but not put into the car. The clothes are washed and dried, but piled up on my bed, and it's bedtime. The glowing screen is showing funny posts about cats while the clock steadily advances toward the work hour and I'm half dressed, enthralled by the multiple tabs open. If I didn't know myself so well, I would call it being lazy, but I know that's not it. It's more of a stumbling. It's an attention deficiency. It's the butterfly, the squirrel, the shiny object. It's distraction.
It was 6:19am the next day; it was Saturday. I received a text from my brother saying that my grandmother had fallen at her home and had to be taken to the ER by ambulance. Of course, I didn't get that text until the second text was sent at 9:30am; the text that actually woke me up. It was words on a screen that brought to mind the realization of life with its frailties and lack of guarantees. Although the x-ray results were positive and her injuries were mild compared to what they could have been, those results were not guaranteed to be positive. It wasn't a given that she would be okay. Knowing that the opposing thought is just as much a part of the way things equal out; that its role in 'Life as We know It' is just as possible as its counterpart made it more than just something you've placed in a dark part of your mind, only bringing it to surface when situations move you to dig deep. It made it real.
I finally got to talk to her again on the phone this Friday night. She had spent two days in ICU for observation at a hospital in Tampa. She was not in ICU because her injuries warranted it, but because at her age of 92, it was determined that it was for her benefit. She could receive around the clock care and be more closely monitored, and they were more well equipped in case something did go wrong. After that, she spent two more days in a regular room. I had the phone number when she was in ICU. I had called, but was only able to talk to her son, my uncle, during her stay. I never had a number when she was in a regular room. She left the hospital this past Friday morning and by that afternoon, I had the number to her room at the same rehabilitation center she had been in for more than a month leading up to Thanksgiving. When she answered, I heard familiarity. It was not the voice I had heard the previous Friday. It wasn't the pained, foreign voice. It was a voice that knew what she had just gone through and was determined to face the intensive rehabilitation that was to get her back home again. We talked about what had happened and the things that would come after.
I'm unprepared to face this. I'm not ready and don't think I will ever be. I don't even believe that I have to be. I don't have to accept it to know that it is going to happen. I don't have to be okay with it to lessen the pain it will bring. It will happen no matter how much time I think I have to prepare. No amount of preparation will make you ready for your life after.
After what? After anything. I've had many lives in the after. School, marriage, children, divorce, jobs, relationships, choices, even death...through the space between beginning and end and back to a beginning again, there is an after life. Proof that life goes on is not only reflected in the hand-cleared section of bathroom mirror, wet with condensation from a long, hot shower. It's also in the face of a woman, chattering in her winter parka and pumping gas into her car next to me. It's in the voice of the teller behind 2-inch plexiglass at the bank, asking,"How else may I help you, Mr. Barefoot?" It's in the stance of the familiar face double riding to separate floors on the elevator at work. It's not personally universal; it universally personal. Each of us have our own after life, each different and all at once; each separate over our alloted span of time.
She'll be 93 in February.
I used to have someone who said they'd be there for me when that time came. I know that this person will still be there for me, but not with me. The help will come from the same source, but in a totally different way. That's the result of another after life. We're both living proof that life after does go on.
Like I said, she'll be 93 soon. Here's to hoping my after life gets to wait until after that time to begin anew.
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