The day I decide to visit Highgate, my grandmother’s assisted living home, is a day when the guilt has gripped me long and hard enough that I can’t postpone the inevitable any longer. I know she is lonely, and I know I have neglected her by staying away so long.
The drive is so short. Sometimes I wish it would last longer, and then I would have more excuses to explain my absence. The face of the brick building is friendly with two-story walls and wide windows to greet me. The front door is open, and I enter a small square room where I face a second door. From here I can see into the tacky, carpeted room full of old people milling about with walkers or in sitting in chairs existing numbly. I start to feel the oppression already, and I want to turn around and leave, but I’ve already come this far.
The second door is locked with a keypad, but the entry code is written plainly beside it.
“It’s there to keep the senile ones locked in,” I think to myself as I punch in *0321 backwards.
I swing the door open and am greeted by the toothless smiles of strangers and also a putrid smell. It reeks of Lysol and old, leathery skin hanging flabby and wrinkled in flaps, like loose shingles on a roof. The sunspots and milky eyes boar into me as if they haven’t seen anyone younger than thirty in years, so I run to the elevator.
“Oh god, get me out of here!” I scream within the confines of my mind.
The upstairs halls are empty, but not free of the stink. I walk down the hall, past the hair salon, the laundry room, and to my grandmother’s door which reads “Georgia Wood.” A picture of her in a Hawaiian shirt hangs on the wall nearby, and I think that they must have had another family barbeque that I didn’t go to.
I knock, and she opens the door to her surprise visitor. Her face lights up with excitement, and instead of feeling good about making her so happy, her joy inflicts yet another pang of guilt. I can’t help but think that even at 92 she looks better than the other inmates, but her face is still thinner, her hair is still sparser. It’s in these first few moments that I think, “Yes, she really will die soon, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and I still don’t come to visit her.”
As she welcomes me into the confines of her small, cluttered room, the stench of the elderly assaults me yet again, but now the fumes of Lysol are paired with something familiar. This smell doesn’t make me want to vomit: it just reminds me of being ten again.
It reminds me of spring afternoons in Grandma’s garden with silver mixing bowls full of ripe, freshly picked, homegrown raspberries. I’d bring the bowl in with my prickled fingers just before it overflowed, and she’d apply kisses to my scratches and sugar to the berries. My sister and I would then sit at the breakfast bar munching away at our harvest while Grandma would save the rest for delicious raspberry preservatives that we would enjoy throughout the winter. It reminds me of eating cherry tomatoes from the vines in the corner of the garden that I didn’t discover for years because there was so much for a ten year old to explore. It reminds me of the skeleton of some old car hidden beneath the branches of a shady tree. The metal rusted by years of rain and forgetfulness housed racecar games for my imagination. It reminds me of the plastic owl that played my best friend when I pretended that I lived in the wilderness. I’d climb the rickety ladder up to the shed’s rooftop with him in tow where I’d pick apricots from the tree now in reach. Every time I made these expeditions I worried that the rungs would snap off the ladder at any moment, and I’m sure if Grandma saw me she would have told me the same thing. It reminds me of pulling carrots from the soft earth, picking flowers to mimic in my watercolor paintings, and trying to feed weeds to the dogs through the fence in the backyard. It reminds me of the rock, perfectly round and smooth, that I’d turn over in search of Roly-Polys and worms, and it also reminds me of running away, screaming at the top of my lungs when I would find a spider instead. It reminds me of the Grand Ole Opry, Walker Texas Ranger, and digging through Grandma’s jewelry box. It reminds me of walking to Kenroy Elementary School on a summer day to play cops and robbers and whiz down the slides. I remember home cooked meals where I’d always beg for coleslaw, squash pie with Cool Whip, and stir fry. It even reminds me of dreaming of drinking a big glass of water and consequently being awoken by my sister’s screams as I wet the bed we were sharing.
However, I’m sucked away from these memories and back into reality as my grandma offers me a cookie she saved from lunch and chocolate she won in Bingo last night. I comply, not because I want to, but because she won’t take “no” for an answer. She’s stubborn and she knows it. Everyone knows it. She doesn’t hear me though because with her stubbornness comes her refusal to wear her hearing aids. Today I’ll have to break out the line that my dad taught me: the one I hate using.
“Grandma, if you won’t wear your hearing aids, I’m going to leave.”
I have to tell her twice before she hears me. As she fights with the technology, I examine the photos that engulf me. At the top of the shelf is my senior picture, and beside me are photos of my sister and I all dressed up in German clothing, my mother’s choice no doubt, at about ages two and four. I was two. There are also pictures of Daddy, Aunt Caroline, and Uncle Ivan, of my cousin Patty, my second cousin Amanda, and her two young children. Still, there are even more photos of people I don’t know and have never met.
Once again I am drawn back into the moment as my grandma announces that she met someone who knows me from high school. She has to find her planner, hidden beneath junk and craft supplies, in order to remember the name. It makes me sad when I remember how strong her memory used to be, and how fast it is fading now. She reads off the name: a girl I’ve never heard of. Another human being I didn’t even know existed. I promise my grandma that I’ll check my yearbook when I go home even though I know I won’t. I just assume that I was nice to the girl in high school even though I never liked her, so she probably remembers me as a kind person. In reality I’m just a two-faced, cold hearted liar. Visiting Grandma always makes me so bitter these days.
I’m swept from my contemplations as my grandmother begins to tell me about her bowel movements. She has written down how many times a day she has had diarrhea since she took some antibiotics, and she points out the tally marks to me, and I’m sure to anyone else will listen. She informs me that these bowel movements are “runny,” a word that is accompanied by hand gestures: she wiggles her fingers as she moves her hands down through the air, a motion that resembles rain, or better yet, runny diarrhea.
Once I have gotten her off the topic of her bowel movements, she begins to tell me a story about my father’s childhood, but what she doesn’t remember is that she’s told me before. I try to remind her that I’ve already heard it, but being stubborn she finishes anyways. Finally fed up and yawning profusely I make up some excuse to get the hell out of here. We exchange a hug, a kiss, and some “I love you’s,” and I promise to come back soon even though we both know that it will be weeks, or more likely months, before I return.
As I make my way through the throngs of flabby skin once more, the frustration begins to fade and the guilt begins to grip me again and hang upon me like chains. It’s in these last few moments that I realize, “Yes, she really will die soon, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” With the guilt also comes fear: fear that the next time I muster the courage to see her, she won’t be here anymore.
