Chapter 7: Grandma

My dad is driving. We’re going to see grandma, who has released herself from the hospital yesterday and is now home in her apartment in San Francisco. Outside the window cars are whooshing by at great speed. My dad always drives when it’s the four of us, which grantedly has been somewhat infrequent since their divorce. Thorin is here too. The two of us are sitting in the back seat, like we used to, when we were kids. My legs feel crammed. It’s weird, to be here with both of my parents. I’m assuming my dad didn’t want to come, but my mom has guilted him into it. “Grandma is sick, and might not be around forever. This might be the last time you see her.” My mind feels dull at the thought. I’ve lost the dissolving sometime last night, and with it most of my sense of what I want, and what’s worth doing. Which, I guess, is better than reading my family’s minds.

Yesterday morning I walked in on Nate and Sarah fighting. It was a pretty strange experience. Not just because Nate and Sarah never fight. But from the midst of the dissolving I could see their minds. Minds full of knives and full of jagged edges. I remember Sarah’s balled fists, full of angry flames. It feels like a bad omen somehow, to have my best friends fight like that. Like I walked in on something I shouldn’t have seen.

My mother is complaining. Her voice sounds shrill. She has been complaining for the whole length of the car ride. We went to the supermarket on the way, to grab flowers and some household essentials. Sparkling water. Grandma loves sparkling water. They were sold out of mom’s favorite brand of toilet paper and all of the flowers looked limp, which apparently amounts to an absolutely unacceptable set of circumstances. I’m doing my best to tune out my mom’s voice. It’s odd to be in such a grey mood, after last week’s intensity. Like coming down from a really long psychedelic trip. I’m exhausted, and part of me is embracing the break. Another part of me is bored, bored, bored and screaming for the intensity to come back. Except that the screaming is very dull. Muffled. And far away. Going shopping took longer than we expected and now we’re running behind schedule. Which is giving my mom another thing to complain about. She’s urging my dad to drive faster. “We’re late Wolfgang“, she says. “Could you go any slower?” I’m already going five over the speed limit”, my dad says in a reasonable tone. My mom looks at him with barely contained fury, as if she can’t quite believe she was ever married him. Thorin and I are quiet in the backseat. We know not to get involved when they’re like this.

Outside my window the landscape is flying by. I keep wondering what happened to the dissolving. I’m a little bit unsure if I miss it. There was something meaningful about it. And connected. But then again, I was maybe skirting the edge of madness. Over-interpreting some random phenomena. Like a very vivid, compulsive daydream. It seems way better to have my functioning back. Better to focus on what’s real and in front of me. Which, in this case, is this visit with grandma I have to get through.

Grandma is in a lot of pain when we get there. You can tell from the way she is holding herself. Her elbows are subtly shaking, pressed into her tiny porcelain body. She is sitting in her favorite brown recliner, her tense hands interlocked. Her face is made out of porcelain too, like a mask that says “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.” Everyone is politely pretending they aren’t worried. 

I know from the way that my mom is pacing in the hallway that she is out of her mind with worry.  The hospital has sent grandma home with pain medication, which she is refusing to take. My mom, who is a doctor, is used to telling patients to take their medicine. She isn’t used to telling her own mother, who is stubborn like a very polite mule. Her pacing tells me she has exhausted her options. She has tried authority, and pleading, and blackmail. They are at a standstill. 

I sit at the foot of grandma’s chair, trying lightly to make conversation. “Hi grandma!” I say, feeling shy. She smiles her porcelain smile at me. I have always been her favorite grandchild. She has always been my favorite grandparent. We are bonded, alike somehow. Even now she is happy to see me and I am happy to see her. My eyes trace the elegant oriental rug I am sitting on. The tassels are brushed into perfect parallel lines. A microcosm of the spotless perfection of her apartment. Nobody teaches grandma about control. Nobody. I admire her stubbornness, but at the same time I feel like crying, seeing her in so much pain. Randomly I find myself thinking of Julian, wondering if he would know what to do. If he could help her.

I look into grandma’s blue eyes. Her eyes feel old but through them I feel connected to the woman she must have been at my age. Like thirty-year-old grandma and I are locking eyes through time. Something in me takes over. Julian isn’t here. But I am here. I look around the room calmly, assessing the situation. There are too many people here, too many energies. To many family members and they're unspoken conflicts. The people must leave, if anything is to be done. I clear my throat and tell my family to go to the bakery. Buying pastries is what German families do in a crisis. Miraculously everyone simply nods and leaves the room. So I nod too, and get to work. I move closer to grandma, close enough to touch her. She doesn’t look up. Her focus is on her pain, directed inwards. The edge of my awareness has started dissolving again. 

Slowly I tune all of my attention to her. I notice all the parts of me that are scared to take her in and politely ask them to step aside. I open my heart to her. I can feel her pain, echoed in my body. I can see it surrounding her, in layers of black and red. I feel what it’s like to be old and made out of porcelain. What it is like to be thirty years old and trapped in a body that is ninety and can’t hold you much longer. Tears are streaming down my face as I touch her feet to the ground. 

Then I’m kneeling in front of grandma, my hands on her ankles. There’s a sense of energy coming through the ground, through my body, seeping into her through my hands. The energy itself is like a thick liquid, which somehow imparts solidity. I feel supported, as if the ground itself is showing me what to do. “You got this, Leia”, the ground tells me. I nod, too focused on what’s in front of me to be surprised.  I look up to grandma, trying to catch her eyes with mine. She looks more alert, more here. “What’s going on?” I ask, my voice slightly hoarse. “Why not take the medicine?” 

Grandma remains silent. I can tell that the effort needed to speak is just too great. The pain is consuming all her energy. I’m just about ready to drop the question when grandma touches my hand, directing my attention towards something. A swirling energy, in her stomach. An image arises in my mind, of grandma in the hospital. She looks younger. I can see, or feel, the hospital room in great detail. A dresser with medical supplies, white and plastic. A bathroom to the right of the bed. A blue paper curtain, meant to give privacy. “What is this?” I ask the image.

And the image shows me. Somehow, wordlessly, it lets me know that this younger version of grandma was in the hospital for surgery on her stomach. Stomach cancer treatment, twelve years ago. Current me remember this, even though it hadn’t occurred to me to think of it as relevant to what’s happening now. Somehow I now have the felt sense, in my own body of how it is relevant. The felt sense of swirling energy in my stomach. I somehow know how the painkillers make my stomach feel weird, just like the cancer did. I can feel the overwhelming sense of needing to survive. My stomach is filled with nausea, threatening to overwhelm me. 

I remind myself that we’re here, in the now. That I’m not there, in the hospital. That grandma survived. That we survived and are here now, alive. I let my hands touch the oriental rug, feeling the individual fibers on my skin. Here. Now. The nausea subsides a little, and the swirling slows down. I can feel grandma looking at me. “Your stomach?” I ask her. She nods. I take a deep breath. Then another. The swirling energy slows down further. It’s liquid now. A liquid green that feels friendly. I look at her. She seems a bit more relaxed, a bit more at ease. We both take a breath together. “Okay”, she says. I hand her two pills, and a glass of water. She nods solemnly, then puts the pills in her mouth, slowly, one at a time, and swallows them with a gulp of water each.

We sit for a while, her in the chair, me on the floor, letting the green energy heal us. We’re the same, her and I, both in pain, bound into bodies that aren’t made to last. There’s nothing to say, and nothing to do but sit here and take one breath after another. The green tones in the carpet feel soothing, breathing with us. Time passes until I hear my family return. Wordlessly grandma and I communicate to each other that I am here with her, and that she is here with me. Then I vanish to the bathroom just as my mom enters the room with a box of cake.