An archetypist

Mere hours.

Mere hours, they say, until my grandmother is dead. This is why I have been in Michigan for the past six weeks. I have been watching her die.

I sleep on a couch in the living room down the hall from her bedroom. I remember it being covered in plastic when I was a child. She tried to extend the lifespan of everything–truly a child of the Depression–but somehow neglected herself.

And so here we are.
« Maybe we should cover her in plastic, maman? Surely it’d be more effective than the chemo. »

Those who say Death is not a palpable presence are clearly in the wrong. He lingers in a heavy, but not unfriendly manner and I have been seeing small flashes gleaming in the air all morning. I like to imagine that since he surely ceased his archetypal harvesting during the Industrial Age, he now uses his scythe only to cut doorways into the next world. So I follow the gleams and listen for the whistling winds of eternity and wonder how and where she’ll go.

Maybe, when ties are severed with her body, she’ll walk right past us in the living room, fritzing the television as she goes. Maybe she’ll walk right onto the balcony and into the lake and it’ll be churning and spinning like it’s all funneling through a drain into the next world. And beneath the dropping water levels will be unearthed memories from her life, people and places and defining moments. Maybe she’ll see her mother or her sisters or old dead lovers waving her in and saying The water’s fine! Come on in. And it will be, and so will she and she’ll swim into the spiraling center and away to I-don’t-know-where. And when we sleep at night, we’ll venture into the barren old lakebed and pick up the flopping and gasping memory of that time she went to Niagara Falls or that waterlogged book of favorite Romanian phrases and verbal tics and we’ll keep them in aquariums and on bookshelves and revisit them in our dreams.

Or maybe her mind will turn from her past to her future and she’ll think of her descendants, her link to ever unfurling time. Maybe she’ll think of my brother and how nary a week ago he kissed her goodbye and left her to see the space shuttle launch in Florida. Maybe she’ll think of how everything smells like orange blossoms there and how space was a new frontier and a symbol of progress and hope for her generation. And she’ll follow the space shuttle up through the clouds with his eyes and through the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere and into the future and beyond and on and on, Amen!

But here, on the ground, I will think of her voice and her hands and weep. I will think of how she never aged and how her mind was too much for the times she was born in to. And I will think of how she gave me my middle name and the shape of my body and how I inherited her love of language and how that has birthed everything you read here. And I will sigh and dry my eyes and think of how these words are both hers and mine and how I have become, in ways, a voice for the now voiceless.