Fixing to Die Blues

I use the words 'die', 'to die for', 'dying to', and other death variations to punctuate certain thoughts frequently in conversation. Most of us do. Death and sex are the two mysteries conjured up in order to make us feel deep ... like we know, man. We dig it. Now sleep with me, or respect my conceptual darkness, or let's just go get that pastry I'm 'dying' to eat. It's kind of silly the way we name-check death, because all of us walking around have never died (unless you count those who have seen the tunnel of light and been jerked back into the hospital room to live another day). We're like the virgin cheerleader in American Beauty boasting about her sexual expertise. Like Goth teenagers, sullen and wearing black while shopping at the mall. But the day we lose our death virginity, we're, like, corpses. We don't really know what death is like because we've never done it.

So my 97 year old step-grandmother is at the nursing home. It's been years now, and her death is alleged to be imminent. And I was compelled by an urge to go see her yesterday, perhaps to tell her goodbye. We were never close, but we know each other. She was one of the old-school strict constructionist Assembly of Godders, stern and strange. My stepmother told me that her mother had never sinned in her life. Both of them seemed to believe it. As a result, the woman was a pretty judgmental old hen. I always felt the angry eye of Jehovah on me while I sat on her stiff living room couch over the years, bouncing a nervous knee. Step-Grandma Mattie was a Marine sergeant for Jesus. She walked to church every Sunday morning and evening in Savannah. Mattie was like a stiff locust branch jutting heavenward from her unupholstered wooden church pew, where she usually sat alone.

My stepmother knew something had to be done when she was riding in the passenger seat with Mattie at the helm when the Holy Spirit descended on her and the prophesies began. Mattie was driving 50 mph down a main thoroughfare of Savannah when Jesus lit the fire on her tongue again and she began to speak in that unknown language. She raised her hands until her fingertips touched the headliner while my stepmother grabbed the wheel.

The car was sold soon afterward.

But Mattie was unstoppable. She took to walking everywhere while her mind and eyesight failed. She let the yard man fill out his own check from her checkbook. She stepped into a bed of fire ants, oblivious. One day Daddy called me and said that Mattie was moving in with them. I heard the deepest sigh. Daddy knew that this would never work.

Step-Grandma Mattie got looser and looser around the edges while she forgot to go to the bathroom, forgot to eat, forgot where she was. Sometimes she seemed to forget that her daughter was trying to sleep fitfully in the bed beside her. Mattie would perceive her as an intruder and proceeded to whale on her and demand that she get away from her bed, that she be taken home instead of being in this strange place she found herself in.

A series of nursing homes followed. But Mattie got thrown out of a couple of them, calling the attendants a certain inappropriate racial epithet and hitting those who got in her personal space. In the meantime, my stepmother was consumed with guilt and shame for letting her mother down. I heard about it all over again last night when she called to thank me for visiting Mattie. Her mother's decline is not the result of living ninety something years. No, it is all because my stepmother is a bad daughter.

Sometimes I worry that, when the day finally arrives, my stepmother will jump into that coffin with her mama.

I walked into Mattie's room yesterday and thought that she might be already dead. I had seen her a few months ago, but this time I understood the notion of a person being nothing but skin and bones. She was sleeping and I could literally see the skull beneath her papery skin, the eyes sunken so deeply in the sockets. It was startling when she awoke with the same bright blue eyes so much like my own, although no blood relation exists.

It's hard to talk to a dying woman. It must be like confessing to a priest, I would imagine. One-sided, and hopefully with forgiveness granted at the conclusion. Small talk is fairly useless but is still the chosen method of passing the time. I described my daughters, my life, and the cloudless sunny day outside of the concrete block building. Finally, Mattie blurted out "Who are you?". I did better with giving her sips of water through a straw. She grasped my hand tightly for a minute, but then would almost shove me away. And those eyes bored into me all the while.

At a loss for anything else to do, I asked if she wanted me to pray with her. She said "yes" in her birdlike warble. And so I prayed to Jesus with her, for her, expressing gratefulness and love toward God in the best way that an agnostic can. It was awkward as hell. But after I said "amen" she thanked me.

I sat there hoping she would go back to sleep so that I could slip out without saying goodbye. But she continued to stare at me. Mattie seemed as strong and willful in death as she has ever been in life. I bet that she could die for years. That's fine if she takes her time. It is, after all, her life. I mean that with utmost respect.

I finally kissed her and left. And I realize that I might go back to that nursing home and pray with her a hundred more times before she gives it up. Mattie could outlive me. But probably not - the nurses and hospice seem to think that it's any day now. But no one knows for sure.

I woke up this morning with all of this on my mind. And I am pretty damn humbled by Death, realizing that I don't really know it at all.

NTD