Grandma Speaks
The day after my grandmother died I listened for her voice in the shower.
"I heard her this morning while I was in the shower," my mother had said the day before as we stared across my grandmother's hospital deathbed at each other. My mother's eyes were hollow but her voice was emphatic. Then, "she's so cold," she said as she touched her own mother's hand.
"Water enhances a spirit's ability to communicate," my mother's cousin Judy had added with comforting assurance. "It's lucky you were in the shower when you were. There's no telling if you would have heard her if you'd been another minute sooner or later." She wiped her nose.
I sank into a chair and stared at my grandmother's closed eyes. I hadn't taken a shower that morning before coming to the hospital. My mother's phone call had disrupted our Sunday morning somnolence. We had just finished a lazy, mid-morning breakfast when the telephone rang. When I'd hung up, I'd only stood helplessly in the middle of the kitchen. It was Jim who'd come up to me, taken the phone from my hand and told me quietly to put on some clothes.
So it wasn't until a couple of hours later that I sensed the true depth of a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, I didn't feel the urge to run home to the shower. Showering in the middle of the day seemed somehow unnatural to me. If I wanted to hear my grandmother speak it would have to happen as it had happened to my mother. It would have to be completely unexpected. I sensed this was something I couldn't push, couldn't force. Besides, right now there were arrangements to be made, people to be called. My sister in Minneapolis was distraught at not being closer. But I hadn't found being closer much of a help, and I didn't think living a few thousand miles away could have stopped my grandmother's spirit from communicating a last message to my sister. I asked, just to be sure.
"What do you mean, did I hear anything in the shower this morning?"
I could see my skeptical sister pulling the phone away from her ear and staring at the handset to be sure there wasn't something very wrong with it.
"Nothing," I muttered. "Just get out here on the earliest flight you can."
I walked out of the ICU and saw the sign for the women's restroom. More in need of a break from other people than for any physical relief, I went inside. I used the facilities, but I couldn't bring myself to flush the toilet. All that rushing water –– what if it brought my grandmother's spirit? I couldn't have her last communication to me happen in a public place, her spirit and me, wedged into a tiny stall. That wasn't how I wanted to remember my grandmother's voice.
I left the bathroom without even looking at the sinks. My fear of the flushing toilet was nothing to my fear of actually putting my hands under moving water. I rubbed my hands on my faded jeans, hoping the old denim would absorb any germs. I felt bad about not washing my hands in a hospital; ignoring basic hygiene might make the patients here more sick or prove a good way to end up being a patient here myself.
The next morning I was out of bed earlier than usual, despite not having gone to bed until near midnight. I hadn't showered yesterday. There simply hadn't been time, though I don't think I'd stopped thinking about being under the hot spray of water, even when I called the funeral director at our family cemetery. He had asked me where we wanted to have the service.
"Is there a river or a creek nearby?" I had asked him.
He was silent for a moment, but he was also used to the disorienting conversational gambits employed by the recently bereaved. "No," he had said carefully, "but there's a beautiful oak tree in our Garden of Eden section."
I went into our bathroom, sparkling white and pale green. It was a beautiful room, completely redecorated by Jim and me. I loved the huge green-walled shower with its clear glass door, but I hesitated before it today. Such a mixture of feelings. I felt physically grimy and spiritually so as well. I wanted to look and feel differently than I had yesterday. A simple shower couldn't accomplish that, however.
I was afraid –– my stomach quaked with it. I'd never known a shower to conquer fear. Neither had I ever known a shower to fulfill such heady anticipation as I felt –– my head felt ready to float off my shoulders.
I considered acting normally; thought about going through my usual morning rituals as though nothing unusual was expected this morning. But the thought of washing my face at the sink cowed me. The motions of scrubbing and rinsing my face were too busy. I thought it might be best if I stood idly under the shower's spray with my mind open and my body relaxed, ready to receive whatever communications had slipped into the ether for me.
Not hurrying, I opened the shower door, turned the shiny chrome knob that started the water rushing from the brand new shower head. I waited for the spray to warm, not daring to test it with my hand. I allowed my fluffy white robe, a Christmas present from Jim which I usually treat carefully, to slip to the chilled tile floor. Shivering with cold and excitement, I waited for the steam to rise. I wanted to be engulfed by the shower, to be surrounded by its atmosphere, to inhabit it fully, without distraction or restraint.
Tentatively I poked a toe over the shower's threshold, carefully avoiding the spiky streams of hot water. My other foot lifted of its own accord and suddenly I was in the shower, backed up against the green and white tile wall where the water couldn't reach me.
I breathed deeply, and stared into the water. With one step I was within it, my eyes closed, my mind opened.
Nothing. My hands spread, my arms lifted slightly, straight out from my sides, asking a silent question. Nothing. Silence. The sharp splash of water on clean tile reigned.
I waited. I emptied my head and even grabbed a washcloth and the bar of soap, trying to fool myself into acting normally. I washed myself, trying to concentrate on every move I made.
But I discovered that the process of cleaning oneself is so routine, so automatic, that it can't possibly engage the mind. Trying to do so only messed me up. I actually stood for several minutes, soapy washcloth in hand, and wondered what I was supposed to do with it next.
Without really considering the right or the wrong of it, I started thinking about my grandmother. And yet, I wasn't really thinking about her. Yesterday consumed me and she hadn't been there yesterday, not really. She could not have been an active participant, yet she was the catalyst. My mind wandered painfully, like bare feet on sharp rocks. I thought about how my tearful grandfather –– a man I had never seen cry, a man who had lived through the Great Depression and WWII and not been broken –– had asked me what we were supposed to do next. And I thought about my own helpless response.
I had told him we should wait at my grandmother's hospital bedside awhile longer –– for what I don't know. I think it was because nobody actually said the words "She's dead." When I got to the hospital yesterday, my father had stopped me at the door to the ICU. "She's dying," was all he'd said, like it was an ongoing process. And no one ever offered a correction or an amendment.
So that's how I knew, when my grandfather asked, that we should wait awhile longer, until someone in charge came into her room and said, "Okay, it's over." But no one ever did. We were all afraid of finality.
Eventually it was decided we should leave. I don't know who began the movement. Nobody wanted to be the last one out of the room. But I hated to leave. What if some vestige of her remained? How would I feel if it were me, left to take my last breath alone, no one to hold my hand? I thought about how I had kissed her cheek then, how her skin had felt cold and rubbery. My mother had shivered and said I was brave to do it. I'd only known I didn't have a choice. It was the only way I could be sure she was truly gone and didn't need us anymore.
Which was silly, really, because I'd never considered the fact that she might need me. She was a child of the Depression, and used to doing without. So it was okay with her that I'd let months go by without answering the messages she'd leave on my machine. It was okay that I didn't get over to visit her when I had other things to do and she wasn't feeling well enough to make the trip to my house. All that attention I'd taken for granted, and now I would have willingly traded the house Jim and I are so proud of for one word from her.
I stayed in the shower until my skin was so saturated with moisture that it became wrinkly and transparent, as wrinkled with water as my grandmother's had been with age. My skin started to feel as though it were floating loosely above the fat, muscle, and bones of my body. I feared it would slide off my fingers in drips like water. The temperature began to cool, despite the new water heater Jim installed last winter. I closed my eyes, listened, willed my grandmother to speak.
Nothing. The water splattered on the tiles below and behind me. The steam began to clear. I leaned my head back and let the cooling spray wipe away my tears. Shivering now with cold, with exhaustion, with anticipatory adrenaline come to naught, I turned off the water. Leaning my forehead against the shower wall, I waited, listening to the last dregs of water dripping from the shower head, from my hair, from my fingers. The fluffy white towels Jim and I had gotten specifically for this bathroom were easily within reach. We had even installed a towel warmer, something my grandmother had considered a wonderful extravagance when I'd told her about it, though she'd never had a chance to see it, let alone use it. She'd never been to our new home, first because we were busy moving in and restoring the house and then because she'd gotten sick. She'd wanted to see the place, but the trip across the river from Washington was just too much for her.
I regretted that even more now than I had then. To be honest, I hadn't regretted it then at all. Jim and I had been busy, too busy for familial obligations that took too much time away from the house that had become almost an obsession for us. I figured there'd be time for my grandmother later. Back then, I'd had to focus on the house. Jim and I wanted to have it done in time for the upcoming holidays.
My grandmother had been a little confused the last few months, I recalled as I wrapped myself in the towel and sank onto the toilet seat. Perhaps she had forgotten that we had actually moved into our new house. The tragedy of cosmically-crossed wires was almost funny. I pictured the new tenant of our old apartment naked and startled in his shower the preceding morning when my grandmother floated by to say: "It's all right."
That's what my mother said grandma's words had been when she heard her voice. "It's all right, Vera," spoken in my grandmother's voice, as clear as a bell.
But no message for me or my sister. I didn't think it was because we weren't important to her. Maybe she just hadn't had the ability to be in three places at once, or somehow hadn't had time to visit us all before she had to go.
My hair dripped over my shoulder and I twitched uncomfortably, swiped a hand at my nose like a stubborn ten year-old. Then Jim came into the bathroom.
"Are you all right? You've been in here for more than an hour." He crossed his arms, rubbed his hands up and down from his shoulders to his elbows. "Jesus, it's freezing in here."
He crossed the room, knelt in front of me. I couldn't even look at him. Jim took in my bedraggled, shivering state and grabbed another towel to wrap around my shoulders. His hand brushed my cheek, "Bless her heart," he said softly.
I've known Jim for ten years. I've never heard him use that expression. It's old-fashioned, rather feminine, and something my grandmother said to me every time I'd seen her since I was three years old.
I burst into tears, throwing Jim into helpless confusion. I've never seen him quite so flustered before. He thought he'd hurt me by saying the wrong thing and it was several minutes before I could speak well enough to tell him he'd said exactly the right thing.
Jim looked a little blank. "What did I say?"
I smiled. It was a watery smile.
"I just heard my grandmother."
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AUTHOR NOTES:
Shelly Monteith lives in Gresham, Oregon with her husband, stepson, and demonic cat. Currently a project assistant at a Portland law firm and a senior in the Marylhurst English Literature and Writing Program, the author hopes to pursue a Master's Degree in Creative Writing.
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