I'm Just Happy to Be Here

by Janelle Hanchett

  I’ve never seen anybody eat chicken sandwiches like that since, but that’s still what I make when I want to remember.

  • • •

  If it was October or November she would tell me it was time to start wrapping gifts for Christmas, and that she was going to pay me for my work. I would say, “You don’t have to pay me, Grandma.”

  She’d shake her hand at me and say, “No, you’re good at it, and I hate wrapping, so you’ll earn it.”

  I knew she was telling me the truth.

  I’d begin by laying out the paper choices. I needed plenty of options to balance the landscape under the tree. Then I would set out the tape, making sure it was in an upright metal dispenser, so I could rip the tape pieces off with one hand. Next, I would set out the scissors, tags, and a pen. Just one pen. A ballpoint that wouldn’t smear on the labels. Finally, I would stack the gift bags and boxes and tissue paper.

  After it was all set up, we would move into the guest room and open the bottom drawer of the dresser, which would be stuffed with tiny gifts she had been buying all year. She would remember who almost every single one was for. All year, every year, she bought gifts for her five children and six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren and all the family members who weren’t actually family members but really, at that point, were—plus everybody’s boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses.

  She bought the tiny porcelain tea set for Aunt June in London because Aunt June loves England, and she bought the horse figurine for Aunt Caroline because she loves horses. Some gifts were catchall gifts. These she would often hold up in the air, resting one finger on the side of her mouth in the classic thinking pose, contemplating who would be the perfect recipient. She looked so tender and affectionate in those moments. She might put the gift back, or she might make a decision. Sometimes I found the gift in the drawer long after Christmas had passed. Guess she never decided on that one, I’d think.

  After I gathered my stack of gifts from the drawers and closets, I would begin wrapping. I loved the boxes the most because I could wrap the corners tight and clean, and easily center the bow. When I was done, they felt perfect. I’d wrap for hours while she’d listen to talk radio, occasionally walking by in her long robe that zipped up the front, patting my back.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you!” she’d say. The finished products were spectacular.

  I felt I made Christmas with her. I felt it was us doing it together. I wrapped for her when I was nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. I kept showing up when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. Grandma Bonny needs me. I am the one who wraps the gifts. I was thorough. We had a system.

  My first year of college, in 1997, I made sure to come back at Christmas to wrap with my grandmother, but after that, I didn’t come again. My stepmother took over the wrapping.

  • • •

  When Ava came in 2001, I had grown impatient with Grandma Bonny’s phone calls, because she spoke slowly and quietly, and there was rarely time to listen to old women talk about the British Parliament. I saw her at Christmas, and every year at the Cloverdale Citrus Fair, and I never failed to stop at the shop when we drove out to Mendocino, because it was right on the way. But I had grown busy.

  My father told me in 2008, the last year of my drinking, not to come visit her, even though it was the last year of her life. If I were in my right mind, I would have gone immediately anyway. I would have sat by her side and touched her if she would let me, and I would have studied her eyes to remember. He said not to come because of her dementia, because she wouldn’t remember me, but I wonder if it was because of the state I was in, and maybe they didn’t want her to see me like that. I was the sickest I had ever been.

  We were both, I suppose, the sickest we had ever been.

  So I cannot remember the last time I saw her, what we talked about, or how. I have one vision of her standing in the doorway of her last home, the bigger home she told me “the children” had convinced her to buy after the mobile home. She was wearing a pink fleece robe, and she was waving to me as I drove away. She seemed to wave an extra long time, and I noticed.

  “One of these times will be the last time I see her,” I said to Mac.

  But I don’t think that was the time. That day, we kissed and hugged in the doorway and I said goodbye, but I don’t think that was the goodbye.

  In the end, there was no goodbye, and I was still a loser when she died.

  • • •

  She once told me while I sat across from her on the couch that she wore red velvet to her wedding in 1943. She said, “They weren’t going to turn me into some blushing bride!” When she said “blushing bride” she put her hands up under her chin, wagged her fingers up and down, and flitted her lashes to make me laugh. That was not the last time we talked, but it was the conversation I have chosen as the last, because it was my favorite, and I can’t bear to think of what our actual last conversation would have been. If I could see her with the mind I have now, I would tell her how much fun I had with her, and how I always felt a strange, superhuman connection to her, because we are similar women, skeptical and “offending” and “just too much,” with tiny rage problems and loads of children, but an inability to accept them as the full definition of our selves. I would thank her for reading me Beatrix Potter and letting me eat three Danish pastries with butter on top and showing me how intellectual mothers can be and that some of us will simply never fit.

  “You know? We just don’t, Grandma,” That’s what I would say.

  I would record her talking about her life, so I could hold it and hear it and learn it, because there were a thousand stories beyond the ones she told me and I forgot, and a thousand more she never told me, about growing up behind the stage, becoming the first woman editor of the University of Washington’s newspaper, about World War II and a veteran husband who sometimes woke up sweating from nightmares, about the time she crawled onto the couch and refused to move, and nursed herself back to sanity by doing paint-by-numbers her friend had brought her. About the day Uncle John died of alcoholism, and she said simply, “A parent should never outlive her children,” and it was the only time I saw her drink a glass of wine.

  Oh, I want to hear about writing, Grandma, about people who hated you, about journalism and female editors in the 1950s, the Mafia men you fought with about the resort on your lake—the algae lake with the rough water that lulled me to sleep on those hot-cold sunburned evenings, the one I drove by and remembered, and wondered when it was that we last spoke, and if she wondered the same as she drifted on, or if the dementia took that away, and I had become nothing but a speck of curled ribbon in the recesses of a fading mind.

  Part of me wished that were true. Part of me wept at the thought.

  On the day my father called to tell me she had died, I was sitting in a bar that smelled like urine and bottom-shelf bourbon. I notified the man sitting next to me of the passing of my grandmother, and he felt very sad for me. Surely he would have bought me a round had he a few extra bucks. I remember feeling almost nothing, and wanting to, but I had passed the moment when feelings came the way they should and I lived like a real human on a real earth.

  Six months later, I left myself in a bed, maybe the way Bonny Jean left herself in hers.

  • • •

  When I was a month sober, my bedroom door opened suddenly in the middle of the night while I was in a dead sleep. I startled and sat up in bed in time to see the door open, rest for a second or two, and then shut again. My dog jumped out of his bed and barked at the door.

  I thought it was my mother, the only other person in the house, but I needed to make sure, so I said her name and opened the door. But I saw only an empty hallway. I walked across the hall to her bedroom, and from the doorway I saw her sleeping and heard her snoring.

  As I sat on the edge of my bed considering what had just happened, I was overwhelmed with a feeling that Bonny Jean had visited me. Out of nowhere, a feeling of h
er presence overtook me, as if she were standing right there, and I could smell the scent of her car, see her wrinkled hands as they clasped in delight at my wrapping or in rage at the audacity of Fox News.

  It was as if she had opened the door and looked in, saw me sleeping there, and moved on. As if she had opened the door, looked in, and said, “Oh, finally, you’re okay.”

  Perhaps that is the last time we met; though we didn’t say goodbye, we were both in our right minds, and that’s saying something, I guess.

  • • •

  Seven years later, when my maternal grandfather, Bob, was dying in October 2016, I was there, because I knew what it meant to miss a grandparent’s final days. When I walked into his hospital room, I leaned over the foot of the bed, and he grabbed my hands and said, “It’s time.” And I said, “Yes, it is,” and made my bravest face for him, because I saw fear in his eyes. He wanted to die at home, but Grandma Joan wasn’t ready to accept his death, not quite yet. But by the time she stopped demanding more pills and doctors and possible new medical advances, he had mere hours to live, and they couldn’t arrange hospice in time. He passed away in the night surrounded by his daughters and wife, by a window overlooking the maternity ward.

  He and Joan Lila had four daughters, twenty grandchildren, and forty-four great-grandchildren. Many of us passed through his hospital room, taking turns sitting by the bed and leaning against the walls. We cried and laughed as we had done our whole lives together in the basement of their home two miles from that sterile room. Occasionally, Grandpa Bob would wake and lift his head, startled and sudden, and look slowly and deliberately around the room at each one of us, from behind the oxygen mask he kept yanking off, and I wanted to beg my family to just let him take it off. Let him be comfortable. He clearly hates that thing. What does it matter now? What are we hoping for? An extra hour?

  Then I realized we were keeping him alive for us, for Joan Lila.

  He would lock eyes with one of us, hold our gaze for a few seconds, and fall back asleep. When he locked eyes with me, I did my best to send him strength, to see the part of him that knew he was stepping into the great journey and didn’t want to go. I wished something could soothe him.

  Grandma Joan refused to leave his side. She rubbed his arm where there were no IVs and fixed the tape around their entry points. She brushed wisps of hair from his forehead and said, “Oh Bob, we had a good life together, didn’t we?” She told him story after story, of their friends and daughters, and boating on Clearlake, and he watched and dozed and nodded in recognition. His eyes held hers desperately. Once, he pulled his oxygen mask off and they had one big, last smooch, and it made a nurse kneeling next to them drop her head and cry. Their hands entwined and he pressed himself against the side of the bed, his face as close as he could get to hers. To watch them felt like watching the perfect end to the love story we all wish we could have, the piercing agony we all strive for.

  When it was bedtime that night, and all of us grandchildren were heading out for sleep, we said, “We’ll see you in the morning, Grandpa,” but we knew that was unlikely, so we said longer goodbyes than usual. Mostly, though, we relied on the thousand goodbyes we had tossed over our shoulders as we left their home of forty years. Until next time. Love you. There was no way we could say enough, so we simply said one more goodbye—lingered longer, grasped his hand, let go, and forced the turn to walk away.

  When I was standing in the doorway looking into his room, aware that I was probably looking at my living grandfather for the last time, a new nurse came in to help settle him and check his gear. The air hung heavy with nearing death, and my grandfather was restless. So when the nurse walked by the television, she said to nobody in particular, “We have a special channel for moments just like this,” and flipped to a station with soothing music and goldfish swimming around against a blue background.

  It was a fake fishbowl television death station.

  During moments like this I feel like I am on the edge of the world, looking on, a hundred miles from whatever land the rest of you are inhabiting, wondering how nobody sees the tragedy of that gesture, how infinitely weird and empty we are. I studied the scene: my grandmother staring into his face, my mother and aunts bustling or sitting, eighty-seven years of life and love circling to its close in mere hours, and here, on the night before us—the last night—all we have to offer are motherfucking TV goldfish to see him into the abyss.

  Hey man, sorry you’re dying. Here are some goldfish.

  I took a hard look at his big, calloused hands that he used to sweep over his mouth after he cracked a joke or teased my grandmother, and I walked out the automatic doors.

  • • •

  Five weeks after we buried my grandfather, on the morning of November 10, 2016, I was pulling out of my children’s school parking lot after dropping them off when my phone rang, and I thought, Oh, good, it’s my mom telling me she’s forgiven me for being an asshole last night. Donald Trump had just been elected President, and I had taken my shock out on my mother. But as soon as I clicked “answer,” I only heard her screaming.

  At first I thought my mother was getting stabbed because I heard “knife” and “stabbed” and “killed,” so I screamed at her to leave her house. But through more chopped screams I realized it was my grandmother who was being stabbed.

  Then I learned she had already been stabbed, and was in fact dead, and my cousin was the one who did it. My own cousin, the one who sat with me in my grandfather’s hospital room but registered no emotion, no affect, no nothing. I noticed, and I asked about it. I was told he was suffering from depression. I said I thought he needed help, that he was perhaps suicidal.

  I was twenty minutes away from my mother when I picked up the phone, and I knew she was alone in her house, so I drove and wailed and tried to breathe while telling Arlo—our fourth child, two years old, the beautiful completion of our family—that I was okay, even as the air I breathed felt like fire and the air moving out felt like drowning, my terror a thousand shards of glass tearing through me, slamming the outside of my body.

  I drove to her while my baby looked at me wide-eyed and silent from his car seat. I called Mac and screamed to him. He thought one of our children had been killed. Hysterics, actual hysterics, are virtually impossible to comprehend. I tried so hard to pull enough air to speak sentences, but all that happened were quick bursts of guttural wails and broken words through burning breath.

  When I got to the intersection two streets away from my mother, a wooden arm came down in front of me and a huge cargo train rolled in. The train stopped entirely, and I couldn’t get to her. I was the first in line in the intersection, and I couldn’t get to her, so I yelled “No no no no” while immobile in the car and shook my head and sweated and screamed and looked at my boy who sat silent, until I could get to her. When I did, she was half-dressed, doubled over in a chair and shrieking with the shock of a terrified child, “My beautiful mother! He killed my mother!” When she said “mother,” she rose and spun around and ran across the room, and sat and rose again and cried out again, “He killed my mother!”—over and over, while I watched with eyes wide, fighting wild, insane panic and sorrow.

  An old woman murdered by her grandson. My grandmother. My mother’s mother. Joan Lila.

  My mother fell against the walls, and I held her up while my little boy stood looking out the front door I had forgotten to shut, holding his monkey lunch box in front of him with both hands, as if he were waiting for a ride on a train that had just departed.

  In those early hours we knew no details of the crime, so I imagined my grandmother suffering, slowly bleeding to death in pain and isolation. But it turns out that after eating Chinese takeout with her and his mother, my thirty-five-year-old cousin went upstairs to the bathroom, and when he came out, went into his bedroom, where he unsheathed a Kershaw hunting knife, stuck it up his shirtsleeve, came downstairs, and stabbed my grandmother in the neck, once, from behind.

  This I
found to be a significant relief.

  After spending a day envisioning her body mutilated and writhing, I felt relief that she hadn’t seen him coming. I felt relief that it was instantaneous. I felt relief that her last thought was not, My grandson is about to kill me. I felt relief her final moments were not terror and betrayal and the watching of a hand raised to annihilate her, defenseless and yet fighting anyway—the instinctual shriek and cowering—and the subsequent fall, bleeding, and extinguished light, with not even a goldfish to comfort her.

  • • •

  Grandma Joan and I had not spoken in almost a year before my grandfather’s death because I was angry with her, and had convinced myself we need not speak again, ever. She had sent Mac a message online asking why our daughter Georgia was “shorn like a boy” and inquiring if her mother was using her as a political project. You know, a sort of “girls can have short hair” poster child to further my liberal agenda.

  But when my mother told me my grandfather was dying, I was reminded of the eternal backdrop of impending death, and my charge grew petty and damn near shameful. I left for the hospital immediately. As soon as I turned the corner in the hospital hallway, Grandma Joan came running to me and grabbed my face, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Do you forgive me?” Of course I did, and had for many months, but was still clinging to the self-righteous indignation that always failed me. I took special care to focus mostly on my grandmother, to pat her back, bring her water, and hold her hand. She was dizzy with confusion and exhaustion and helplessness, watching her love travel on without her, and I wanted to fix what I had done, because she was eighty-five and didn’t understand little girls with mohawks. Do we hate them for that? Our mothers and grandmothers? Do we hate them for roles they’ve internalized and been forced to play? Or do we simply love them as they pass into the gray?