A couple of weeks before Christmas 1998, my grandmother mentioned casually over the telephone that she had a doctor's appoint for a bone scan at Piedmont Hospital.
"You want company?" I asked, and then half-jokingly, "Someone to hold your hand?"
"That'd be fine," she said, I imagine from the rocking chair in her kitchen where she sat drinking coffee in the early morning hours, talking on the black wall phone. "I'll go to the office and write a column and then I'll pick you up."
. . .
Dr. York did not keep us waiting long. When he came into the exam room, he sat down, asked the perfunctory questions about how she was doing, and then he got down to the truth. There were tears in his eyes as he told her the cancer had returned and it was terminal, that there was nothing to be done. The cancer had spread all through her bones and other tests would have to be performed to see where else. She took the news calmly and, as I looked at her practical stoic face, I felt tears rushing down my hot cheeks, a torrent of sadness that was unstoppable.
. . .
What goes through a person's mind at a moment like that?
. . .
I didn't want to say good-bye to my grandmother. I figured maybe if I avoided sending her off, it would stop the inevitable. But then on Friday the thirteenth of August, I found myself getting up at four in the morning, packing up the car with my little brother John-Stephen in tow, and making the six-hour drive to Dog Island where 'Tine was laid up in bed giving last instructions to everyone in the family-save me. When I walked into her bedroom I knew immediately why I'd come. She stretched out her arms big and a smile like pure joy set over her face as she exclaimed, "Tibo! I'd thought I'd never see you again!"
. . .
Close to five in the morning, I woke up of a sudden impulse, a noise, a groan. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and headed towards my grandmother's room. Her "tenant lady" (her home healthcare attendant) was busy tending her, trying to make her comfortable. The pain from the cancer had seeped through the medicine and was torturing what she called her "unfriendly bones."
I sat beside her bed and said the words that I imagine people have said since the beginning of time. "I'm here. We all love you so much. Everybody has a job. Everything is taken care of. It's okay to let go. . . ."
My mother sat down by me and softly sang age-old tunes that sounded like lullabies. We held 'Tine's hands as she gazed back and forth between this world and the next, the pain finally gone. And then just as in a church, just as in any poem or piece of wisdom, her spirit slipped from her body as quietly as it had been conceived.
I called my close friend and 'Tine's former assistant Ellen, and asked her to pick up my sons Vincent and Wolfie, give them the news, wipe away tears, reassure. Ellen has been like an aunt to the boys ever since she came into our lives. Ellen and her husband Rodney took the boys out for pizza, and explained. "But 'Tine's not supposed to die!" Wolfie sobbed.
When we got back home the next day I was walking through the house, coffee in hand and remembering. Then I came upon Wolfie in the music room, a wrinkled letter protected under his small hand.
All I could see was the outside. It read:
Address: heaven
From: Wolfie
His eyes were swollen red, the tears spilling off his long lashes in currents of grief.
I gently pried the note from his protective custody and my tears welled up as I read the childish handwritten words:
Tein I miss you very much and I wish you were here. I hope you see everybody in heaven and when I come I will see you. I wonder what is like there and I could be with you but it will just half to be your spearot until I get there. But when I do we will have lots of fun and we can run on the clouds and fly. And we can do anything we want me you my mom and ron and betsy and my brother. I hope you get this leter love Wolfie.
And, as he folded it shut and put down his pen, I knew she had.