The Story I Never Planned to Tell

I lied to my grandmother on her deathbed.

She lie in a hospice bed, stricken by a stroke the doctors claimed would leave her paralyzed or unable to speak or comprehend. The smell of Vaseline and menthol, the aftertaste of my lie.

A week before, when my father made the decision to stop the feeding tubes, he acted on the recommendation of the doctors who told us that Dorothy White would never wake up again. She’s lost in a coma, they informed, her brain too damaged and swollen. The gash on her forehead where she had fallen taking in groceries wounded us. Her bruised eye reminded us of her frailties. Only when you tried to wet her tongue or spoke loudly into her face did her eyelids flutter open. Those blue eyes struggled to focus, then rolled back. She would never submit to living in a nursing home. She had openly declared so on more than one occasion.

We grieved her, even while we stood at her bedside and held her hand.

I remember the way her hand felt when you held it. My grandmother had distinctive fingers—knobby, shiny and unusually smooth, her fingernails squared and thick. Arthritis crooked them. They always seemed in perfect position to hover over a keyboard, click a mouse, or punch numbers into an adding machine. She worked in a bank for years. Never looked down at the keys when she tallied something up—neither in her office nor years later as a volunteer bookkeeper for the Hospital Gift Shop.

One of my strongest memories of my grandmother’s hands was in the 1980’s. She bought tickets for me and my brother to participate in “Hands Across America.” The event was meant to fight homelessness and hunger. People all across the country lined up and supposedly created a human chain from one coast to the other.

I was twelve, just having had my birthday the week before. We stood in the middle of our town’s Main Street and linked our fingers together. What I remember most was my grandma death-gripping my hand, her rings digging into my fingers, the strength of her clutch. I bit my lip to keep from crying out. I didn’t want my grandmother to think I was whiny or weak—traits she did not admire. We raised our hands up and sang the special anthem “Hands Across America.”

I still feel the press of her fingers. I can still hear the quivery soprano of her voice. I still remember shifting my weight and counting down the minutes in the song until we could finally let go.

I didn’t want to let her go. I stood in that hospice room, watching her sleep, listening to my parents and uncle tell me about her condition and how she seemed confused whenever she woke up. They spoke about “the process” and referenced some blue book about the stages of death and celestial seas. I hadn’t seen her in a week, not since I kissed her good-bye for what I thought was the last time in the hospital. I had worked all week, preoccupied by thoughts of my dying grandmother. I flinched every time my cell phone rang.

As soon as I was able, I drove to the hospice from Indiana—three hours—after a late class, lost an hour heading East. I had only an hour or so to speak with my parents to know what had happened during the week.

The scene was not what the doctors had predicted.

She had signed a “do not resuscitate” years before and spoke with disdain about nursing homes or assisted living facilities. It was impossible to know for sure what damage the stroke had done. She spoke well for having suffered a massive stroke. But, she had not eaten for days. Was it the starvation that suddenly energized her brain? The little blue book claimed so. This was part of the journey they bulleted for family members to help them cope.

I couldn’t cope—with the fact that she seemed alert and strong considering the week her body had endured. I sat in the chair by her bed and clutched her hand.

My grandmother and I had a unique relationship. She’d called me “hard to get to know” once when I was younger. By all accounts, I had grown into the woman she might’ve been had she not married and had children. In the 1940’s, she moved from a small farm in Ohio to Arizona—an independent spirit that her World War II era eventually broke. She would marry my grandfather three months after their first date, a blind date. She would give birth to two sons. She would play the wife and mother for years, even though she worked full-time and refused to be stay-at-home mom.

Years later, my grandmother and I would enjoy some adventures. I would drive her down from Bowling Green, Ohio to her hometown of Nevada to see her brothers and sisters. We would drive all over Ohio, our own version of Thelma and Louise. I was easy-going and laid back and never minded her telling me where to turn or how to drive. She could tell me things that she had done—like mow her own lawn—and I never chastized her. My father and my cousin were more parental in their concern for her.  My cousin was the closest thing my grandmother had had to a daughter, and they would bicker and battle, so like each other in itchier, feistier ways. 

My grandma and I, on the other hand, were kindreds in our indomitable independence, though neither of us ever put that into words.

And, so, when I held her hand at her hospice bedside, I had no words for the question she asked me. My parents had left. My uncle had left. I had wanted a few more minutes with her before I left for the night.

Suddenly, she seemed especially lucid, her blue eyes focused onto my brown ones, and she asked me the question that haunts me almost a year to the day later.

“When will I be released?” she asked, her eyes wide and childlike.

My knees shook, nausea tingled in my stomach, and I held her hand even tighter.

“I don’t know,” I said, my breathing hard. “I think in a couple of days.”

I thought my lie might help her sleep that night; I would not sleep at all.

She would come to accept that she was in hospice care, and I would be able to tell her that I loved her and how much she meant to me.

But, the lie lingers, even now--one of those moments in life that change you—for good and for bad.