Part 1

In August 2020 my grandma was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. She agreed to see a doctor only after the tumor growing on the outside of her left breast began to seep a toxic infection from numerous enlarged pores. She’d hidden it for nearly eight months as it grew, but once it began to smell, she knew her secret wouldn’t be kept for much longer. 

The tumor was twenty nine inches long. Nineteen inches across. Twelve inches deep. It was covered in a honeycomb of black infected pores. They performed a biopsy to see where else it had spread in her body. She was prescribed an antibiotic for the infection and a pill to start shrinking the tumor. 

It was too large to remove and had to be shrunk first. The cavity left behind in her body, they said, could be fatal. 

At the next appointment the biopsy results showed the tumor was cancerous, but it hadn’t spread. It was clustered in one area on her body and was very treatable. They recommended a non-traditional chemo treatment that targeted the zone of cancer, rather than radiating through her body. It would only target the cancerous cells, shrink the tumor, and make it operable. They were hopeful that by Christmas, she’d be on the road to recovery. But, her Medicare insurance denied the request for this treatment deeming it “unnecessary.” Rather than consulting with her for alternative options, she was treated with a traditional form of chemo, the stretch of radiation from which would be experienced throughout her whole body. The absence of information regarding this modification pillaged her consent in the matter. 

After three weeks of chemo Mondays, three weeks of daily pill treatments, the tumor had shrunk from twenty nine inches long to nineteen. From nineteen inches across to eleven. From twelve inches deep to nine. The infection had cleared and the black and purple oozing pores had shrunk, the rotten liquid dried up in response to the antibiotic. Her body was responding “positively,” to the treatment her cancer doctor told us.

But the chemo treatments were making her sick. She went for treatment on Monday. Tuesday she was so exhausted she didn’t get around to eating much. Wednesdays were better, but her appetite was marginal, at best. Thursdays and Fridays were her best days. The nauseating effects of the chemo had worn off, the angst of the upcoming treatment was out of arm’s reach, but by Saturday it was close enough to grasp at with her fingertips and so the nausea set in through Sunday as she anxiously pondered Monday morning’s appointment. 

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, in November of 2019, she fell on an icy sidewalk outside of a print shop where she was picking up notebooks with handwritten sentiments to incorporate as part of ‘thank you’ baskets for the renters to the farm. At Thanksgiving her wrist was wrapped in a brace she still had from a previous injury. Her spirits were high regardless. With plates dusted from the remnants of pie scattered about the table we taught her and grandpa how to play Keys To The Castle, a board game we’d picked up in Niagara on the Lake, Canada. The trauma to her body triggered the growth of a tumor that, she confessed later, she had originally discovered as a small lump in December of 2012. 

The tumor robbed her body of its eighty one years of resources. It fed on her flesh and withered away her rosy cheeks until they hung from sharp, peaked bone. The following summer, in mid July sunlight, as we sat by the pond in her backyard, I thought the breeze may not be gentle enough to keep from tearing the thin veil. 

Her body had already sacrificed itself to grow this parasite. It had thrown all its eggs into one basket, an expression she often used. In doing so, after three weeks of chemo, her reserves were depleted. Unable to manifest the physical capability to endure week four, the treatment was waylaid for a week in order for her to gather her strength the following week. 

She went on week five and came home too weak to rise from her bed. The cancer treatments were put off until she could regain enough strength to withstand them. 

In the next two weeks that followed mom started each day with a single cheerio that grandma nibbled. Some days it settled. Other days it didn’t. In the afternoon a spoon full of rice or a bite of oatmeal. One of the effects of her treatment was constipation. Fearing too much build up in her system, and already enduring searing pain slicing through her abdomen, she timidly nibbled at bites but couldn’t eat much more than a single swallow. 

Week eight I simmered beef bones with onions and carrots for 36 hours. Carefully, I strained the golden and oak brown liquid into cans to bring to her kitchen and prayed that it would provide her with the nutrients to sit up, and eat a spoonful of cheerios the next morning.

Inside her house the busyness of idle waiting was fraying the edges of everyone’s wits. She was sitting in her cancer chair. An addition to the living room furniture that she’d requested. It had a remote control lift to help her stand up. Beside her chair, a new end table that grandpa built at her request stood taller than the others, and was easier for her to reach. On the end table is a mug of ice water. I had bought her the mug at the start of this journey. It said “survivor,” and was decorated in pink ribbons. I sat on the floor in front of her and talked with her for several minutes until she appeared weary. 

The distance between her house and mine was not enough to weep all that was inside me out and I didn’t want to upset my children by bringing my tears home. Our church’s building was rebuilt down the road from her house after it was struck by lightning. It now stood between hers and mine. I pulled into the familiar drive recalling all the Sunday’s I sat beside her in the back row. I pulled into one of the spots near the building and curled up into the fetal position in my driver’s seat and wept.

    It wasn’t long before her chair with the lift and custom end table surrendered her to a hospice bed that was temporarily set up in her living room. Week nine I sat at her bedside with my mom holding onto her leg. Patting it as if that may bring her comfort. 

Losing someone sharpens memory in both a cruel and merciful way. I remembered things holding her bony shin that I hadn’t thought of in years. More recently the afternoon that my daughters had painted her toenails so that she would feel pretty at chemo floated through my brain. It had been just a few weeks earlier. The giggles they emitted as they transformed her toes to bright pink and purple etched laugh lines into the walls all around us. Decades of Christmas Eve laughter carved  memories filled with matching pajamas and one-liner t-shirts in between the planks and wallpaper strips. A small town magician came and performed magic once in this living room to the wonderment of my then tiny daughters. It was my birthday. 

It was all coming to an end. Each breath was tortured, and every so often she would emit a pained moan. In desperation I convinced her to try medical marijuana about a month prior to this. She had agreed, and seemed to be looking forward to having something to eat. But, when she was just a signature away at the appointment, the attending nurse told her it may make her feel “loopy.” Rather than coming home with an appetite she came home with only her resilience and the hope that maybe tomorrow she’d be able to keep something down. 

Drinking, dancing, any manner of compromise of virtue was against the rules of her upbringing. “We were good baptists,” she’d say “Baptists didn’t do those things,” always laughing, waving her hand at the folly of it. All through the chemo, all through all that pain, she only took one half of one acetaminophen. 

    My mom bore the majority of grandma’s caretaking. She fed her, bathed her, drove her, and was there beside me holding my other hand while I cried as quietly as I could, so as to not disturb my grandma. My uncle called earlier that morning to ask if the CBD gummies that I take for anxiety would help her appetite. I injected a tone of misplaced anger toward him and said that the prescription would have helped. I said I didn’t think these would help and mom didn’t think she was strong enough to chew them. He called a local CBD store to find an oil or another sort of dissolvable form so that she could drink it, or absorb it under her tongue. 

In the meantime I melted the gummies I had in a pot on her stove. Afternoons eating tomato soup and grilled cheese with her burned in my throat while I stirred the melty, gummy liquid. 

    In a cup of warm water I dissolved less than a teaspoon. The gummies were peach rings. I hoped it would give the warm water a peach tea flavor and taste pleasant, while also providing her some relief. I sat beside my mom as she spooned her mom tiny sips, one, two, and that was enough for that moment. I sat, still patting her bony shin. I hoped that my touch would bring her some small measure of comfort. The silence in the room was broken only by the ticking of her clocks. So many seconds asynchronously ticking past. One grandfather clock whose chime hadn’t sounded in years was the only piece frozen at some distant point in time. 

***

I like to picture the moment the grandfather clock froze, capturing the relief my great aunt Belle’s children must have felt when she returned from gathering eggs one morning during a particularly arduous winter storm. The barns out back were hog barns when I was a child, but when my grandpa was a child, they’d been chicken barns. The farm survived the depression pedaling eggs and milk to the surrounding cities of Lorain and Elyria. When my grandpa was a young man, my mom would accompany him dropping eggs off on porches where, in exchange, the residents would place coins under the glass bottoms of emptied milk jugs. 

The farm is located in the flatlands, the plains of northeastern Ohio, along the corn belt of the midwest. I imagine they call it the corn belt because from an aerial perspective of the nation, it probably looks like North America wears a belt of corn around its middle, largely due to this region. The landscape allows for breathtaking, “as far as the eye can see” sunsets, rolling clouds, and plenty of time to see a thunderstorm march in from miles across a field. However, during the winter months, the snow storm winds that assault the farm can be as relentless as they are brutal in their accost pushing mounds of snow drifts, that during this storm in particular, came to be some as high as twenty feet. On a winter morning, a century prior, my aunt Belle found herself lost in the middle of this snow storm, not 100 yards from the house, but just as hopeless as if she’d been dropped into Oz out of Kansas. 

***

“Let’s see how that settles,” mom said. 

Grandma nodded and slowly settled back onto her pillows. She closed her eyes. I prayed that the tiny amount of pain relief she may feel would be tangible. That she wouldn’t get nauseous, and in a few minutes she’d sit up, declare how good that made her feel, and ask me to make her chocolate chip cookies. I asked mom where the broth was. 

“I could warm some,” I offer.

Mom shook her head. 

“It was just too rich for her system,” mom said sadly.

Later, at home, I canned the rest and stored it out on one of the shelves in our homestead pantry in the garage. 

    We sat in silence a few minutes more before grandma started to rustle uncomfortably. “I’m going to be sick,” she said. 

She tried pushing herself up toward sitting, but mom rested a hand on her shoulder, “you’ve got to try to keep it down mom,” she said gently.

“Don’t you think I want to?” Grandma rested back against her pillows once more. “Don’t you think I’d love to eat something.” 

She didn’t open her eyes the whole time. Mom began talking about just one bite and then another, that we’d get some of her strength back, that this was just the first step. 

“Lynn,” grandma interrupted her, “just stop talking.” 

We sat in silence for a few more moments. 

“It didn’t work,” she said, “I don’t feel any better.” 

    When I was a little girl I spent lots of farming days at grandma’s house with her. We’d make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or tomato soup and grilled cheeses. Then we’d make food for all the farmers and drive around to all the spots they were driving with the tillers or the planter, the sprayer or in the combine if it was Harvest. As I got older I started fitting the ground with the tillers and grandma would bring me sandwiches.

She drove a black Chrysler, by far the fanciest vehicle on the farm, with leather seats and suede interior. No matter the field condition, around five o’clock, she came bouncing along the headland in her Chrysler with ham and cheese sandwiches. She had a career in administration at Oberlin College so lots of those days she’d worked all day too. Then she came home to make sandwiches for us. 

    She bought the Chrysler because on one of those sandwich delivering days, when I was no more than five or six, the car she drove before she got the black Chrysler wouldn’t start in the driveway of my parents’ house. So, we ended up walking the field between my parents’ house and hers. It’s less than half a mile distance, but in a field nonetheless. We’d only gone a little way and I decided I just didn’t want to walk it anymore. So she carried me. 

    Every fall, even when we were homeschooled grandma took my brother and me shopping for school clothes. We’d load up the registers with new jeans, shoes, coats, whatever we saw that we liked. Then we’d go to Bob Evans. She continued buying our clothes all my life. When I had kids she bought them their clothes too. We’d all pile in one of the vehicles and while the majority of the shopping was for them, she’d tell me, “but, you get something nice for yourself too.” 

    Grandma had a particularity about cleanliness. She was always washing our hands. Anytime we came out of the bathroom, hands still wet from just washing them, she’d guide us to the sink in the kitchen and have us wash them again. The “germies” she called them. We had to wash away the germies. 

On one of my shopping days with her as a child she bought me a tiny diamond ring. On the way home we stopped at Sterks, a local breakfast diner in Wakeman, for lunch. She shepherded me to the bathroom to wash my hands. While she was scrubbing my fingers the ring slipped off and dink, dink, dinked down the drain. We both stood there for a moment until I let out an open mouth wail as she stared in shock down the black hole that had just swallowed up my prize. She lamented that day for the rest of her life, always recalling the day she lost my ring. 

    Once grandma retired she spent a significant amount of time driving us around places. When my brother went to middle school she picked him up every day. The middle school was about twenty five minutes from the farm. Grandma was never late. She was early by a margin of quarters of hours, but she was never late. 

When she was a little girl, attending the church across the street from the farm she’d one day marry into, she would wait on the steps of the church for her parents to pick her up after the youth activities, never on time. She swore in those moments she’d never make her children wait on her. 

“I was always the last one there.” Grandma had a way of huffing without making an actual sound, “and I used to watch Belle, and Lenny, over in the house, and I didn’t know who they were. I had no idea I’d marry that boy in the farmhouse with the windows all lit up across the way. I just sat on the steps and thought I’d never make my kids wait on me.” 

But, one of the afternoons she was preparing to pick up my brother, Gramps asked her to follow behind him to a field north of her destination, him in the water truck, her following behind, so she could drive him back to the farm where he’d then collect the planter to return and start working in the field. Grandpa confirmed he’d never seen her drive so fast between the field and the farm on that trip back. Then, he said, she shot out of the drive and down the road toward the school. After she died, we were around the table in the dining room at her house sharing these stories, “like a bat out of hell,” grandpa said.

What my brother described witnessing, as he emerged from the school not seeing grandma parked in her usual spot, is nothing less than Dukes of Hazzard worthy. He had just stepped out onto the brick steps of the middle school when the nose of her black Chrysler speed racer style careened around the side of the school and screeched to a halt in front of the step for him to climb in.

***

Aunt Belle realized too late that the snow had moved in as she was collecting eggs. When she opened the door to the hatchery she was met with the unmerciful brutality of a Nor-Easter snow storm. Mounds had already piled, covering her tracks from the house. Certain she could maintain a steady direction she willed herself from the threshold of the door and plunged deeply into the heavy snow. She had only made it a few feet before realizing that she may be veering off course. Frantic, she spun around, only to find that her tracks from the barn were already swept away. She was an island amidst a torrential onslaught of nature, determined to swallow her whole in its rage. 

I don’t know what Belle must have been thinking. In telling the story to her kids, to my grandpa and great-aunt and uncle, she recalled, I just prayed that with each step I was walking closer to home. When I knocked into the railing at the back of the house, and knew I’d made it, I’ve never been more thankful to God. He led me home. 

I imagine that this is what waking up in Heaven will feel like. As we reflect on the journey of this life and look back over all the doubt and fear, one thing will be clear. It was by the grace of God we were led home and what joy will be waiting there to greet us. I imagine Jane and Ron, Belle’s kids, running to hug her despite her snow covered and shivering state. I imagine that we will run to the arms of Jesus and he will embrace us, and welcome us home. There is little more painful in this life than laying a loved one to rest. But, there will be no greater joy than being reunited with them in Heaven.

***

    There is little more painful in this life than laying a loved one to rest. I would even reason that the degree to which that pain exists depends on the manner, time, and perceived understandability of the death. I’ve lost loved ones unexpectedly. In an instant they’re gone which, for me, has been hard to reconcile. The pain of losing someone whose death was ‘expected’ is by no means less painful, however time can be a cushion. Time seeing a loved one suffering, time reconciling with their last days, time to say the things needing to be said make saying a final goodbye more reconcilable, though the pain is by no means less, the manner of stages through a process of recovery are expedited. 

Week ten the CBD oils were ready to pick up. My oldest daughter had a soccer game in the afternoon near the store. After her game my husband parked our F150 in front of the clean, glass doors. Earlier that morning we’d stopped in to pick up an envelope of cash from my uncle. Grandpa was sitting beside grandma in the living room. I walked to her hospice bed and put a hand on my grandpa’s shoulder. He put his hand on top of mine and gave it a squeeze.

“Hi, grandma,” I smiled for her.

“Hi, honey.” 

She was able to look up at me. 

“I’m going to go for your medicine after Rae’s game.” 

She nodded.

“I’ll be back, okay? I love you.”

She gave me a weak smile. Grandpa got up from his chair at her side to walk me out. 

“How’s she doing today?” I asked, peering over his shoulder to the living room. He shrugged, and gestured a “so-so” with his hand. 

In the CBD store, the lady managing the counter rings up the items my uncle ordered. I hand her the envelope of money. “Chronic pain is difficult to manage, especially at the end of life.” She says to me, counting the bills. 

“Oh, it’s not the end of life,” I tell her. 

She smiles at me as though I may be the saddest thing she’s seen all day. She hands me a white bag and tells me how to administer the various medicines. 

“I added a few samples,” she says, “for you.” 

Back at my grandparents I go straight to her bedside. Grandpa is still there sitting beside her. “How was the game?” He asks. I don’t remember what I told him. I hold up the white bag. 

“I have your medicine,” I say. 

Her eyes search for me.

“Thank you, honey.” 

She reaches for my hand. Taking it I tell her it’s going to help her feel better. That it wasn’t the same stuff as the peach water that didn’t help. She squeezes my hand. 

“I tried honey, her voice is just above a whisper, “I’m sorry.” 

I squeeze her hand. The hospice bed was set up in her living room with the green carpet, where the Christmas tree goes

It had been my suggestion to send her to chemo. Only a few months prior we’d sat in the same living room, she and I. 

“I just don’t want to miserably waste away,” she’d said. 

“These are going to help.”

I hand the white bag to my grandpa, still holding her hand. She doesn’t answer. 

“I’ll be back to see you, okay?” I couldn’t keep my throat from pinching off these words.

“I love you, honey.” She repeats. “Goodbye.” 

“I’ll see you soon,” I tell her. But I can’t keep tears from falling as I bend down to kiss her on the head before turning to go. Grandpa walks me out to the backroom, and pats me on the back as I leave. 

Eleven days later my grandpa and I stand in this same place in front of the mirror above the sink in their laundry room. In this room are the cupboards he’d built to store farm clothes, the washer and dryer, the back room shower he’d installed for us to use after days in the sun power-washing hog manure out from beneath crates of piglets, where our boots went so as to not track the stink into grandma’s kitchen. Family hadn’t arrived from the cemetery yet. We, my brother, and mom stand alone in this room. The reserves of each of our memories finds grandma busying about in the kitchen behind us, pulling cookies from the oven.

“Hello, hello,” she’d say. “Come in,” with her arms outstretched to embrace us. 

She was a worrier. Anxious always. Tormented by the news. The injustices of the world. She had a deep vein for justice. 

His arm held my shoulder tightly. We had watched her starve to death over a period of 11 weeks after the chemo had stolen all that was left from a body that had used all its reserves to grow a tumor the size of a toddler. She died on a Saturday, after three nights in the hospital, with grandpa by her side. He called mom after she’d drawn her final breath.

“I need a ride,” he told her. 

Mom picked up my uncle and they drove together into a night containing the whole presence of grandma’s life as though she’d been absorbed into the constellations and they were merely existing beneath her as they’d always done. Her two children, now motherless, and still not without her presence. 

***

“I’m just ready to go home,” she’d told me. She was referencing Heaven. It was August outside. We’d celebrated her 81st birthday just days before mom told me about the tumor. Her first appointment was in a few weeks. 

“The doctors may be able to give you something to help you feel better,” I pleaded with her. “You could get a medical marijuana card and it would help your appetite.” 

“That would be nice,” she said. 

Grandma loved lemon meringue pie. She had full access to the food she loved and no capacity for it. 

“I’d love to see them grow up,” she gestured to my children outside in her pond. They were splashing happily with my mom.

“I never got to rock Rylan and Eli,” she said sadly. 

“You can,” I tell her. “We’ll get your strength back and you can rock them for naps for years.”

My youngest and her cousin were only three weeks apart, both nearly one now, both born on the heels of her fall. She didn’t feel strong enough to hold them as newborns, the injury to her wrist prevented her from cuddling them. Grandma rocked my older two babies to sleep all through their infancy when they were at her house. I’d come to pick them up from afternoons with her and they’d be snuggled in, sleeping soundly atop her oversized bosom. 

When discussing treatment her wish was to die gracefully, quietly, at home. It was her last offering of herself for us: to fight for herself the way she had always fought for all of us. 

“I’ll go for you guys,” she had said.