The Outgoing Light

We are all going to die and we all write it in the back of our diary, too busy living, to afraid to face that one day we will leave others behind or that they will leave us behind. Life is immortality until the grim reaper knocks on the door and reminds you otherwise.

There is something about GrandParents for most children; they ooze love even when they are strict and we hate to upset them. My nan, my fathers mother was no exception.

Elizabeth or as we used to call her little nan because of her size was tougher than old boots and had a will to match. In my earliest memory she was already an old lady, having laid her husband, Bertram in the ground. She made strew with the aroma of old age, filled hundreds of jam jars with plum jam and raspberry jam. Raspberries picked from the park as kids with instructions how to find good ones, bad ones and don’t get them until they are washed you will be bad! Plumbs came from the large plumb tree, now long since gone to old age and disease and in later years when I was fifteen I would venture onto ladders to pick them battling my dislike of ladders and heights to do so. She also pickled giant onions, which would be hairs on herculus chest as the taste hit the back of your teeth with the force of a punch from Mohammed Ali.

She had a zillion clocks in the house each ticking and tocking to a different rhythm in the silence. She made sugar sandwiches; a desert from the pre and post war times when things were hard, scarce and people were poor and to this day I will on occasions spread a sandwich, lace it with sugar as a treat. She baked potatoes, split them with a karate chop worthy of Chuck Norris, still she could not hold back the erosion of time.

Gradually she needed help around the house, the television rose its voice over the years until you could almost here it standing in the porch outside the front door, wondering if Dad could hear you in the living room as you patiently knocked the front door.

Over time her chair became part of her slowly. To start with it did not matter, she smiled, watched the birds and you raised your voice year over year to have a conversation, kissed her on the head to say goodbye and she would smile back like only a grandmar can, huddled in the chair

I always paid her a visit even if conversation was thin. She was glad I had stayed with my dad, not gone to my mother even when I was old enough to choose. Something I never expected her to say but she did nevertheless and never made any other comment to me about my mother.

And then the light dimmed.

The chair became a prison, she became foetal, her back arching driving her head to chest, her breathing laboured over time until it was a wheeze. She stopped raising her head to look up, stopped talking and was nursed by my father like a baby, yet in pain as age bit into her bones.

A kiss on the head to say goodbye never raised a smile or a word. Life had become a waiting room, every day the same and dull as the one before as the pain ate away.

I remember I had a phone call at work from my sister, my nan was in hospital, it was not looking good though the mention of death was side stepped, omitted, left outside to wait in the cold. My bosses were on holiday and thus a request to the manager in charge released me to go with my sister and meet up with my father, aunt and uncle at the hospital.

I have always thought Death is not the enemy but rather time is and nothing more brought it home than standing in the hospital ward. The image clear, I stood at the bottom of the hospital bed, next to me moving up the side of the bed was my uncle, then my sister, aunt and finally my Dad. People tried to make conversation but it was pointless. I stood quiet and looked at my nan.

You can see life and you can see it ebb. This is not to see death but the dimming of a light.

A hollow rose from my feet and came to an uneasy rest like a brick in my stomach. Behind my nans eyes there was only a dim light and despite she looked around, she did like she was lost in a world we could not see and no one else seemed to notice.
There was nothing of my Nan there, only an echo of memories, a body almost drained of the nan I knew replaced by darkening hollow eyes. When I walked away from the bed with my sister, leaving the rest of the family, the brick in my stomach dissolved into dread, spread through my veins until it fizzled out by the time we were in the hospital grounds. I held my composure behind the mental wall. My nan gone although her body was holding on. I did not need to be told, I knew I was not going to see my nan ever again.

In the middle of the night I was woken by the phone ringing, an old battered green phone with the receiver cradled above the, dial which we kept at the top of the stairs and had a healthy bandage of cellotape on it to cover a gaping crack in the back of it.

I picked the heavy receiver up, still waking up from the sudden rise.

“Hello?”

“Your nan has gone”, my father said, his voice shaking. The strength and composure I knew so well cracking in the tones.
“Are you okay?”, a stupid question and the moment you say it, you kick yourself for saying it but it was too late the phone was on it’s way down with a resisted sob which fell to a click and a dead phone. Four words were all he could manage.

I put the receiver down. A couple of silent tears rolled down my face as I sat for a moment in the silence of the house before I restored my composure after a few seconds and a fight with restraint.

I wondered how my father was coping before I quietly returned to bed.