"In Touch with Faith"

This story was published in a CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL book and is available online at the News and Record website

In Touch with Faith

 

“She’s my grandmother. You can’t...” I started to say. “You can’t stop me.” But we both knew he could. “Please, Daddy, I want to see her. I...”

“We all love her, Sissy, but this stroke has destroyed the person we know. She won’t recover. All we can do is ease the pain of her final passage.” His eyes got drippy, and he dabbed at them with a folded, linen hanky.

I’d seen my father cry once before, when I was thirteen and they were going to amputate my sister’s leg. I came on him in the kitchen sobbing into a dishtowel. Those tears were wasted. The pathologist called a halt to the surgery. My father, a surgeon specializing in cancer before the age of specialties, was in the operating room as an observer during the initial biopsy. When the lab results came in, Daddy said that he had touched the tumor, and it didn’t feel like a malignancy. The pathologist sent off the slides for another opinion. My sister’s tumor turned out to be a benign look-alike mimicking a deadly malignancy. There was no cancer. She got to keep her leg.

Back then, my father was weeping; now, his eyes were damp and spilling over with sadness. He finally gave in to my persistent pleas. “Take Mommy’s car,” he said. “I have to make rounds.” He took my shoulders in his hands. “She probably won’t know you, Sis. She doesn’t know me, and I’ve been her son longer than you’ve been her granddaughter. Will you be okay?”

I nodded and gave him a quick hug and a brush-by kiss before leaving. I was prepared for whatever awaited me, or so I thought.

Of my half dozen siblings, I was the closest to my grandparents. I often stayed with them in the small town where my father had been raised. Far from Baltimore and the perils of a city, I was free to roam, and it was fun to be an only child for a little while. Wrapped in my grandmother’s ample arms, I felt loved. The memory of that feeling drove me to visit her at the nursing home, even if she had no memory of me.

Three months before the stroke, my grandmother had created her usual Christmas feast, spreading her love among her grandchildren like soft butter on warm biscuits and convincing each of us that we were the special one.

I felt special as I followed Sister Ignatius down the nursing home hall. At Ma’s room, my heart froze; I didn’t even recognize my own grandmother in that chair. The flesh had melted from her body, and her hair had gone from soft brown to wiry gray. A bed sheet was draped across her chest, wrapped under each arm, and tied behind her back. She dangled like the odd conjoining of a wooden marionette and a rag doll. Her left side was twisted and stiff, but her right side hung limp, as if someone had stripped the muscles out of her.

“Why did you tie her in the chair?” I asked, my eyes hot with accusation.

Sister drew a deep breath. “Your grandmother needs to spend time upright so her lungs don’t fill with fluid. The sheets are gentle on her flesh.”

Sister must not have held my hostile tone against me, because she asked if I wanted her to stay. I shook my head, and she gave me a hug. “I’ll be right down the hall if you need me. Just give a shout.”

I gazed at my grandmother through misty eyes and saw that she held her rosary in her right hand. On summer evenings, we’d sit on her big screened porch after supper and say the rosary. The olive wood beads had darkened with age and were worn smooth from years of passing through her supple fingers.

“It’s Sissy,” I said, touching her shoulder. “Come to visit.”

She spoke, but not to me. She seemed to think I was my Aunt Fran, whom I had always resembled. I’d never heard most of the names she called me. She sounded as if she were talking to childhood pals. She asked me if I’d brought my “skip rope.” Her words were gibberish, but she was calm and we chatted contentedly.

“Halo,” she said, her good eye drifting above my head.

“Hello?” I asked.

She began humming a Christmas tune about angels. With her right hand, she touched the gold velvet ribbon in my hair.

“Halo!” she repeated.

There was no mistaking the word this time.

Suddenly she grew agitated... twitching, moaning, and straining against the straps. I shouted for Sister Ignatius, who hurried to find a doctor to prescribe a sedative for her comfort.

When Sister left, I tried to calm my grandmother, but nothing worked. As I leaned in to touch her, the silver sheen on the cross of her rosary caught my eye. I reached into the crumpled sheets and retrieved it from where it had dropped when she touched the ribbon in my hair.

The instant I placed the rosary in my grandmother’s right hand, she turned as calm as an inland pond on a windless day. She didn’t remember me. She didn’t remember my father. She didn’t even seem to know if she was in heaven or on earth. Her mind was gone, but her fingertips recalled the feel of that rosary and what it represented.

When I told Sister what happened, she canceled the sedative. During the next week, which was the last week of my grandmother’s life, that rosary never left her hand. Sister tied it to her wrist with a white satin ribbon.

Touching those beads might have been all that my grandmother remembered of her long, full life, but it was enough. It brought peace to her passing.

 

~Carol Kenny

 

Reviews

[(Super) Heroes Never Di..]

Awww this is so sad!! I think its awesome how this published though! the emotion in it is really clear. I loved it :) it was wonderfully written.

[Chellie]

This was a great story. Very touching, and very deserving of being in the Chicken Soup for the Soul books.