Weekend with the Grams

I walk into the yellow house this morning to the 86-year-old man in the Smith & Wesson cap, leaning out through an open window and peering intently at something undetectable. When he realizes I am in the room his face changes from somber to sunny, and he gives a shout, blue eyes dancing.

He walks over to me with his characteristic, bowlegged step, and for a moment I think he is crying at the sight of me, but I throw my arms around him and the image passes. He gives good hugs, my Grandpa does.

My Grandmother is trying to make the bed. She is hunched over, shrunken and hobbit-like. She seems smaller than she was the last time I saw her. I wrap my awkward arms around her, and my wrists register every vertebra of her curved spine jutting out through her shirt like a museum dinosaur. I worry whether she will bruise from the embrace -- that I could be the cause of such a blemish means that I underestimated the strength of my own youth, and that it was my youth that trumped one of her fragile vessels to leave a purple, tented mark on her papery skin. Sometimes I think that if I could just hug her enough, it would straighten out her back and she could stand upright again but that would be a cruel and ill-conceived experiment.

We lay clean sheets on the bed. I toss them in the air a few times just so I can discretely inhale of their smell -- it reminds me so of being five years old and running through the clothesline in summer. We sit side by side on the chest at the foot of the bed, which is of a dark and smooth wood. We talk about life in the way we do -- witty, light conversation about being 84, having leg pains and the new walker she uses, aptly named 'The Crusader,' which has a nifty hand brake. She turns to me, and the moment our eyes meet I am overwhelmed by that deepest and most incomprehensible of emotions: a silent elation that reaches from my vocal chords clear down to my intestines, and is matched in intensity only by the sheer terror of losing her, which now grips me and in an instant is gone, thankfully, for it might have killed me.

I remember reading once in a beginner's psychology book that humans seek the eyes of others for reassurance of our own existence. Also that the pain of separateness is one we constantly fight to overcome, but never can because we are all always just alone. But then I wonder if she could see it in my eyes just now that I love her to pieces; that I have absolutely no words to describe it, can make no sense of it, have no protection against it; that she is as much a part of me as a rib in my chest and as close to my heart.