It was in this way that I missed my favorite week of Summer One, my favorite unit of Intro to Lit. Drama is my mode of choice, not just because my life was full of it but because everybody’s is. The drama unit is not just about plays but also play and playing, make-believe and making meaning, not just with words but more real, more solid than that—with sets and costumes, gesture and inflection. The drama unit is where we take back control. We become directors. We embrace the drama in our lives. We embrace the chance to tell our own stories, write our own endings, shape our own morals. Our trials, the hard parts, become opportunities to surmount them. The drama unit is always my favorite part of the term. Nevertheless . . .
“Go back to school,” said my grandmother.
“Not on your life,” I snorted.
“I’m fine, honey.”
“Me too.”
“You have school.”
“There are literally hundreds of people who can cover for me this week.”
“Do you mean figuratively?” she said.
“Whatever,” I said.
My mother and I split up the week. At first, we planned each to take a shift in rotation, but it didn’t turn out to be necessary during the day. My grandmother was a popular woman. It seemed like everyone in the building was her friend. During the day, there was a steady stream of visitors. Two sisters, easily ten years older than my grandmother, lived across the hall and brought over another friend and sat and played bridge with my grandmother for hours. A young couple who lived two floors down showed up one morning with breakfast for maybe fifty people—bagels, spreads, coffee, eggs—and stayed and chatted until afternoon when everyone was hungry again and then ordered pizza. “When we moved in, we didn’t know anyone at all,” the woman explained to me with her hand cupped over the receiver while on hold with the pizza place. “We expected to make friends with lots of people our age, but they just nodded in the elevator and went their own way. Your grandmother brought down a lasagna and salad one night, labeled a huge map for us with her favorite parks and restaurants and movie theaters, and offered to water our plants when we were out of town. She’s an amazing woman.” I nodded mutely. Did they not work or have a holiday or what? “Oh no.” The woman waved me off. “When we heard she was sick, we took the day off.”
The building’s night security guard came up one morning after work with DVDs tucked under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. A knock on the door early another morning revealed a haggard-looking woman in scrubs, obviously just off a very long shift, but with a puppy in tow. “I just thought it might cheer her up,” she explained as the dog wriggled all over my grandmother. “She always cheers everyone else up. She’s the friendliest face in this building.” It was like this all day and all evening. Neighbors dropped by with food, flowers, gifts, and stories. She smiled for all of them, welcomed everyone into her home, did her best, ever the hostess, to make sure everyone had something to eat and drink. I mostly sat and watched everyone, sat and savored, but sometimes I left for lunch or went to the library or the coffee shop and worked for a few hours. Mostly I stayed though and alternated nights with my mom.
Those nights—and there were only three of them—were entirely sleepless though the nights I spent home with my dad I couldn’t sleep either, so it hardly mattered. But painful though those nights were in yet another week without sleep, they were also, somehow, restful, peaceful, calm quiet full of breath. I kept vigil in the other room, out of her way but so that at her first move, I would be up and making sure. My grandmother, however she had consented to having me there nights, would never, never wake me up to say she had to go to the bathroom. She just wasn’t that person. So I stayed up just in case. In truth, two of the nights she slept straight through. One, she wandered off into the bathroom and back again without incident. Still, I couldn’t leave it to chance, and besides fears that she would fall, I kept finding myself in the bedroom, in moonlight, holding my breath to make sure I could still hear hers.
It wasn’t the middles of the nights that were remarkable anyway. It was earlier than that, the time right before sleep. The first night, she got ready for bed then called for me, and when I came into the room, she patted the bed beside her and said quietly, “Stay with me until I fall asleep?”
“Really?” I said, amazed at this show of something like vulnerability from my grandmother.
“No, not really,” she scoffed. “That’s what you used to say when I put you to bed when you were a little girl. ‘Stay with me until I fall asleep.’ You were very cute.”
“Did it take long?” I asked, curling up beside her in bed anyway.
“It didn’t usually even take until we had the lights off.” Indeed, I have always been a quick sleeper.
“Listen,” she said. “When the time comes—I’m not saying it’s now but when it comes—you have to let me go.”
“What are you talking about?”
“No heroic measures. No feeding tubes or breathing machines.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s change the subject.”
“No praying by my bedside either. No ridiculous promises to God that will give you stress and guilt for the rest of your life. No weeping and hand wringing and not eating. I don’t want any of that.”
“Okay,” I said, as noncommittally as possible.
“I mean it.” She sat up in bed and sounded like she did. “And don’t let your mother do that crap either. Keep her in check. She gets two weeks of feeling sorry for herself after I die and that’s it. You make sure.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Find a way,” said my grandmother. “Once I’m gone, you’ll have to be the toughy in this bunch. Your mother is too emotional. I’m counting on you. I don’t want her miserable for years. I don’t want her wallowing.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I promised.
“See that you do,” said my grandmother, rolling over to go to sleep. “And don’t think I’m kidding either.”
I didn’t. Not at all.
The second night I stayed, just after I kissed her good night and turned the light off, my grandmother called out to me to turn it back on.
“Look in the top drawer of my bureau,” she said. “I have something for Atlas.”
I caught on right away. “Save it,” I said. “You can give it to him when you get better.”
“I want to give it to him now.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Look and see,” she said. I did. It was a black, velvet box (the box alone would send him into shrieking fits of joy) which opened to reveal pearl cufflinks inlaid with onyx and gold. They were beautiful.
“They were your grandfather’s,” she said. “I want Atlas to have them.”
“That’s very sweet,” I said. “When he’s older, you’ll give them to him. He’ll be delighted.”
“Jane Eleanor Duncan, why are you hell-bent on making me spell this out?”
“It’s not like you’re dying,” I said. “Maybe you’ll be fine. Maybe you’ll live with cancer for twenty years. Ethan’s grandmother did. Ethan says there are amazing drugs now. Why would we tell ourselves you’re dying when you might be fine?”