Bees are Stuck in my Aortic Valve

It is 4 am. I wake up with a jolt. In my dream, a man pulls up into my childhood driveway. He gets out of the car with a gun. We lock eyes. I can’t seem to shut the back door. My mother is in the other room with one of my childhood friend’s babies. Strangely, this is a baby I’ve never even met—I’ve only seen pictures of her on Facebook. I’m afraid this man will come in the door. I’m on the phone with the police, reporting a suspected robbery down the street. For some reason, I hang up. Strange assortments of people are streaming through my living room. I can’t seem to get anyone to run out the front door. I’m so scared, I wake up, terrified of what will happen next.

I thought nightmares ended with childhood—wrapping up at right about the same time as when my chubby cheeks lost their charm and canned Spaghetti-O’s became unacceptable as a dinner option. But here they are, still speckling my REM cycles. Although I suppose nightmares have just become scarier, more real, now that I’m all grown up. Instead of dreaming about evil clowns and monsters under the bed (not that I ever had those nightmares), I dream about things that really haunt me. I dream about heavy things like death, deceit, and money. I’ve been working in an intensely poor urban environment now for almost five years. I confront evils on a daily basis that are darker than dark. I also watch too much television. And I eat a lot of spicy food. I’ve heard these things are interconnected.

For weeks now I’ve been having horrible dreams. I’ve been dreaming so vividly that I often wake up exhausted, feeling as though I’ve been up all night, acting in a play to a sold-out audience. My poor roommate has had to sit through weeks of my early morning rumblings of how bizarre my last dream was, who was in it (and where did they come from?), and my constant ponderings about what the underlying message is to all this active fantasy.
I can’t seem to help it. I’m sitting on heavy words. My grandmother is dying. These are hard words to say out loud. Words that tumble around in my mouth and brain like that game in the pediatrician’s waiting room—the giant maze of colorful wires with wooden beads, twisted and twirled around like a rollercoaster. It is a bizarre feeling knowing that you must say goodbye to someone—someone who has always been around in your life. Someone who taught you important things about yourself; who challenged you to be bigger and better than what you thought you could ever be.

I used to spend my summers in Florida. Grandma Boggie and Grandpa Jack were just about the best set of grandparents a kid could ask for—we went to the beach, we went to the mall, we watched The Golden Girls and The Price is Right (and lots and lots of soaps), and I got the opportunity to participate in the active lives of two amazing seniors. My developmental psychology textbooks all tell me this “intergenerational exchange” is extremely beneficial to the development of children. Anyone who has spent a lot of time with older people doesn’t need a textbook to tell them this. We helped with Meals on Wheels. We volunteered at church. We walked dogs. We read National Geographic. We baked cookies. My grandma taught me how to cook. My grandpa taught me the art of sarcasm. We laughed a lot.

But my fondest memories are of playing Scrabble. Grandma Boggie was an avid Scrabbler. She had the version of the game that twirled around on a table. We would climb into her, what felt like giant, full-size four-post bed and sink into crisp light blue sheets with eyelet trim. She would place the board in between us. I would run my little fingers over those square indentations, just perfectly ridged to hold my pathetic 3-letter monosyllabic word, dreaming that someday I’d have my very own Deluxe Scrabble, if I was lucky. I’d spend hours reading the scrabble dictionary—trying to force words into my vocabulary that I’d never remember to use when the time actually came to put my word down on the board. Every word I put down was a victory won. She taught me to love words. Even simple, stupid words. Especially two-letter, high-scoring words placed on a triple word score. Plus, she let me make up a few of my own rules. I guess she had her own rules, too.

Over the years I learned a lot from these two people. I spent a lot of time with them—asking tender questions about the world and trying to figure out just how exactly it all worked. I’m sure I challenged them—this loud-mouthed curly-headed baby from North Carolina. I was so confident and full of energy. But I was, and am, just like my mother. Except a bit more “out of the box” and bizarre—qualities I’ve happily taken from my father. So perhaps it was more of a review for them. A chance to spend quality time with a child, a generation removed, that was just like one of the children they had already raised.

When Grandpa Jack died, now almost eight years ago, I thought my world had stopped. The news crushed me. He had been such an amazing grandfather to me—I was desperately trying to figure out how I’d go on without his jokes. Without his commentary. I loved my Grandpa Jack. I know that no one is perfect, and Grandpa Jack’s life was living proof of this fact, but from my small, freckled vantage point, he was perfection. He was silly and smart and full of great ideas. I guess now I realize he was a Republican, but I feel sure he would have changed his mind for me. I could have bribed him to vote for Obama with a sweet smile, a good story, and a double scotch on the rocks (“light on the rocks”, as he used to say). I was heartbroken when he passed, although it was at the end of a long battle of illnesses and strokes. This, coupled with the death of a close friend from high school at about the same time, and I thought my life would never be the same. And I guess, in truth, it wasn’t. Nothing ever remains the same. All these years later, I still miss him dearly. But it doesn’t hurt as bad as it did that first year. And so much has changed. I was just a kid.

Grief has this funny effect. It’s like this heavy lead jacket. You walk through your day as if you’re on your way to get an x-ray, all day long. Occasionally you sit down, and the weight seems to temporarily disappear, but soon you feel it creep back into your bones. And after some time, after walking around feeling heavy for what feels like an eternity, you heal. You recover. Sometimes you still feel that deep heaviness—like the floors are sinking in. Like a man is pulling up in your driveway with a gun in his hand. But most of the time you’re okay. You remember the people you’ve lost in small bits—the way someone flips through their hair or a small smirk on a face. These are the happy moments through which you remember the people you’ve loved and lost. It is hard to make that compromise. Knowing how much you love someone, knowing they’re dying, and knowing that at some point in the near future their memory will melt into tender moments that are brief, albeit touching.

Over the last few years, we’ve slowly said goodbye to her. As her memory has slipped, it is has become harder and harder to call her Grandma. She isn’t the woman I spent summers with. She isn’t the woman who taught me to always serve blueberry muffins with chicken salad. She isn’t the woman who could never remember if the dog was a girl or a boy. Her body is there. She still looks the same, for the most part. She just turned 90 years old. 90 years and four children later, it is remarkable that she still has any semblance of that young girl from Arkansas that my Grandfather fell so passionately in love with so many years ago. She still has the same voice, although the sound has become disconnected. This disease, Alzheimer’s disease, took her away from us a long time ago. It’s like the words are all still floating around in her brain and she struggles to grab them—to pull them down and put them into a sentence. What comes out seems artificial, strained, lost. Like her brain has become one of those prize machines in the arcade that you pump quarters into constantly and rarely come out with a prize. The grabbing mechanism is flawed, intentionally, and you think you’re getting this awesome new stuffed animal and it almost always slips through the claw in the retrieval process. How frustrating this must be. How uniquely inhuman she must feel.

I still smell her sometimes. I catch a whiff of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door and I’m taken back to sitting at her vanity table, my little tan legs dangling wildly from the stool, rummaging through a drawer of twenty tubes of the same red lipstick. I can smell her powder. She’d be getting dressed for some occasion at the church—someone’s retirement party or anniversary. She had about four dresses she cycled through. Today she might choose the pink one with the big bow around the neck, worn always with a smart shoe. I’d play with her old wedge heels from the 60’s and 70’s and she’d gawk that she once wore such frivolous things. She never really let me get too carried away, always insisting that I remain appropriate—she fiercely held on to this idea of “appropriate”; decorously holding fast to some nameless tradition, which I of course felt was archaic. We fondly referred to it as her living testimony that she was indeed from the “fallen down aristocracy of Arkansas”. In reality, I think it was her attempt at creating order, despite our collective chaos. Today I relish in this decorum. I live by many of the standards she stated as fact back in those days and try hard to channel that dignified sense of propriety (perhaps a Southern trait?) she infused into so many elements of her life.

The memories are so real, so vivid, like my recent habanera-induced dreams. So it seems weird that over the last few weeks I’ve been struggling with saying goodbye. I have her, the grandma I want to remember, right here in my memory bank. I could spend hours telling stories. Going through pictures. Remembering her. I know, in my heart of hearts, that she has lived an amazing course. She has had unbelievable highs and unmentionable lows. She has survived 90 years of this world—this crazy, mixed-up, upside-down world. And I feel as though I’ve said goodbye one hundred times now. I’ve waited, with bated breath, these last few years for the phone call that would relay this sinking news. When I finally got that phone call, I didn’t react the way I thought I would. It struck me in such a strange place in my heart, I almost felt stung. Like a hornet had somehow weaseled its way into my bloodstream and was passing through my pulmonary trunk (does that even pass things?). It hurts. And I’m scared. I’m unsure about what will happen next. Like bees are stuck in my aortic valve.