How’s Grandma Doing…
On her final hours,
She was grinning like a Cheshire cat
Eternity, the sly one, listened for a giggle.
Nothing.
And us grandkids,
Like moths around a lightbulb,
Watched as in pranced old Shep
Dropping a dug-up bone
At her feet.
Of course we wanted to laugh,
But dare not.
Grandpa cried and spoke to the clouds out the window.
As Mom and Dad told him she was headed for a better place.
Poppycock, he barked
A crow cawed boisterously from a tree
Receiving no answer.
The beauty of that last moment
Wasn’t like a red sail in the sunset,
More like a wheel falling off the model A
Ready to roam on her own.
Private as it might have been,
I think she gave a little giggle.
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The grandmother who, at the drop of a hat, would take to the road with me and go wherever I drove, enjoying being out there in the fresh air, experiencing… The last time I saw her she was relegated to skin and bone and lying on the couch every day, the lung cancer preventing her from even sitting up or walking. Still, she had an opinion of my girlfriend. "She's too bossy," she told my mother after we left.
My other grandmother, always cheerful, and suddenly overly religious until her Alzheimer's took over and she couldn't even remember. But she smiled like a Cheshire cat and ate whatever spoonful was put in her mouth. Her eyes looking out at nothing. Her dying, finally brought my uncle and my dad back together after many years. They shook hands. "It was her reason for staying alive so long," another uncle told me.
Ron