Oma inhales, now………and now………….and now………………….and now. Her eyes are all brown, pinpoint black irises. Slack eyelids toward the window: the Berlin grey sky, pines dripping, the smallest hint of sunlight somewhere near the horizon, and now also above the treeline, a ray breaking through the clouds. Is it selfish of me to say soon, please? Everyone has their own time, the hospice booklet reminds me, and we must deal with the discomfort; witnessing our loved ones in pain, it offers, is like witnessing labor for the afterlife.
Oma’s earlobes droop, her skin taut between shoulder bones, her cheeks sunken. I think about Oma’s last week of words: This is no life anymore. Everything is too heavy. Man, did I become weak. I can’t anymore. Ach, Missylein, it is almost over. Or did she say already?
I’ve been trying to listen: I hear the comforting drone of the automatic air bed. The wet rasp in Oma’s breath. I hover and tell her we love her, that she can go whenever she wants, that we’ll be okay. But is she past the point of wanting? I wait for movement, recognition, the faintest change, but there is only the occasional opening of her throat behind her swollen, spotted tongue.
Finally, the sun. It shines right on my fingers for five, six minutes, envelopes me with a warmth I haven’t felt in several days. I nudge Oma's 90th birthday flowers into the rays. I inhale now……..and now……….and now. And then the clouds come, and the wind agitates the trees so that all the top branches sway, back and forth, back and forth, but gently.
Oma inhales, now………….and now…………………..and now…………and now. The sun returns, finally strikes the crystal dangling from a thread. The refracted light dances on the sponged-yellow walls and reminds me of all the little invisible strings, the magic of physics and everything we can’t see, the energy that swirls. The heavens are waiting, the sky and the universe and the vibrations of Mom and Opa and my cousin Amanda and everyone in my family who has perished. Are they here now? Are they the crystal and the wind and lingering pulse in Oma’s veins?
Oma inhales now………………..and now…………………………..and now. Her breaths are quieter, almost silent.
I stand by her bedside. Hallo Oma. Do her eyes hurt, open like that without a single blink? How are they even still moist? I watch the vein in her neck pulse, and pulse, and pulse, but her breaths are longer between. Is it okay that I am standing here, staring? Can she see my furrowed brow, can she sense that when I said “we’ll be ok” I meant “eventually” but maybe not now, because I don’t know that I am ready to witness another death, I don’t know that I am ready to process that in November she was supposed to be visiting us in America and now she’s wrestling free of her cancerous shell, her distended belly and skeletal frame? This again?
Her throat opens, closes. Her jaw moves, a gentle agitation like the trees in the wind, a soft relaxation. Her eyelids close. Her throat opens, closes. I watch the pulse in her neck. Then, and again. And again. I wait for another breath. Oma? Oma? Bist du noch hier?
I wait.
I wait.
Comments