Ordinary Dialogue

From Chapter One: Death Will Bring Us Back to God.

Then the August of the year I turned twelve, I did. My grandmother went home. 60 years spanned between us, I was born on her wedding anniversary, on Easter Sunday. She called me her Easter present from God. Everyday after school I would go to her house, eat a pudding or drink an Ensure with her, and we would talk. She would tell me about how she had helped Billy Graham plant a church. When she told about her brother Baldus and the car made that only had a frame, which they would ride from their front door all the way to the bottom of Eagle Mountain, I laughed and wished that I had been there. I was haunted when she told me how her youngest brother Glen had lost his life while strapped to the Gunner’s chair onboard the U.S.S. Arizona during Pearl Harbor. I thought how lonely to sink to the bottom of the ocean--no wonder that the man who was feeding Glen’s gun bullets had shot himself later for leaving his friend there to die alone, helpless.

My grandmother was a smoker; she smoked almost everyday of her life from the time she was seven, when she took her first draw in the coat closet of her little country school. I remember the day she died; my dad came to get me. I knew she was sick, she had been on oxygen for almost six months. Her lungs were charred by the years taking in smoke and had been filling with mucus for a while.

When she found out she was dying, she stopped smoking, as she had tried to do when I was five and seven and nine and ten and eleven. All those times, She got better. But this time, as with the times before, something made her mad, my mom, my papa, me, or she thought about my sister or her sister or one of her sons… something, anything. And she sent my grandfather to the store for her “cigs”. “I could quit, if you all would leave me alone,” she said as she lit the first cigarette from the new pack and took a deep draw.

She was mean, extremely hardheaded, and opinionated; in many ways I’m like her. The last time I saw her: if only I knew that would have been the last time, I would not have said the things I did. When she called me a “bitch,” I would have just smiled and said, “I know Nan”, but since I didn’t know and hardheads beget hardheads who rear even more stubborn hardheads. I lashed out, and told her I hated her and that maybe life would be better if she kept her mouth shut--at least then she would have more air, and I ran out of her house, leaving only the slam of her metal front door behind.

That night, I lay in bed and I cried. I wished she would die so we wouldn’t have to put up with her. It was that next morning, my mom drove me to school and went home--Nan wasn’t feeling well, by 10:30 my dad came into my little classroom and told me to get my stuff, I needed to go home. “I don’t want to go home. Why do I have to go home? Are you mad with me?” There in front of my classmates, he told me: “Nan died, Sugar, let’s go home.” Everyone said how sorry they were, I wanted to tell them “it wasn’t your fault she smoked”. I gathered my stuff and followed dad to the truck, got in and said “I knew she was going to die, I could feel it.”

I didn’t cry. I didn’t do anything as my dad drove the 18 miles back home; there was nothing I could do.

Almost immediately people began bringing food, until there we ran out of refrigerator space and we moved stuff to the counters, and stacked food on top of food. People we knew, people she knew, they came to pay their “respects”. At her graveside, is where my habit of tapping my big toe began. I didn’t cry.

It wasn’t that I became hardhearted; I just had too much emotion. I could not let it out, so I stood there.