It Is Still Dark Outside

by YVONNE GEORGINA PUIG

Day in life: I wake up around seven. It's steaming hot outside. I am seventeen. My sister, Vanessa, is nineteen and studying at Oxford for the summer. I am at home in Houston, helping my grandmother take care of my ailing grandfather. He has heart disease, and is very slowly, and somewhat painlessly, dying.

This day I wake early, as I need to pick up my grandfather, Poppa, and take him to see Gramma, who broke her arm a few days ago in a car accident, at the hospital. This is difficult as Poppa is feeble, and unaccustomed to Gramma's absence.

When I arrive he is awake and sitting at the kitchen table. The light is gray and cold, despite the heat outside. I help him with his cane and we drive down Gessner to Memorial Hermann Hospital. He looks strange walking down the hallways, very thin, like a patient. I am thinking about my boyfriend, and vaguely, about applying for college in the fall.

Though I'd rather be with my boyfriend or sleeping, I understand there is some significance, some meaning, in spending this time with my grandparents. Gramma is upbeat. She tells us about the doctors and the medicines and the big operation on her arm. She looks like Lucy, but with gray hair. And Poppa is like Desi. When Gramma irritates him, he grinds his teeth and mumbles in Spanish. Gramma makes a joke about not needing to stick around while the nurse helps her use the restroom, and Poppa and I go to mass at St. Cecilia. I went to school here in eighth grade and I wonder if I'll see anyone I know, and hope that I don't.

During the service I can smell Poppa's breath. An old smell, a from-deep-inside kind of smell. I wonder if Poppa believes any of the Jesus talk, because I don't, and decide that he probably doesn't either. It's just a part of his and Gramma's history, and now it is part of mine.

I wait in the pew while he takes communion. It was a point of contention between my parents and Gramma and Poppa that my sister and I weren't baptised, but I'm not sure it made a difference to Poppa. Father Risotto has an unbearable lisp. We sit on the far right of the church, and Poppa spends most of the service looking around at the parishioners. After mass, we walk through the church parking lot and a car pulls in front of us, too fast. Poppa stumbles and shakes his fist and grumbles something in Spanish. I take him home and he watches some football and smokes a cigarette even though he shouldn't be smoking. Tomorrow I will come again and we will go back to the hospital.

A few weeks later, the phone rings at 5 a.m. I hear my mom saying, "Evelyn? You mean George, not Evelyn. Evelyn?" She comes into my room. "Yvonne, wake up, Gramma died." Gramma? Gramma was not dying, Poppa was dying. I climb out of bed like a robot and drive to their house. It it still dark outside. I can't stop my hands from shaking.

I walk in and Poppa is in his hospital bed, beside the big bed where they slept together before Poppa got sick. Gramma is in the bed on her back, eyes closed. "She's gone, sweetie," Poppa says and I hug him. There's a flurry of paramedic activity and I'm told to sit outside. Some time goes by in which I sit on the couch and stare off and wait, various people show up, and then Poppa is wheeled into the living room. He leans over in the wheelchair and begins to cry into the crux of his elbow. I get up to hug him, but someone signals me to let him be. A few of us sit and watch him cry. He's just said goodbye to her. I hear someone say they were married almost sixty years. Another person tells me they are taking her away now, do I want to say goodbye?

She is on the floor, pale, when I enter the room. I am still shaking. I sit on my knees and kiss her forehead. It's slightly cold, which doesn't surprise me, but the stickiness does. Goodbye Gramma, I say. And then I leave. The afternoon is busy. Kay shows up and she hugs me and I cry when no one is looking. I sit with Poppa for a few minutes before I go home at the end of the day. He is watching football and not saying much. I ask him if he needs anything and says no. My dad comes in and asks about arrangements. I give Poppa a hug and tell him that I'll see him tomorrow.

A few hours later, Poppa dies. My dad and sister were there; his mouth began opening strangely and Martha, an unpleasant distant cousin, kept saying Come to Jesus, George, Come to Jesus. He died in the same room as Gramma, twelve hours later.

Yvonne Georgina Puig is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here.

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