More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.
And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.
Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmother’s hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, she’d be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.
What dreams might she be having? I wondered if she’d been able to look back and take stock, or whether she’d consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that she’d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when she’d experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.
I thought back to a conversation I’d had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.
“The thing about getting old, Bar,” Toot had told me, “is that you’re the same person inside.” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it’s still you. You understand?”
I did now.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
