Flurries

It isn’t that Homer really believes, deep down, Great Grandpa’s forgotten everyone’s name, as Homer watches him turn to bones on the nursing home bed, Great Grandpa curled up on his side and glaring out the window through the snowflakes. It’s more like he gets the feeling an approaching death takes all of Great Grandpa’s concentration.

Homer stands behind family members and relatives who keep fussing with Great Grandpa, smoothing out his pajama top or talking loudly at him about television and fishing, all the regular everyday stuff that now bounces off Great Grandpa like quarters off an army bunk. Homer looks with him out the window, feeling as inadequate as ever, knowing, on this day, death will deal only with Great Grandpa and Great Grandpa only with death.

Homer wants to act like everyone else, like everything’s going to be okay. He’d like to carry on about food and fishing shanties and the Milwaukee Bucks. But he’s mesmerized by the look on Great Grandpa’s face—a look of marble, a look as if the last thing he’s ever going to do now is respond or show interest in the score of a game. Shooting percentages no longer exist for him. If he cares about anything, it’s death and what it’s going to mean. All of his concentration, all of his focus, all of his purpose is death, somewhere suddenly not far from the white room and the quarter-sized snowflakes floating by the window. Great Grandpa faces it down, dares it with all the strength and nerve and dignity that eighty-four years of richness and poorness, sickness and health will allow. He takes the ball straight at death, single-handedly attacking its press, yet fully aware of his chances for success.

“Do you want me to change the channel, Gramps?” Homer’s sister Madeline shouts.

He nods twice rapidly, not meaning it, keeping his eyes to the window, glaring past the falling flakes, past everything, his bones rigid, waiting, his face marbled, as if he might be riding a sleigh straight downhill into the black violet wind of a stormy winter’s night.

“Did you hear about the big salmon Jake caught ice fishin’, Gramps?” Madeline shouts at him, meaning all the good in the world, though her pedestrian words come across as near alien in that room.
He nods again.

Everyone stares at Great Grandpa, fussing with him, clutching onto the last life in him. But Great Grandpa clutches onto no one, acknowledges no one. To Homer, Great Grandpa’s mind is focused on the glimpse he’s gotten of death, on the way it looks as it comes up over the white horizon, approaching deliberately, inexorably.

Homer looks out the window with Great Grandpa once more, and then, believing he’s actually standing there in plain sight of the real thing, discreetly, regretfully, steps back out of the way.