SuperstitionI was living with my grandma and we had just moved to the home I would live in until the summer after high school graduation. I’m in 5th grade. Me and my 3 current “siblings” pile in the car…my grandma driving…and we head out to my great-grandma’s house on the other side of town to eat dinner. We get less than a mile down the road and my grandma realizes that she’s forgotten something. “It’s bad luck to turn around and go back home…” (this was actually stated out loud at the moment) but we do it anyway. We stay in the car while my grandma hops out to run inside and retrieve the forgotten item. The next thing we realize is that she has tripped over a railroad tie on the edge of the driveway and it turns out that she has broken her arm. I’m not really sure on the details of how some of the subsequent events happened in time, but while she was seeing physicians for her arm, they discovered that she had cancer…non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. My grandma rarely talked about how she was holding up emotionally so I can only say for sure the things I saw and experienced personally. Over the next 7 years…through her rounds of radiation, remission, recurrence, and chemotherapies…I was not so much a child at all but was anything from nurse, cook, maid, friend and sometimes enemy for my grandma. I tended her radiation burns. I watched her hair fall out (the first round of chemo it took a while and she was so sure that by some miracle it wasn’t going to happen and I will never forget walking into her room and seeing her standing there crying, holding her hairbrush full of hair) and I watched her hair grow back (it grew back twice as thick and white as snow). There were obvious moments of hope and obvious moments of despair. And then there was the moment when she called us to the living room and told us she was ready to stop the therapy she had recently started and that she wouldn’t start another. We all sat there staring at the pill bottles in front of her on the tv tray…there were pills left in them she was supposed to take, but they were going to make her very sick and we all knew there was no sense in it at that point. Looking at those bottles at that moment was like sitting there watching a light dim to nothing. In what I remember as an almost real visual sensation, they went from bright potential to dull inertness right before my eyes. Anything she could eat at any time of the day or night…I was likely to be up preparing it. I’ve fried catfish at 2 am and dipped Nilla wafers in almond bark at 6 am. I sat up with her endless nights in her isolation…when she couldn’t be alone…and watched movie after movie…no matter if it was a school night. When I think about it I can still smell in my mind what the hospital rooms smelled like (it’s like a mixture of clean plus skin cells…or how I would imagine skin cells smell) and what my grandma’s bedroom smelled like (the mint of Icy Hot cooked onto a heating pad then cooled to 50 degrees by a window air conditioner plus undertones of waterbed). These are the things I can tell. They are a few of the things that are shareable. There are so many disturbing, sad and horrible things about those years that would be inappropriate to share in a public forum. So… I was about to conclude by saying that it all started with a superstition and a railroad tie because that was always the story of how it all began and it was always put into that context. But it started well before that. We just didn’t know it. Come to think of it, that’s pretty typical of life. Things are usually in the works for a while before we know them. But we always think it makes things easier or that we will find comfort in pinpointing the moment something happened, or the moment something changed, or the moment something started and became inevitable. Which, not so strangely at all, is more than likely exactly what I’m doing with this list of most influential moments. But of course sometimes that pinpoint in time that gives us consolation isn’t found in the moment something started. It can sometimes be found in the moment something ends. My grandma died two months after I graduated high school. Certainly death is easier to accept than dying.
