Who am I not to oblige?
It's of course the story... of how I came to be, of how a weirdo quested his way to normalcy, of how I got over.
This morning the thoughts flew through, of my wondrous streak where every other visit home was for a funeral... starting with Nancy's final curtain call. So I guess I'll gibber about that for a little bit.
It was 2005. I'd recently cracked into 24 -- the cruelest of the twenties, old enough to start shedding spry naïveté, young enough that car rental was still impossible. Terry Schiavo was just trickling out of the news, having left the world the day before my birthday. (I found this little gem just now, it reminding me of what that mess had been about -- parents regretting the hot mess that was sisters.)
I still remember the phone call. It was late, I'd thought, too late -- and my first response picking up the phone was exasperation at the implied drama implied by picking up the phone. "What is it?"
It was Grandma. She was wailing, in a way I didn't know was capable her without a night of stiff drinks and intended utterances... but tonight was sober, sobering, and most deliberate. Nancy's feeding tube had, inexplicably, popped out. Her nurses had called, asking for authorization to reinsert. Grandma declined.
Sobbing, she confided her reasoning to me -- to the extent reason actually matters into a decision as grave as this. That the Nancy we knew and loved was gone from that body in Heartland was something the family had internalized long ago, if not out loud. Yet she'd carried the cross of a mother's guilt these 12 years.
scared that the "culture of life" that had plagued Michael Schiavo for so long might yank away her chance to escort her daughter out of this world on her terms. More importantly, perhaps, was that she took it as her sign that, finally, the Almighty was finally ready to let her set this cross down.
We as a family had long ago given up hope of seeing the Nancy we knew reemerge from the body that sat at Heartland... most of us anyway. The ache and the smell of inevitability I'd experienced in her nursing home 10 years prior still wrapped my head like a faulty electric blanket, at once stuffy and jolting, and represented a place I couldn't bring myself to.
In the years that followed, Grandma and I had never spoke about Nan in detail, just occasional invitations to join her on her weekly trips to Heartland. She always seemed a touch disappointed at my refusal to join her, yet it was just too raw an experience for something that hadn't been my cross to bear.
