The Flying Remembers Her

This I wrote after seeing my grandmother, Ethel Plaisted, alive for the last time.





My grandmother lies in a hospital bed, looking like a bird taken out of the air. Her eyes, I try. Her eyes. I cannot look into them for too long, those pools of blue on three hospital pillows, or my heart will crack and I will fall to the floor. But I hold her hand and rub her skin and tell her that I will ask a Blessing for her from the Light of lights, so that she may fly again, in whatever form the Light is moved to move her. I know, no matter what, that she will no longer, then, be, strictly speaking, my grandmother; even my heart must let her go, so that she may fly. She must move on, in whatever shape or shapes or states, and I hold her hand and tell her that she must fight this disease, but that, when she feels with all her might that the fighting is done, she must relax into the process with full feeling and let go of everything. Even the lights in the room, all her people, me, all history and time, drop it like a hat on the floor of a temple, and fly, free of all wings and direction, to the breathing crest of Infinity, which holds you like a lamp, and there is no crying involved except as release, so I breathe it through, and out through her, and her into me and out again, like the being my grandmother was to me in life whom I loved with all my breath and heart, who did her part in the taking care of me and of all my people. We are all there with our grandmother, and aunt, and mother, and teller of stories and provider of afternoon snacks and blankets and Don’t jump on the furniture! and countless banana-split cakes and knitted things for our warmth and protection.

I look into her eyes. They are frightened, like the eyes of a bird who has been taken out of the air. I cannot look away, but I cannot see because of tears. Just a blurry shape, a blob of a head on pillows and leaking, hospitalized body, though she has said she is not in pain. But of course she would say that. I touch her shoulder, the top of her head. Her hair is thin. Her feet: alone together below the hospital blanket. She wiggles a toe, and smiles, but her eyes do not. But they do say “I love you” with more force than any bird of any air, the force of no knowing, even after such long life, what anything IS, what even a single thing IS, including this life, this process, this turning, this wonder of transformation, this small room with all the cards and flowers and loved-ones. I squeeze her hand and tell her I love her, though my voice barely makes it out of the sentence alive. Three words, which devastate the being by filling it with Light, and it’s all right, you know, I tell her. You fight it, I say, but then you must surrender from the heart when it’s done. You’ll know it when it’s done. And the love will never leave the room, because we are here, holding you, letting you go on your free way wherever.

My grandmother squeezes my hand on her hospital bed, the way a bird might lightly grasp a branch when it is just about to fly. Her face is warm. She looks up at me, the lone bird in the first tree ever grown by nature in its house among the Light, taken out of the air, and those pale blue eyes are no longer afraid. They have seen something. They are seeing everything, I feel, as they begin to close. Her grip on my hand suddenly relaxes, and I realize she need not worry about remembering how to fly: it is the flying who is remembering her. The flying remembers my grandmother, and me, and you, and all the people who do not know that they have wings, that we are already fire in the sky.