Autumn
A tall man in a dark jacket comes to take my grandmother to the doctor. Except he doesn’t.
In reality, the man who takes my grandmother to the doctor is a small man in a colorful jacket — my dad. But when you ask her, she’ll tell you of the tall man in the dark jacket. It’s hard to say whether this is an hallucination or a failure of her brain to properly describe what she experiences, but either way, it’s troubling. Everything about her life lately has seemed troubling to me. I must admit that I haven’t been to see her in a while, because the last time I did, it was pretty obvious that she didn’t recognize me. I’m worried, sort of, about frightening her. But really it’s just convenient. Her misery is so palpable in the little house where she lives with my uncle Victor. It scares me a little.
I think my grandmother was a better grandmother than a mother. I think that’s true of a lot of people, especially people who survived the Depression and the War and spent a lot of the 50s and 60s trying to sort themselves out. My dad was largely raised by his own grandmother, Ma Quigley. He was only a few years younger than his uncle Lanny, so when his mother turfed him there, he was easily folded into the brood. At times he would live with his mother, and at times not, but there was chaos there. His stepfather was an Air Force mechanic, and an irresponsible reprobate. They moved around a lot. He ended up back at Ma Quigley’s sometimes. He went to high school in a little logging town in southern Oregon, where he lived in an apartment with Ma Quigley, who slept in a walk-in closet. He didn’t talk to his mother very much, I don’t think. He had been with my own mother for years before he introduced them. It was a complicated relationship. My dad and my grandmother loved one another, but I’m not sure they liked one another very much.
By the time I was born, much had been settled, I think. The stepfather was long gone, wandered into the United States of Alcohol on the back of drunken horse, and my grandmother lived a short drive away from us. I don’t know how they related to one another, but she and I had a fine old time together. We ate popcorn with butter on it, which wasn’t freely available at my house, where my mom was often on a diet. We would go out behind her house and climb Pilot Butte, the big cinder cone that used to mark Bend’s eastern edge, and she would listen to me speculate about the possibility that we would end up in the newspaper for this feat of endurance and strength. She never pushed religion on me, which had been one of the sticking points in her relationship with my father. If I had a nightmare, she would sing me to sleep, in a high, trembling voice that made me feel safe.
When I got older, we had less to talk about. We didn’t really have a lot in common other than our genes: she was religious, conservative, constitutionally inclined toward small towns and environments with as many people as much like her as possible. I was atheistical, liberal, from a city and always looking for a bigger one. For a while we bonded over a mutual suspicion of George W Bush and a mutual love of cats. When I lived in Bend in my mid-20s, I would go to her house once a week to visit, and that’s what we would talk about — her cat, Gus, a gigantic Maine Coon who had wandered into her yard one day and taken up residence; my cat, Phoebe, a less-gigantic Maine Coon who had been my companion off and on for ten years.
Last winter, she caught the flu and almost died. She hallucinated then, too, including mistaking me for the pastor of her church at one point. But the signature feature of my grandmother’s life has been a complete refusal to be crushed by forces larger than she. She survived the Depression. She weathered the home front in California during WWII. She endured after her first husband, my grandfather, vanished. She didn’t give in when her second husband turned out to be a drunk. When her oldest son didn’t speak to her for years, when her oldest grandchild was killed by a drunk driver, when her youngest son returned to live with her in adulthood, when her favorite brother crashed his Cessna on Christmas Day 1996, when her older sister withered with Alzheimer’s, when another brother wasted away from emphysema — she bore up. Often she performed heroic work. She was always good in a crisis. In the crisis of her own influenza, she refused to die.
And now, though she believes that a tall man in a dark coat comes each week to take her to the doctor, when in fact it’s a small man in a colorful coat? I don’t know. Eventually one of these things will mean her end. In the long run, you always take the field. But any individual thing — I have no doubt she’ll outlast those. The tall man in the dark coat may take her to the doctor for another ten years.
It is the autumn of her ninety-fourth year. Today I noticed the tree in the courtyard next to my building has flushed pink, as though embarassed by the spinning of the globe. I will have to go see her, and trust that she will deal with the crisis of my presence as well as she has dealt with every other crisis so far.
