I. Black.
Bubbie’s funeral was on a Wednesday.
Afterwards, we sat shiva. In Judaism, this is a week-long mourning period after someone’s death, to create a sense of comfort and community for those grieving. As semi-practicing Jews, my family did not follow many traditions, but my mother insisted on certain ones, including shiva. The custom I remember most from this event is that all mirrors were covered in opaque black curtains.
When we arrived back at our house Friday, we discovered someone had already shrouded our mirrors with curtains. The idea behind this tradition was that mourners focus on the deceased, not their own personal appearances. Men were to refrain from shaving, women to eschew cosmetics. As a sixteen-year-old girl, I hated this. I wanted to check that my hair wasn’t standing up. I wanted to pop my pimples.
You’re being ridiculous, I told myself, No one is looking at you. What would Bubbie think of you being so selfish?
I wanted to see Bubbie one last time. I wanted to see her shiny manicure, her beautiful skin.
II. Perfume.
When I was in first grade, I looked forward to Thursdays. That’s when I would see Bubbie, who would pick me up from school and take me to McDonald’s. I ordered a chocolate ice cream cone and we’d sit at a booth. Both under five feet tall, our dangling feet twinned under the table. Bubbie was diabetic so she couldn’t have anything here, but she enjoyed watching me lick my way around the cone. She listened intently to my strategy for minimizing drippings: “Look, I go all the way around,” I’d demonstrate. She emitted her guttural belly laugh when ice cream dribbled on the table anyway. Bubbie helped me wipe up my chocolate-covered face. Her eyes affixed on mine as I’d parade my sticky hands in front of her. She guffawed again. As we left, I inhaled the waft of the restaurant and the scent of Bubbie’s perfume on my hands.
III. Shimmering.
In here, the stench of old age jolts me back into reality.
I slither up to Bubbie’s bed – beige, plastic, ugly – feigning joy. I bend down to kiss her cheek. Like paper.
Her frail body is unmoving. She has not reacted to anything. She may as well be dead already.
No.
I should not think this way.
She’s still here. Still present. Underneath this stranger is the same woman who took me to McDonald’s ten years ago. She’s in there somewhere.
Held against her chest in a hardback sling to keep it from flailing, her left arm is locked to her chest. The stroke has made her arm – the one she used to write, brush her hair, touch my cheek – unusable. It is now a nuisance.
But her useless hand is still beautiful. Her fingernails are perfectly manicured in the blood-red polish she always uses. Even now, the polish is not chipped. Her hands are free of warts and wrinkles, so white they are practically shimmering.
But I can’t bear to look at them right now – pretty and pointless. Instead, I scan the room. Gray, cold, sterile.
Bubbie’s hands look out of place.
IV. Crunch.
After my brother Ben started school, Bubbie would pick us both up and take us to her place until my parents got home from work. She had followed us up to Arlington, Virginia after she retired from running a small grocery story in rural Virginia.
Although she couldn’t eat them herself, Bubbie kept a crystal bowl of M&Ms in her living room just for Ben and me. Every day she would offer us one of each color. We would carefully select candies and dance them on our tongues individually until they dissolved. We conducted unscientific experiments to determine which color lasted the longest. He said yellow; I said green. Some days we didn’t want to wait for them to dissolve. We wanted to bite into them instead, feeling the chocolate melt into our mouths. We tittered as we remarked on the crunch they made.
V. Clang.
Did Bubbie die happy? I wondered. Is that even possible?
The drive down to her funeral was a silent car ride.
We spent Tuesday night in some shoddy motel room in Roanoke – four hours away from our home – and drove the remaining two hours into Galax, Virginia for the graveside service the following morning. This was the town my mom grew up in, and she showed me for the first time where her dad was buried nearly 40 years ago. There was already an empty grave next to his, ready for Bubbie.
It was a chilly fall day. I couldn’t see the sun.
At sixteen, I’d never been to a funeral before. I was expecting sadness, but the weight of the grief on my shoulders was something I was not prepared for.
I also wasn’t aware that traditional Jewish funerals had unadorned coffins, meaning Bubbie was buried in a plain wooden box with a metal Star of David drilled into the middle. Like she was some artifact being stored.
I barely sniffled during the service, but when the rabbi began shoveling dirt onto the box with my grandmother’s body inside it, the sound of the dirt pummeling the gold star tore holes in my heart. Like a metal baseball bat hitting a steel post, the jangle vibrated in my ears. Clang!
I bawled.
Next to me, Ben wailed as well. My mom’s childhood friend, Peggy, rushed over and held us both tightly. We cried into her shoulders. I wanted my mom, but she was grieving more than I was and I couldn’t bother her with this triviality. My dad and the other men were taking turns filling the grave with dirt, as was traditional. The men shoveled while the metal star continued to ring out, reverberating in my ears. Clang!
I was in a tunnel of metallic echoing.
Clang! Clang!
That evening I dreamed of that sound.
VI. Vibrant.
In her hospital room, I wish I were dreaming now.
My family tries to cut the tension with small talk amongst ourselves. I don’t feel like talking small and I don’t want to feel small.
I’m sitting so close to her I can smell her shampoo. But I don’t know what to say. So I sit there, awash in my family’s murmurs and hushes.
The bed swallows Bubbie’s body; the thin white blanket inhales her chin. We surround her as if she were a precious statue that mustn’t be touched. We are somber. Reticent. Is this how we’re supposed to act?
My mind wanders to a time before she was moved to this wing, when Bubbie was in assisted living in the same building. Her nurse, Maria, came to help every day. It was a study in paradoxes: Maria’s jet-black hands atop Bubbie’s pale white ones; Maria’s loquacity and Bubbie’s utter silence; tiny, upright Maria lifting my nearly immobile and fat grandmother into her wheelchair. She hoisted Bubbie out of bed and into her chair with seemingly no effort, speaking in her rapid-fire Barbadian accent: “Okay, Ms. Mildred, let’s get you outta dis bed. Firs’ we go clear de bladda.” Then Maria and Bubbie were out of sight.
When they came out of the bathroom, Maria was already mid-sentence: “… colorful birds you like, Ms. Mildred. Perk you up.”
Maria wheeled her to the elevator as I followed them to a floor with some vibrant birds flying around in their cages next to the nurses’ station. Maria wheeled her right in front of their cage.
It was silent except for the tweeting of the birds. Bubbie’s expression was blank but she seemed to focus on the birds, on their bright yellows and greens. I watched Bubbie watch the birds, wondering how much she observed. I wanted to know how much their colors blurred together in Bubbie’s brain. I wanted to ask if she found any joy in watching them flit about.
VII. Blood.
As a child, I’d flit about in Bubbie’s home, inspecting as she checked her sugar levels. At least once a day, she’d bring a fingertip to her thumb to test how tender it was. Observing her move her fingers up and down along her thumb, the flash of her red nails moving up and down, was like watching a cascade of beautiful blood.
Bubbie would narrate her process to me: “I used this one yesterday, so it’s probably tender… Yep… the middle finger should be ok… Well, that one’s still a bit tender… Let’s do the ring finger today. Yeah, there we go.”
Sometimes her process was quick, and only one finger was needed. Sometimes she checked six appendages before finding the least tender one. Once Bubbie settled on the appropriate digit, she would take out a tiny needle from her purse and prick the skin of her finger. She would watch it bleed for a second or two, then place her finger on a strip she had inserted into her portable test kit. The meter above the strip would beep.
On the days her blood sugar was within normal range, we walked to the frozen yogurt place across the street from her apartment. I ordered a chocolate cone, and she ordered sugar-free raspberry. I asked, “If you’re getting sugar-free anyway, why does it matter if your blood sugar is low?”
“There are other foods that cause a sugar spike,” she said, “Not just sugar.”
I pressed her, yet despite my deluge of questions, I didn’t fully understand. Bubbie was patient with my curiosity.
VIII. Giggle.
I was seven, fascinated by newly-discovered words. I’d set up dolls and stuffed animals along my bed to serve as my students and pranced by my easel to teach the perpetually respectful class. I pretended to teach the alphabet and wrote a sentence on the chalkboard using words beginning with B. Like any good teacher, I found visuals I had to drive home the point, underlining Bs as I went. “Bubbie is holding a Barbie” – I flashed one at the class – “and blowing up a blue balloon” – I snapped one – “and has a barrette in her hair.” I fastened a barrette into one doll’s hair. In my limited practice of spelling, I had misspelled the words as “baloon” and “baret” on the chalkboard. In my limited practice of writing, the ends of the lines snaked up the sides.
As was typical on many weekends, Bubbie was visiting and walked by the open door. I was excited to show her what I had written, particularly since I used her name in the sentence.
She knelt down to ask me a question. “Do you want a real live example?”
I exclaimed, “Yes!” and shoved upon her the balloon, the barrette, and the Barbie. She let me pin the barrette into her soft silver hair as she tucked the Barbie under her arm. I watched her try to blow up the balloon but she was unable to. Her face turned as red as her nails. I giggled, which made Bubbie giggle, and she gave up completely on the balloon and gave me a tight hug.
I still have this image of Bubbie: her face turning red from trying to blow up that balloon, her usually perfect hair askew from my sloppy placement of the barrette, with the Barbie suffocating under her armpit, limbs akimbo.
IX. Silver.
There is nothing resembling that image in this woman now lying before me. Dying before me. She is pallid and unkempt. Her silver hair is mottled down and her skin seems sallow. She doesn’t acknowledge anyone’s touch or voice. I wish for the clattering sound of Death to stop nibbling at her toes and consume her entirely.
Stop it.
I shouldn’t think such things.
Maybe Bubbie can still hear our voices. Maybe she takes some comfort in that.
But I don’t. There’s pressure on my chest. Like a soaking wet woolen blanket. I need to get out of here.
I tell my family I need some air. I don’t hear the response, but it doesn’t matter.
X. Safe.
When I was eight, we were living in Houston. Bubbie had followed us, like she had followed us to Arlington before.
One day, it flooded. The school closed early because flooding was projected to get a lot worse – up to four feet of water in some places. Bubbie came to pick Ben and me up since my parents couldn’t leave work immediately. The school was just over a mile away from our house, but about halfway home, Bubbie didn’t feel comfortable driving anymore. I know she shifted nervously in her seat, because I heard the phonebook she used for height shuffling beneath her. She found a safe place to park, unstrapped us from the car, and hailed a cab. By this point, many of the major streets were completely under water, including Stella Link Road, which separated our neighborhood from the elementary school. After about ten minutes, the cabbie pulled over and told us to get out because he couldn’t get us there, adding he wouldn’t charge us.
“Excuse me?” Bubbie demanded, “You’re kicking out a seventy-five-year-old woman and her small grandchildren?” Ben and I had unbuckled our seatbelts in the back, but Bubbie hadn’t budged. “Take us home. I don’t care what it costs,” she said.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the cabbie demurred, “I can’t go any further.”
Bubbie huffed and helped us out of the car, then slammed both doors. We were maybe a half mile from home, but we didn’t know which roads were closed. Nevertheless, we walked toward home. Or we tried. Stella Link was completely flooded between the I-610 loop and Brays Bayou. We were stuck.
Bubbie found a payphone and called my dad’s office. She told him where we were, and after she hung up the phone, we waited for him at a McDonald’s. Bubbie ordered us Happy Meals, and we ate in silence while listening to the deluge outside. I wondered if Bubbie was hungry or scared. I was both.
But I didn’t dare ask for an ice cream cone.
When my dad showed up, he looked like a banana, dressed head to toe in a yellow rain suit and knee-high rain boots. He carried Ben and me across Stella Link, which was now a shallow lake. On dad’s back, skinny five-year-old Ben was hunkered on top of his shoulders. I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his chest, feeling his heartbeat beneath my cheek. He planted his feet carefully on the ground with each plodding step, the water almost reaching the top of his boots. My plastic parka crinkled as I watched Bubbie bob up and down on the wrong side of the lake. My dad found dry land and plopped Ben and me down before taking a breath. Then he trudged back to the other side to retrieve Bubbie. When he reached her, once again out of breath, they both laughed. Could he actually carry her across? They both wondered.
Ben and I watched intently from the other side as they tried various strategies. She couldn’t jump onto his back. He couldn’t pick her up in front of him. He bent over and she threw her arms over his shoulders, and that didn’t work either. My dad could not carry her across.
Bubbie thought a minute, then knocked on the door of the house on the corner. A Black couple answered. Bubbie turned back to my dad, telling him she would stay there for the night. When the city fixed the flooding tomorrow, the homeowners would give her a ride back to her car. But they are strangers! I tried to protest. How do you know you’ll be safe?
Neither Bubbie nor my dad seemed concerned. The Black woman waved to us from her front door, Bubbie went in, and we went home.
It appeared we were all safe. Although it was my dad who had ultimately gotten us home, Bubbie was the hero to me. She’d kept calm throughout the entire endeavor and always seemed to know what to do.
XI. Alabaster.
Why is the death of an old person such a sordid affair? When young people die, it’s a tragedy. When healthy people die, it’s a calamity. But old people are supposed to die. Why do we torture ourselves wishing the inevitable will not happen? Why can’t we just be happy that they made it to 84?
I’m not thinking about this currently, in the hallway of the nursing home. Instead, I feel lost – physically and emotionally – finding myself surrounded by a sea of pink and white hair. Tiny women take no notice of me. They are in wheelchairs or moving extraordinarily slowly with walkers – all hunched over, all wrinkled, all with claw-like hands. Where are their families? Why do they look so miserable?
I focus on one particular woman. She’s in a wheelchair, hunched over her sinewy hands that playfully manipulate a necklace of plastic beads in her lap. Willing it around her neck?
I’m intrigued by this woman, watching her laser-focus on her knotty knuckles, underneath reds, blacks, blues. Her fingers get tangled up among the beads, as the necklace entwines itself into her ancient hands. She’s murmuring to herself: Black and silver, black and silver.
I can’t take my eyes off this woman’s hands. They are what you’d expect on an old person – wrinkled, liver-spotted. Perhaps it’s their youthful movements that give me pause, the incongruous agility of them. They remind me of the incongruity of Bubbie’s hands – their youthful look, their uselessness. I’m incapacitated for a few minutes, watching her nimble hands, hearing her murmur Black and silver, black and silver.
Suddenly, I realize where I am, and hasten back to Bubbie’s bedside. I find her sleek, alabaster hand, clasping it in mine.
Bubbie’s hands are not yet useless.
Elaine Ferrell lives in Silver Spring, MD where she works in non-profit communications. When not writing, Elaine enjoys baking and spending time outdoors. She has been published in Chapter House Journal, Motherly, ellipsis literature & art, Months to Years, Soliloquies Anthology (Canada), Santa Clara Review, and others.