I remember Ginny Grandma in whiffs.
Her Lilac perfume. The walker with the
split tennis balls. Her voice was water
pouring into a tall glass. Gentle as a dove.

Bird houses. The porch. The bubbles. Orthopedic
shoes. Ankles like pillows. Hair like cirrus clouds.
Rummy-cube. The sun-room. Play-doh. Life-alert.
Arthritis turned her hands to stiff marble.
Did you know skin could chip? I didn’t.

I remember the farm. The neighborhood in Cadillac,
Michigan with houses that looked like they belonged
to a set. Chicken-pot-pies stuck together in the freezer.

Technology left her delightfully astounded-
The electronic organ, with its rainbow keys and
pre-set melodies. Everybody Loves Raymond
on TV. She would watch Windows 98 computer
screensavers for hours, patient and perplexed.

She howled at the hospital, but if she had known how loud
she was, if she could have heard herself, she would’ve stopped. She couldn’t stop.

The fluid pouch. The hearing aids. The needles. The hurt.
The monitors. The gelatin desserts. The wires. The hurt.
Eight years later, my mom has cried enough to fill
all of Lake Michigan. She hasn’t stopped.

Ginny Grandma snuck treats to the therapy dogs, Max and Drooby, who visited residents and knew how to press elevator buttons.

My dad always told my Mama, “If I didn’t
marry you, I would have married your mother.”

We knew the end was close when my Grandma
started speculating about God, how she thought
he was a child- to her, nothing could be more holy.

When she died on my sisters seventeenth birthday,
my mother stopped humming while she made breakfast.
In fact, she stopped making breakfast altogether.

My outfits stopped matching. The dogs always looked
like they were just about to lie down, but they never did.

My dad removed the bible from his nightstand.
The forget-me-nots we planted in the front yard
did not make it through the winter. I barely made it
through the winter.

The whole fourth grade moved on
to shoes that laced, but I didn’t.
Butterflies hovered around my mother in the garden like messages. We saw her face in a slab of the new granite countertop. Lightning struck our house that year, twice.

The word funeral was too dim, too rough, not temporary
enough. That night, we flipped our pillows to the cold side
and pretended it was her breath.

My little cousin asked if God was a burglar.
We all swore it was not a funeral, but a
“Celebration of Life.”