Grandma Hugen

I see her face, ancient, lined, severe.
Dark eyes, intense, staring
behind old rimmed glasses
that I remember from long before
we carried her box
to the grassy Iowa fields.
Old eyes that saw her husband to his grave
- and much earlier - her eldest son,
a war hero, who drove back
into an ammo dump holocaust
to save his dying friends.
Pieces of his Coast Guard jeep
were scattered all over rich Nebraska farms.
For a while, then, it seemed
she resigned her way
to the insanity of death and pain,
chasing ghosts and grandpa
with hate filled eyes, raging anger.
Or so I’m told,
but she must have rallied,
when I knew her as a kid,
because I don’t remember her as mean.
In later years her baby boy died,
gasping his life away
from a conspiracy of choices,
weather, dust, and Camel cigarettes.
He tore both our hearts in two.
We were miles away from each other,
and could not share the bleeding.

I wandered alone
through brilliant tulip gardens
to find her wood floored room
lost in the Old People’s Home,
which is what they called it
before it became pejorative and impolite.
It was late morning,
the sun lambent through frame windows,
It shone softly on the gently scalloped words
of an ancient Bible held in gnarled hands
inches from her nose.
She looked up when I knocked
on the half open door,
she was sitting beautifully framed
in the dusty grace of light streams
slipping soft through cobwebbed windows.
I will always remember her
caught in that moment.
“It’s me, Grandma,” I said.
She greeted me by my given name,
not the name by which I’m known,
I was suddenly a kid again,
sneaking pink peppermints,
and elephant peanuts from the cabinet
by the ancient Fridgedaire.
Naughty and loved,
like I always feel now,
and felt around her then.

We talked for a while, of Dad and life,
the things that might have been.
She asked me if I'd read the Psalms for her.
I took her Bible in my hands,
she bent her tear stained face
toward the Giver of the light.
She knew the words before I said them,
mouthed them silently to another world.
A world I could not see, but knew was close.
Before I left, I knelt
beside her brown stockinged feet,
pillowed on the age-old hassock.
I prayed an inside prayer.
Silent. Alone. Together.
We both knew it would be
the last time we would speak,
we murmured soft goodbyes,
I checked my watch
to see if I would make the sixty miles
to Des Moines in time to catch a plane.
When I looked back she was smiling
holding her Bible near her nose.
Her eyes were somewhere else.