Love.

Her life had been reduced to sitting in a wheel chair, looking up at the ceiling for nine hours a day. The bed was pointed towards the windows in her small room with all the furniture and decorations designed to have a certain look and feel to them to make the occupant feel more at home. All of them having a cabin feel, something homey and likable about them. In reality all these things did was make her feel like she was getting farther and farther from home the longer she stayed here. In her mind she’d made peace with the fact she wouldn’t see the place she called home again. She’d never say this out loud. She’d never admit to coming to this conclusion and being strangely alright with it. This was where she lived now. Her real home, not her house, had left a few months prior. This was what made not seeing her house alright. Although she missed it; the carpet, the furniture, the pictures on the wall; it wasn’t her home.

This had all started when she had decided to get her hip replaced. This was something that had bothered her for some years now, it was late in life to be having such serious surgery but it was worth a try. If it went well it would mean that she would be able to walk with relative ease again. It went well at first. She was making a full recovery until they found what appeared to be a staph infection. If left untreated this could eventually travel to her heart and kill her. More operations followed. It became about saving her life instead of trying to make her walk again. The more operations she had the more her quality of life was forgotten. She spent most of her time so doped up on pain medication that the person her family knew and loved wasn’t present. She’d become the shell of the person they once knew. Her husband was constantly at her side while all this was happening. The hospital they had chosen was an hour away from their home and he made the trip everyday to see her, just to spend time with her. After all, she was his home. Sleeping alone at night was something he hadn’t done in fifty-some-odd years. Visiting hours was a term that didn’t apply to him, it didn’t matter that he was 84 and couldn’t stand on his feet for more than 20 minutes at a time. There was no other option. The person he called home was lying in a hospital bed unable to speak most of the time, but still awake and alive enough to know when he held her hand that it was him.

“I don’t know what to do. I can’t help her and it’s killing me. I want to take her home. I need her home with me.” He told me once, while going to get her some more ice and something soft to chew on.

I didn’t know what to say. I’d never seen love and dedication like this in my life. Nothing real, nothing I could feel in my heart as the real thing. Every other example of love between two people had failed, or wasn’t something I that felt like I could reach out and grab it with my hands. In a time where the institution of marriage failed just as often as it succeeded, when most couples who weren’t already divorced seemed destined to cross that bridge soon, it was strange to see something so solid. Something so tangible.

My own parents divorced when I was 10. I had watched my father remarry again and seem happy, while my mother went through relationship after relationship that all seemed doomed to failure. There wasn’t anything solid about any of them. Maybe what I should say is, that from a young age I’d learned that love fails. Love is not something to set your watch to or take to the bank. I was fine with this, because it was the way it always was for me. It wasn’t until I saw the way that my grandparents were so willingly and lovingly dedicated to each other that I discovered what love could be. What love could do to people. How, for some people, it truly was something to trust, something you could count on, regardless of what was happening to the other person. Love worth fighting off death for.

After her numerous surgeries to try to rid her body of the infection, my grandma’s leg was all but useless. She did get to go home but, because of condition she had to sleep in one of those electric hospital beds, separate from her husband. He adapted though. In their room they had a big reclining chair that he had used to watch TV in. His solution to my grandma being in a separate bed was to move to her. The chair was put right next to her bed. This became my grandpa’s bed while my grandma was able to live at home. Her days at this point were spent watching television with my grandpa, visiting with people who would come to visit and check to see how she was doing. Eventually the infection returned. What made it different from the first time around was that this time they had also found cancer. They found lumps that had developed all over her body.

The chemo started right away. Back to the hospital again. This time it was more serious. It was something that couldn’t be cleaned out with a series of surgeries. Her once full and white hair had begun to fall out. This broke my heart. I had spent a lot of time with my grandma. When I was younger she used to take me along with her to the neighborhood hairdresser where all the older women in the church got their hair done. She had gone once a week, it was something in her schedule that had to be done. She had the nicest hair in he group. It was perfectly white and was always well maintained. Always in the same shape and appearing to never change. It was something I loved about her. Her hair hadn’t changed since I was old enough to notice it. In my head, my grandma was the most lady-like and refined women I’ve ever known. There wasn’t a crass or uncultured bone in her body. When I was 12 she sent me to an etiquette class. When I was in junior high she insisted that I take ballroom dancing so that I could learn how to dance, because this is a skill that all cultured men should possess. Even when she’d lose her temper because of something that I was doing, she was never actually able to lose her temper. It was something I had to fight laughing at because I knew it was something that was so forced for her. I took it serious because I knew that it took a lot of anger and annoyance to push her to this level.

“Shit!” She’d say, like she was trying to pronounce a word in some foreign language for the first time.