Famous Last Words

The last thing I ever say to my grandfather is, See you next month. I call this out to him as he lays in the ruffled twin bed of the memory care facility he has been staying in for the past three months. He is frail, has lost most of the military muscle he built up in his youth and maintained through his sixties. Grandpa once had calves as wide as my thighs, bulging with veins and muscle tone. Now, he has to wear suspenders because, no matter how slim the waistline of the trousers he buys for himself at his local Walmart, they will be too big—sliding down to his knobby ankles when he stands—by the next month.

Now, when he lies in bed, breath tortured and wheezy, I can see his ribs poking through his sweater. He was once a military man, calves bulging with veins and muscle tone. Now he is all bone.

A week ago, I was shuffling through the large plastic bin—lime green and shaped like a treasure chest—that my mom uses to store old family photos and niche participation certificates I was awarded as a child. I had been flipping through the oldest photos in our collection—grainy and sepia-inflected—when I came across two photographs from my grandparents' wedding in 1965.

They were each about the size of my fist and fitted into two delicate gold frames. In them, my grandparents stood at the alter—facing the camera in one, away in the other. They weren’t touching, but I imagine a tension between their arms which extend straight down their sides. A pull, as if connected by string, of their fingertips towards each other’s. Kinetic connection.

My grandparents had eloped (for reasons unknown to both me and my mother), but the service was still held in a nice—albeit quaint—chapel well-suited for the love union of two catholic people who had each considered joining the priesthood or convent respectively at one point in their lives. In these images, the chapel is decorated with rows of peonies which line the front of the alter. Peonies were my grandmother's favorite flower. I wonder if they knew.

A bend in the photo paper runs through each image, tracing the curves of my grandmother's satin dress, the rough fuzz of my grandpa's military buzz. They're a clean looking couple, happy but restrained. They had done it. Got married. Said I do. Promised to have and to hold each other for eternity. They got 53 years. Only 52 before my grandmother's newly diagnosed stage four liver cancer started metastasizing, spreading to her kidneys, her lungs.

I showed my grandfather these photos today, held them up to his face as he lay in bed, arms tangled in between the covers. I found these pictures of you, Grandpa, I said. From your wedding. He took them from my hand, his own shaky and uncertain. Inhaling slowly, he held the frames before his squinted eyes. He sat there for a moment, still, meditative. When he passed them back to me, though, I knew he didn't remember.

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The completed version of this piece will be made available upon request.