Last words

I talked to my grandmother on the phone today. Just talked, because she was too weak to reply. My mother had phoned from the dementia ward with bad news: All her mother's organs were shutting down. Heart, liver, kidneys, lungs. The doctors were uncertain if she would make it another two or three days. Her question: Did I want to speak to Grandmother while she could still hear?

It was a completely unfamiliar experience. The family members who have died in my lifetime--Aunt Sally, great uncle Joe, Uncle Jim, Grandpa--all went unexpectedly, while I was busy with life in Indiana or Tennessee. My last words to them were simply words--imbued with a greater significance only after I learned they were the last. But this morning, I stood in my bedroom in New York and told my grandmother, who never allowed me to know her well, that I loved her. That I would always remember her stories, especially the one about the red velvet cape she turned into a dashing suit and wore into the city with two-tone pumps on a Saturday. I told her that I wear her old jewelry often, and that it never fails to receive a compliment or two. That I was sorry I didn't see her over Christmas break because I was sick the entire time. That I loved her, again. Then my mother took back the phone.

How strange to speak with an awareness of my words' finality! I wanted to have time to reach into memory and craft something Meaningful. Instead, I said what came to mind, trying to stifle tears so I could speak clearly. It wasn't Lovely, but it was honest and true--and so very everyday. I find this to be the case with many of my experiences. I want to be a Hamlet or Lear, equipped with brilliant soliloquies for my entrances and exits. But instead I am an Ophelia, speaking in seeming non sequiturs as I face the Moments of life:

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you love, remember. And there is pansies; that's for thoughts. There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me; we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays...
Hamlet IV.V

My consistent inability to evoke words that match the elegant or agonized grandeur of the moment is one more reminder of my human finitude. And yet, Ophelia's artless words somehow possess an aching truth and beauty that many of the speeches toward which I aspire lack. So, I shall press on with my ordinary words in the face of what seems extraordinary, hopeful that in their honesty and simplicity, they shall be "a document in...thoughts and remembrance fitted." (IV.V)

post script: Betty Settle died on February 4 at 3 o'clock in the morning, EST