Michael Kimball - Us

This is why I am still surprised when I think about my grandfather taking pictures of my grandmother inside her casket inside that viewing room. My grandfather had gotten up out of his chair with the long back, walked up to the casket that held his wife inside it, and held his instant camera up to his face. He looked through the viewfinder of his instant camera for a long time before he took any pictures of her and I keep thinking about how the camera lens was turning her upside down and then right side up again and that that might have some how made her look and seem alive again through some trick of mirrors or perspective or light.

Or maybe it was the way that a picture of her brightened in his hands after it came out of his instant camera, the way that she turned from some kind of filmy gray back into all of the colors that she had been. My grandfather held her in his hands. He blew on each fresh picture of her and waved it back and forth and waited for her to materialize before him.

My Grandfather Oliver said that his heart hurt. We thought that it was my grandmother who he was talking about and it probably was, but it was also that his physical heart, the muscle in his chest, hurt. Breathing had become difficult for him after she died. It was probably difficult for him before she died too, but none of us had noticed it then, and he hadn’t said anything about it or about any pain in his chest. I’m not sure that he had noticed it before either. We were all so focused on my grandmother back then. We could only pay attention to one dying person at a time.

My grandfather went to the doctor and the doctor told him that his heart valves were clogged and weak, that there wasn’t enough blood being pumped out of his heart and through the rest of his body, that he needed to have a heart valve operation, but that he wasn’t strong enough to have the operation then. The doctor gave him an oxygen tank to help make breathing easier for him, to keep him alive, and to maybe help him get his body and his heart strong enough again so that he wouldn’t die if they could perform the heart valve operation on him.

My grandfather’s heart had become weak. He had given everything in it away to my grandmother as she was dying. The lack of blood pumping into and out of his heart also meant that he would sometimes black out. His brain would stop when there wasn’t enough blood flowing through it and he would be dead for a little bit.

He said that he would wake up again and try to remember where he was and what year it was. He said that his chest would hurt and that his head felt as if somebody were squeezing it and that he would try to remember where my grandmother was. I’m still not sure if my grandfather separated the physical and the emotional pain.

It was because of this that my mother hired a woman to help my grandfather out at home. The woman was supposed to come to his house for a few hours of each day. She was supposed to clean the house up, do the laundry, do the dishes, and do any other household chores that she could. She was supposed to make lunch and then make a dinner that my grandfather could warm up to eat later that night.

But my grandfather said that the woman didn’t clean right, that the food that she cooked tasted wrong, and that he wouldn’t let her come back to his house. He didn’t say that she didn’t do any of these things the way that my grandmother would have done them, but that was probably what he meant.

I think that it made my grandfather’s heart hurt more, that other woman doing those daily things in the house that he had shared with my grandmother for all those days and for all those years. My mother tried to hire another woman to help out, but my grandfather wouldn’t even let her come into the house. The woman said that he wouldn’t get up to come to the front door. She said that at first she thought that he was hurt, but that when she cupped her hands around the sides of her eyes and looked hard through the window that he was just sitting there in his chair looking at what looked like an old picture album. My grandfather was hurt, but none of us could get inside of him — not the doctor, not the pictures, not his sister or daughter or any of his grandchildren — to make it stop.

My grandfather couldn’t keep himself enough alive then. He needed the oxygen tanks filled up and changed. He needed the food that other people made. My mother tried to help him when he would let her. She worked fulltime and also had her own house to keep up, but she would go over to his house every night after work after my grandmother had died. She would pick up a few things, make sure that my grandfather had something to eat, make more food for him to warm up, and make sure that there was enough oxygen for him inside his oxygen tank. My grandfather didn’t want my mother doing these things for him either, but she had keys to his house and could let herself in.

This wasn’t just that my grandfather didn’t want other people doing these things for him. I think that he knew that he was going to die soon too. He didn’t think that he needed to keep the house clean anymore. He didn’t think that he was going to be alive long enough for it to get too dirty. He didn’t think that he needed to do the dishes anymore either. My grandmother and he had accumulated so many glasses and bowls and plates and so much silverware over the years that they had been married that he thought that it would be weeks before he didn’t have something clean to eat with or on.

My grandfather also wouldn’t buy any new clothes for himself. He put cardboard inside his shoes to cover up the holes in the soles of them and he wore two pairs of socks so that the holes in his socks didn’t show through either. There were places in the shoulders and the elbows of his dress shirts that had worn so thin that you could see his skin through the weave of the cloth. The shirt cuffs and the shirt collars were frayed. The cuffs of his suit jackets were frayed too and some of the pockets were missing or torn.

He sewed patches on the elbows on his suit jackets and on the knees of his suit pants. There were holes in them from when he had blacked out and fallen down. But my grandfather wouldn’t wear any of the new clothes that we bought for him. He left them inside their shopping bags with the price tags on them. Somebody returned them to the store after he died.

My Grandfather Oliver believed that living people can communicate with the spirits of people who are dead. He believed that he had witnessed this when he was a child and lived with his Uncle L.P. who was a spiritualist medium.

He said that his Uncle L.P. could do what was called a corner séance. His Uncle L.P. would sit in the corner of a room that had all its curtains pulled closed so that no outside light could get into it. An oil lamp would be placed on the floor in the middle of the room, though the light from it had to be kept low and shaded so that Uncle L.P. didn’t go blind or die.

Uncle L.P. would play a trumpet until his eyes rolled back inside his head. He would stop playing and start to shake. The voices of other people would start to come out of his mouth or the spirits would start to form out of the light from the oil lamp and speak through their own mouths.

The spirits and the voices would say how and when and where they died. They would answer any of these questions about any other dead people and they would take messages or questions back to the spirits of other dead people.

My grandfather said that when his Uncle L.P. would begin to get tired, the voices of the spirits would start to get quiet or their forms would start to dissolve into a weak fog that seemed to slip away down into the floorboards. Uncle L.P. would collapse down into his chair in the corner of the room and his eyes would roll back out of his head. Somebody would put the oil lamp out and Uncle L.P. would stand up. They would open the curtains back up and somebody would bring a glass of buttermilk and a plate of warm biscuits with honey on them into the room so that Uncle L.P. could eat and drink to get his strength and his voice back.