Yaa Gyasi - Transcendent Kingdom

“No, sweetie,” Mrs. Bell said. “You can’t die from sleeping.”

I don’t know why I put my faith in her.

—

Nana sweat so much that his shirts were drenched through mere minutes after he put them on. This was after my mother cleaned out his light fixture, throwing away the last of the prescription pills that he had squirreled away. He had to keep a trash can nearby at all times because he was constantly vomiting. He was constantly shaking. He shit himself more than once. He looked like walking, breathing misery, and I was more scared for him then, sick in his sobriety, than I had been when he was high.

My mother wasn’t scared at all. She was a caregiver by profession, and she did what she had always done when a patient was in distress. She would hoist Nana up, lifting him by the armpits, and lower him into the bathtub. She always closed the door, but I could hear them. Him, embarrassed and angry; her, down-to-business. She washed him the way she had when he was a child, the way I knew she must have washed Mr. Thomas, Mrs. Reynolds, Mrs. Palmer, and everyone else in between.

“Lift your leg,” I’d hear her command, and then softer, gentler, “Ebeyeyie.” It will be all right.

There must be some Oedipal shame about lying in the bathtub at sixteen, crying as your mother washes the shit and vomit and sweat off your body. I would avoid Nana for several hours after one of these cleanings, because I knew that somehow my being witness made him feel all the worse. He’d skulk off to his room and hide there until the entire event had to be repeated.

But if I saw my mother in the moments after she’d cleaned her firstborn child, I would go stand by her, be buoyed by her and this wellspring of strength she seemed so capable of drawing from. She never had even the faintest hint of shame. She would see me, my worry and fear and embarrassment and anger, and she would say, “There will come a time when you will need someone to wipe your ass for you,” and that would be that.

—

My mother was accustomed to sickness. She knew what it meant to be close to death, to be around it. She knew that there was a sound to it, that raspy, gurgling noise that comes out and up from whatever part of the body where death hides, lurking, waiting its turn, waiting for life to tag out.

She was with Mrs. Palmer in her final hours. Like my mother, Mrs. Palmer had been a pious, churchgoing woman, and she’d requested that my mother be at her bedside to read her Scripture before she went on to receive her reward.

“This is what death sounds like,” my mother said, and she imitated that crackling noise. “You shouldn’t be afraid of it, but you should know it. You should know it when you hear it, because it is the last sound and we all make it.”

Mrs. Palmer had been given morphine to ease her pain. She had smoked all her life, even in that final week, and her lungs had become ornamental. Instead of an exhale there was collapse, and every inhale was a whisper. Morphine didn’t reshape her lungs into the air-filled sponges they were meant to be, but it offered a distraction, telling the brain, “Instead of air, I can give you a kind of freedom from need.”

“That’s what drugs are for,” my mother lectured Nana and me the first night she returned home from Mrs. Palmer’s bedside. “To ease pain.”

Nana rolled his eyes and stomped off, and my mother sighed a heavy sigh.

I was afraid of death and of pain. I was afraid of old people. When my mother came home from Mrs. Palmer’s house, I wouldn’t go near her until after she had taken a shower, washed off whatever it was I worried was clinging to her skin. When she smelled like my mother again, I would go to her, sit beside her and listen to her talk about Mrs. Palmer’s decline as though I were gathering before a campfire waiting for the woman holding a flashlight to her face to tell ghost stories.

Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. My mother would read me the Scriptures that she had read to Mrs. Palmer, and this one in particular always stood out. To this day, it brings tears to my eyes. You are not alone, it says, and that is a comfort, not to the dying, but to those of us who are terrified of being left behind.

Because really, it wasn’t Mrs. Palmer’s death that I was afraid of; that wasn’t the reason my mother had started trying to teach us about the sound and the relief of pain. I was scared for Nana. Scared of Nana and the death rattle that none of us wanted to acknowledge we were listening for. I have seen people who suffer from addiction and the family and friends who love them in various places and at various points in my life. I’ve seen them sitting on stoops and on park benches. I’ve been with them in the lobbies of rehab centers. And the thing that always strikes me is how there is always someone in the room who is listening for the sound, waiting for the arrival of that rasping rattle, knowing that it will come. Eventually, it will come. The Scriptures my mother read were as much for us as they were for Mrs. Palmer. My mother and I wanted blessed assurance because Nana couldn’t offer us assurances of any kind.

—

I don’t know how she did it, but my mother convinced Nana to accompany us to the First Assemblies one Sunday. He was still detoxing, too weak to protest. The three of us walked into the sanctuary, but we didn’t take our regular seats. We sat in the back with Nana at the aisle so that he could get up and head to the bathroom if he needed to. He looked better than he had in days. I knew this because I couldn’t stop looking at him.

“Jesus, Gifty,” he’d say whenever he caught me staring at him for those long stretches, drinking him in. It was like my gaze hurt him, which should have been enough to get me to leave him alone, but I couldn’t make myself look away. I felt like I was watching some major natural event—newly hatched sea turtles heading toward the lip of the ocean, bears coming out of hibernation. I was waiting for Nana to emerge, new, reborn.

In the church I grew up in, people cared about rebirth. For months on end, all across the South, all over the world, revival tents are erected. Preachers stand at pulpits promising people that they can rise from the ashes of their lives. “Revival fire fall,” I used to sing along with the choir, jubilantly asking that God raze everything to the ground. I stole glances at Nana at the end of our pew, and I thought, Surely the fire has fallen?

“Nana?” Ryan Green said as he entered the sanctuary. He clapped Nana on the shoulder, and Nana shrank from his touch. “When are you getting back out on the court?” he asked. “I mean, it’s great to see you in church and everything, but church ain’t where we need you.” He laughed to himself.

“I’ll be back soon,” Nana said. “My ankle’s healing up.”

Ryan looked at him skeptically. “Like I said, we’re getting killed without you. Prayer ain’t helping the guys we got out there playing now. I’d be happy to help you out if there’s anything you need in order to get you back on the court.”

My mother shot Ryan a killing look. “You don’t talk to my son,” she said.

“Hey, I’m sorry, Mrs.—”

“Get away from us,” she said, so loud this time that a few people in the pew in front of us turned.

“I didn’t mean any disrespect, ma’am,” Ryan said, amused.

When he left, Nana leaned against the edge of the pew. My mother put her hand on his shoulder, and he shrugged it away.