Anyroads

I Lost My Voice and My Grandfather

My voice came back. My grandfather did too, for a few hours. His tired, 93 year old heart started beating again when the paramedics asked it to, which is, in itself, stunning. He didn’t really come back, though. His body did, but I’m not sure he was in there at all, anymore.

I went by Thursday night on my way home. I had stopped by earlier, but ran out to pick up some things and told him I’d be back around 7. I stood in the elevator on my way up, letting myself stay lost in music for longer than I knew I should have, but he hadn’t looked well earlier and I wanted just a few more moments to stave off the sinking feeling of having to see him suffer with crippling joint pain while I tried to converse with him at three times the normal speaking volume. It makes it harder to have a breezy conversation when you have to yell everything.

I stepped off the elevator, not realizing I had walked into a frenzy until I was well along the front hall, taking off my headphones. Ildikó, the 24-hour caretaker, was running from room to room, instructing me to call my father (though she already had), telling me to go in to see my grandfather because he was in his final moments. I could still hear the unpaused music sounding quietly from my headphones. Had I just walked into this moment? Could I chance not taking it seriously, just because I didn’t want to? I called my father and told him to come. I went to see my grandfather. He looked odd, his eyes were closed, and he wouldn’t wake up.

Ildikó asked if she should call an ambulance, that I should call my father and ask him. Before he even picked up, I told her to yes, of course, call an ambulance. She did. I told my father that she was. I went quickly back into the bedroom – I didn’t want my grandfather to be by himself. The idea of letting him do this alone while I hid in the dining room was repugnant. I think I dug into my purse for a moment, disconnecting my headphones.

His left hand lay by his body and his right further out on the bed. The paramedics had been out a few days before because he’d had trouble breathing, and they had found there was water in his lungs. Now, as he lay there, quiet bubbles swam in his throat, moving gently. Far from grotesque, they were a welcome signal of each breath. I used to sleep over a lot when I was little. At night I’d get to take a bubble bath and play with all the bath toys, my favorite being a wind up green frog that would rotate its arms quickly and swim around. When I got older (seven or eight), I was allowed to be left alone in the tub while my grandparents watched TV and made dinner, and they would have to drag me away from whatever world I had disappeared into with the frog and an empty bottle of shampoo.

I rubbed his arm and his hand. Ildikó came in and rubbed his chest, which helped his breathing for a moment. His hand began turning cold from the fingertips, which had started to turn blue, so I covered them with the sheet. I kept talking to him, telling him in a calm, steady, loud voice that my father was on his way and so were the paramedics,
while my heart beat violently in my chest. I could say that it was trying to make up for each beat he was losing, but that’s just trite. Sometimes when I would sleep over, I would lay awake for hours. That happens when you make an eight-year-old go to bed before ten. The bedroom window faces the main boulevard of Budapest, and every few minutes an ambulance would whizz by. My grandmother spent at least ten, if not twenty years prior to her death talking about when “she wouldn’t be here anymore.” At those late hours when unwanted thoughts creep in, I would watch the streetlights draw shapes in the darkness of the room and think, as an ambulance drove past, that one day one of those cars would stop in front of the house, and it would be terrible and frightening and full of sorrow.

It wasn’t, and I could never have predicted how this moment would really feel. It would have been surreal had my focus not been so intent on staying with what was happening with my grandfather. Ildikó seemed relieved for a chance to get up and open the front door, I think she was scared of being in the room with my grandfather’s soul if it left his body. She had lit a candle for him but then extinguished it out of superstition.

I must have been very nervous with my heart beating so fast, but this was his moment. I wanted to be there with him for it, to make sure he was not alone. A bubble shifted and I waited for the next one to, but it didn’t. I looked at his chest. It was still. I had expected to feel something, for it to be tangible. There was only stillness. I felt a relief in it, a release of tension. His body had not moved at all, and maybe that was what calmed me. He looked odd, but at ease. I can’t put my finger on the oddness. I don’t know what it was. Maybe I had just never seen him asleep, with his face so relaxed.

The paramedics rushed in and I let them take over. I had just texted my father to let him know they had arrived when he walked in with my brother. We stood in the living room, watching, waiting. He had been moved to the floor, onto a blanket or a towel or I don’t know what. I couldn’t see much of him past the cabinet where my grandmother had kept the bed sheets I would sleep on when I stayed over, or the door frame on which my brother’s and my yearly growth was notched with green and white electrical tape. Time became irrelevant the moment the paramedics had arrived. They were working and my father was there, everything else was for another time.

I hugged my dad. He hugged me back so sincerely I felt it in my bones. My brother put his arm around both of us. Dad had spent all afternoon with his father and had just gotten home when he got the call to come back. We sat on the edge of the stow-away-bed/couch I used to sleep over on, which was now in the living room, and watched, waiting. I don’t think I saw my dad blink once, his eyes wide and drowned in nerves. “Oh God.” My brother asked him what was wrong. “They’re trying to re-start his heart.” It struck me that I had known something they didn’t. That my father thought this was just like a few days before, up until this moment. The crazy thing is, the paramedics succeeded. At 93 1⁄2 with a weak heart, my grandfather allowed his body to be brought back to life.

He was studying in France when World War II broke out. So, naturally, he joined the resistance. He never talked about it much, taking for granted a bit that we knew all about the things he experienced. At least, that’s how he brushed it off. Recently my brother tried to get some stories out of him, and all he said was that they had gone up into the hills with rifles to shoot, as if it was the most natural thing he could have been doing. Eventually he ended up in jail, where he survived the rest of the war, then walked back to Hungary. From France. Through the Alps, no less, but with a friend, at least. Go look at a map. Yeah. On foot. And so, even when his body had exhausted itself, it was still game for another round when asked.

We took a cab to meet him at the hospital once they had put him in the ambulance. Few things are more depressing than an old Eastern European hospital complex at night. My brother and I sat together while my father made a phone call out in the hall, swapping stories about what we went through when our other grandparents were dying. Maybe it was still back at the apartment that I told him that I was with this one when he stopped breathing. It was hard, figuring out the difference between the living, breathing person I had known all my life, and the void that had taken his place. I try and try and try and I just cannot grasp what death is, because I cannot grasp what life is. It overwhelms me, and all I can do is try to be present in the moment trying to envelope me at a given time.

We went to see him in the ICU. The nurse on duty was not very optimistic, and I knew that this was whatever chance I had to say goodbye. In the end, all we said to him was goodnight. We weren’t sure if he could hear us, but in case he could, we wanted him to feel like things would be all right. In retrospect, I felt he left when I saw him go, and that the person in the ICU was an abandoned shell with life pumped into him by force. His death felt natural, peaceful, final, and his revival felt violent. We were selfishly keeping him here with force.

Friday morning my dad went in to see him. Several doctors told him that his father had suffered too much brain damage while his circulation stopped, and that he wouldn’t wake up again. He had suffered a massive heart attack and could not live without life support. They, my dad, and the whole family felt that the humane thing to do was to let my grandfather go. So we did.

For me, he died on Thursday night. We caught the worst of it, all he felt was that he fell asleep. He slept his way out of life in his bed, next to where my grandmother had done the same a little over five years previous, the night before their 66th wedding anniversary. He went to bed after seeing his family for a few days, the oldest member of our family, alone with me, the youngest.

Today we began to pack up his apartment. I took photos of every mental image I didn’t need to capture to remember. For the first time, I was free to poke into cabinets and touch fragile things. Melancholy and difficult as this all is, it is relentlessly imbued with a sense of calm, relief, and contentment. He suffered no pain or fear, he did not have to go it alone, and he was well taken care of. It was simply time. My dad and I have been talking a lot these past few days, understanding and helping each other in a way few friends could.

As per his request, my grandfather will be cremated and his ashes, along with my grandmother’s, will be spread together. This summer my family and I will travel out to the mountains where they used to love hiking, and will spread them somewhere beautiful where they were always free and happy.