After we made the decision, the atmosphere changed. The waiting changed, after we made the decision. To not connect the tubes that would, in the word of her living will, “serve only to prolong her death”. Now we are waiting for her to not recover, for her to not get well; to die. Everything feels inside out in this new mirror space that we have created with our decision. reading a boko feels weird, because that noise that you hear in the background, which is her breath, that noise might stop. It will stop, but when? What will we be doing? You can’t sit and look angelic for the six or eight hours you sit by her side. You end up talking to your relatives about this or that. Real estate, books. I do crossword puzzles.

What if that noise stops while I’m filling in a three-letter word for “table scrap”? What if we don’t notice? The inevitable intrusion of the banal into a scene which all my roadmaps of romantic fiction tells me should be laden with emotion fills me with dread, at times. We have entered an area that is for me, unexplored. And searching analogous circumstances for guidelines on what to do or how to behave is fruitless. I think I've watched Zorba once too often.

When your mind is saturated by something, it can begin to leak, and then your inner predilections become painted on the canvas of the world you perceive. It was like this when I bought a Karman-Ghia. For months my Ghia-dar was turned to eleven. It’s like that with death now. The pope hasn’t helped. The day we decided not to insert the feeding tube, all newspaper headlines read “DEATH IMMANENT”. I see and hear the word everywhere. Stories I randomly read talk about funerals, stories I hear on TV talk about murders. The expressions come from our mouths like flies, unbidden.

The worst is when mamasan shows some small inkling of recovery, and this creases my heart neatly in half, and I think it will tear. When she smiles, I feel like a murderer for a moment, and grateful the next. When the nurses come in to help her I feel like a liar. So I do my crosswords.

I should be grateful, I know. For this time with her, with my family. And in part I am, and later I will be more. I’m grateful that this hasn’t been so fast that we couldn’t say goodbye, nor so long that her illness would make us resentful. I’m grateful that my family is an open group, and honest, and that we know that when we feel like laughing about funerals, even with my grandma, that it’s okay. And I think she would be laughing, too.

When I look at her now, white hair and frail, breathing so fragile, I see everyone but her. I see my dad, and my aunt and uncle. I see my grandpa, even. I see myself. And I’m filled with love. And when I look at everything else now, I see her. I see my grandma, and I’m filled with love.