Egress
e·gress/noun
- the action of going out of or leaving a place.
My grandmother lay in what would become her deathbed, nodding on and off, as we hit the chapter of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass called ‘Drumtaps.’ I had gotten the book of poetry from a Barnes & Noble years prior for five bucks and it was on sale in hardcover with other classic works that were also part of the public domain.
But she began to wake a bit before I had the chance to turn out her hospital bed light that night (one of many), close the curtains surrounding the bed and sneak out into the night and out of the hospital.
No, she woke up fully.
“Grandma, do you think we should skip parts of this chapter? It’s making you groggy and talks about war too much, I think.”
She nodded, falling back asleep snuggled into the crook of the bed with her pillow.
I skip ahead to ‘Memories of President Lincoln’ before shutting off the light and leaving.
My grandmother, Brena Lee Bowen, died when I was twenty-four on the eve before Valentine’s Day, as she lay in a partial coma, her breath loud and resonate as if to refute the breathing machine she had been taken off of. My family gathered each of us by her side that night as I reached into the hospital bed drawer to pull out Whitman one last time. I finished it that night with the line from page one-hundred thirty-eight, “Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is great as life.”
I know this because I still have the book, now with tattered, watermarked cover.
Throughout the process of Brena’s passing, I knew she was dying. I had the knowledge of what was happening, but not the wisdom. After all the sobbing and hugging of family members beside that bed, I withdrew to the nearest bar a few blocks over and began drinking. I then returned to her home where my sister had been living and noticed the bedroom light on when I pulled in. My sister was up. I came in, went to the room, sat on the edge of the bed, and began sobbing in a way I had never known a human could.
One of the most important moments looking back of that process was the moment my grandmother, one of my best friends, asked me everything I had learned in her lifetime. She literally asked me, “What have you learned from me in your lifetime?”
I replied, “To fight for my place in the world.”
“And?” she asked.
“To always remember what love is,” I said.
“Anything else?”
I said no.
“Don’t ever regret your life, grandson. Never. Remember I said that.”
Steadfast
She woke beside the bed that morning returning to it for years after saying, “I’m tired of you doing this to yourself. Someday, you will be as tired as me.”
Though she loved him more than anyone or just as much as love could give, the kind of giving tree she was all limbs gone and just the stump to sit on with no leaves.
He later woke from the same bed in a dream years later to describe in a way he couldn’t then how cold and alone the world was without her, how people came and go beside the bed, shake hands and make deals over the commodity of the soul and it’s wealth. They barter and steal. They cry, but never laugh until there’s nothing left to give, a waving tide of shaken alfalfa field miles away whispering over and over again her name.
It says, “In your dreams you will remember me and the tree you once knew that stood thirty yards up, some thirty yards away, some thirty years down the road, some thirty people in my bed and in my stead.”