The Work Gets Done

“I…CAN’T…BREATHE!”

She tells me, frantic, frail, and wheezing. I assume it’s because I don’t know how in the hell the oxygen regulator works. But I take her nasal tube out and test the flow on my fingers. AC on blast. And that’s when I knew Grandma Jo was real short on time. We called for an ambulance, maybe it should have been a flight-for-life direct to Loveland. But severity is always discovered in stages and generally too late. A volunteer ambulance out of the small burg of Rock River came on. It only had forty-five miles of dirt road to get to us.

On a ranch, the work gets done. Soviet invasion. Inland hurricane. Another democrat getting elected president. Doesn’t matter. The Work. Gets. Done. All of this was an abstract thought to me until my grandmother couldn’t breathe anymore. My whole living memory she had a barking cough that was painful to hear. Lupus. And when a few years prior she had offered to man a tractor for haying, my grandpa responded, “No, you’re too old and crotchety.” His loving way of telling his bride of forty-five hard years that the hay dust would put her in an early grave.

I gathered her up in her cotton nightgown. Carried her down the heavy steel steps to the yard. An odd thing carrying your grandmother like a small child. I felt strong and in charge. And real guilty for how pleased I was at playing the hero. The ambulance came down the hill leading a billowing entourage of rising dust. I handed her off with care and the volunteers spirited her away, trying to force air through lungs damn near given up to the struggle of life.

Grandpa Donny and I watched the ambulance go. I turned to get into the “town truck,” the one vehicle he had with tags from this century, when he stopped me. “Let’s maybe get a few hours of mowin’ done on the school section and then we’ll head in.” I wish I could say I was completely shocked by this. But it was no idle brag when I said the work ALWAYS got done. Even when the matriarch of MJ Ranches was fighting for her life in the back of a hand-me-down ambulance. “No,” I said, “Grandpa, this is real serious. We need to go, now.”

I give him credit for the questioning inflection in his voice when he said we should mow first. It was a question, not a command. And Donny Robbins did not run a democracy and rarely sought suggestions on how things should be done or on what timetable. The man didn’t believe in days off or retiring. Whenever I struggled to rise in the morning, he reminded me that “only whores make a living in bed.” Well, I’ll be damned if there hasn’t been a single morning on the ranch that I didn’t envy sex workers. “We gotta go,” I said. It was probably the first time I ever told the old man no and he listened. Maybe he listened because the last two years away in Southwest Asia working in the life-and-death industry stretched my twenty-two years farther than most. Or maybe I was just right, and he knew it.

So we went. Not speeding too much. We aren’t doctors and don’t need to add to the casualty roster with a roll-over on the Fetterman. Looking over at my grandpa I saw the genuine concern set in his jaw. It wasn’t that falling a day behind haying was more important than his partner. It was that ninety miles away in the Laramie intensive care unit his future was waiting for him. And it wasn’t something he was ready to face.

Waiting for us at the ICU were other family members. My aunt, the heir apparent, the realistic and rational one, the one best trained to handle grief after finding her husband dead on the road from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the temple. And my mother, the closest person to my grandmother. My mother who used to cry hysterically whenever a pet died. The one who actually put blankets around a dying steer to ease its suffering. We all waited and wondered. Asked questions to the staff, spoke of frivolous things. I told a joke. Not dirty. But apparently with too much levity for the situation.

Grandma Jo was semi-conscious. Trying to speak through her oxygen mask that fogged and dissipated rapidly as she tried to pull in more air. I tried to put on a show she would like, or I would like, so I didn’t have to focus on what was happening to her. Her desperate attempts to communicate were drifting into raving. But she mustered the will to say loudly enough for all to hear… “Don’t worry about me… just get the hay put up!”

Again, I wish I could say that I was surprised. But the only contribution my grandmother could make from that hospital bed to the cyclical operation of our ranch was to tell everyone to go back to work. And that’s what Grandpa Donny and I did. We drove back out. We mowed the school section. The proud ranch family went back to work, minus my mother, who never left my grandmother’s side for long.

She was moved to Cheyenne Regional. Now unconscious and intubated. The doctor told us what should happen next. We decided as a family. The tube would come out. Nature would do what it does. But the doctor was running late and we had to wait. Nothing worse than that. My grandmother was just a sack of bones.

The tube came out. We all prepared for the death gasps and the flowers and obituary typed on the ranch computer. It took longer than I thought it would take. I imagined a sigh and shallow wheeze and a dramatic flat line on the monitor, though at this stage I don’t recall she was even hooked to one.

But the shallow breathing grew deeper and more confident. Her eyelids fluttered open. A hoarse whisper confirmed she was more than breathing. She was alive and she was Jo. The Jo that got up at four in the morning EVERY morning to read the bible for an hour before preparing my grandfather’s breakfast. Her soul was unbreakable within that broken body and my capricious mind felt fearful of powers beyond this realm. It wasn’t a miracle. She wasn’t healed. She just couldn’t, wouldn’t die until the command came. It wasn’t for us or the doctors to decide.

She lingered another month. But she never saw home again.

But the goddammed hay got put up.

The Work. Gets. Done.