Blue Bottles

You’ve never liked tomato soup — it was always too acidic to you, almost to the point of being metallic tasting. Grandmama loved it though. You watched as if outside your body as your clumsy eleven year old hand brought a plastic spoonful of it to her mouth, yet missed her lips and sent a line of red dripping down her chin. You all laughed — you, Grandmama, and Mom.

It felt easy to keep your spirits up; although she was basically confined to that hospital bed, blue pill bottles lining her little tray table, her IV inserted into a bulbous purple vein on her hand, your collective energy felt the same as when she was healthy and teaching you the secret to being an expert at word searches. “Find the first letter of that word and look at every letter surrounding it” she told you. Looking back now, you barely knew your great grandma — it was hard getting your mom to visit the same place her mother resided — yet you felt you learned all you needed to know in that last week of her life.

And so while you spent your days with Grandmama — feeding her, watching tv with her, listening to her stories — your father and sister took a cruise to the Bahamas — swam in the pool, ate decadent meals, tanned on the beach.

You got the call while eating a nice spread of fried food at the same Denny’s that Mom had frequented in high school. You had never seen your mother panicked until then — shouting at the waitress to get her the bill, throwing cash at the hostess table when it didn’t come, cursing the name of the entire Denny’s franchise, its founders and their descendants included. You went outside of your body again. By the time you reached the hospital, the priest was already in the room and your grandmother was crying on her sister’s shoulder. Suddenly her room felt empty and cold, her IV pulled out of her hand, the blue bottles still full of pills pushed to the side. You watched yourself unable to muster any tears and thought yourself a sociopath. That was the first time you had seen a dead body, and it was the same body you had fed soup to only a few days before.

The second call came while you and Mom sat in Grandma’s living room.

“Your father apparently encouraged your sister to pick something up on the beach and it turned out to be a blue bottle jellyfish,” Mom said sharply after hanging up the phone.

You saw yourself as if from above as your mom wiped away her tears and started looking up Portuguese man o’ war stings, then called your sibling to give her instructions and encouragement from a thousand miles away.

And finally, hours after you had seen her still full pill bottles, hours after the priest had finished his prayer, hours after they closed her eyelids and covered her with a white sheet, I came back into my own body and started sobbing too, knowing it wasn’t actually for my grandmama, it wasn’t for myself, it was for my mom.