My wife’s grandmother died in September of 2004, in her bed, at the end of a long stretch of not being able to eat.
There was a tumor that had closed off her ability to swallow. So she starved, slowly, over days, in her early 80s. Her husband had gone a few years before her and I’ve always believed she was ready to go find him.
When it happened her children were in the room — my mother-in-law, her sisters and brothers. My wife and I weren’t. We’d said our goodbye earlier and gotten to tell her we loved her, which is a thing I’m still grateful we did while she could hear it.
I was twenty-six. We’d been married five years.
Then the men came with the stretcher and couldn’t get it into the bedroom.
I don’t remember the exact geometry of it — a door, a hallway, the way the bed sat. What I remember is standing there while everybody looked at everybody else, and it becoming clear that somebody was going to have to carry her out to where the stretcher could reach.
My mother-in-law asked me.
There’s not much I wouldn’t do for that my mother-in-law. I love her. But I want to be honest about the request, because it was a hard thing to ask, and she asked it anyway, of a twenty-six-year-old who’d been in the family five years. I was ok with it. My wife had a much harder time.
One of my wife’s cousins came in to help. He got a foot, more or less. That isn’t a complaint — I understand it completely and I don’t think he could have done more than he did.
So I picked her up off the bed.
She was not light.
I think people expect that part to go the other way. She’d lost a great deal and she weighed far less than she once had, but she had never been a small woman and she was not a feather in my arms. It took something.
I wasn’t worried about dropping her. I just picked her up and carried her out of the bedroom and into the living room and laid her down on the stretcher. Thirty feet, maybe. Ten seconds of work.
My wife was standing in the living room. She watched the whole thing.
So I set Grandma down, and then I went and put my arms around my wife and told her it was okay.
For her it was awful. I’ve always known that. Her grandmother, her family’s house, and her husband walking through it carrying the body.
For me it was one of the great honors of my life, and I’ve never once been able to explain that to anybody without it sounding strange.
I got to be useful in the one moment where being big and twenty-six was worth something. I’ve spent most of my life being read as more intimidating than I actually am, and here was a room full of people who needed exactly what I’m built like — and I got to lift her carefully, and set her down gently, and step back out of the way.
One of the cousins asked me about it not long ago. Did I remember it.
You don’t forget carrying somebody out. But the part that comes back first isn’t the bedroom or the weight of her. It’s standing in that living room afterward with my arms around my wife.
David Willis 