Goodbye to Grandma

Usually, Grandma’s house smells like lavender and freshly baked bread, but today it smells like death.

It hangs in the air, like a dark cloud brooding for a storm. Mother breathes it in with her deep inhales, fighting back the tears – she was old, she lived a long and happy life - while I silently hope she doesn’t keel over too.

I’m glad nobody has mentioned it – the smell.

Perhaps they haven’t noticed. Too busy doing the things people do when someone dies. Silly things. Things to take your mind off the very serious thing happening around you.

I busy myself folding laundry no one has any use for anymore. Embroidered handkerchiefs with initials no longer relevant, dresses that will be kept in a box in the back of a wardrobe for a year or two before being donated with a sigh and a twinge of sadness.

Uncle Rodger puts a record on. Grandma’s favourite song. The lyrics make him cry. Mother turns it off.

Great Aunt Greta tries to start a round of chequers, but no one knows how to play chequers anymore.

Aunt Maude sits statue still in the chair that creaks in the corner.

No one sits in grandma’s armchair.

Aunt Maude hisses at the children like some Greek myth ready to turn them into stone the second they touch Granny’s prized porcelain doll collection. It’s temping – with their silk dresses and buttoned patent shoes. Beneath bonnets, their hair coils like snakes in perfect spirals. I want to pull on them like springs and watch them bounce back as if I had never done it.

Father though, is a pillar of practicality on the phone to the nurses. They’ll be here by 1pm he assures us, as if they will magically make it all better. We only have to hold on until lunch.

Will there be any lunch?

I certainly have no appetite to eat.

The children will be hungry though.

Children are always hungry.

Everyone thinks Aunt Maude should take them home.

But no one tells her that.

Someone knocks on the open front door. Father stirs from the paperwork he’s found, but it’s not the nurses. It’s Pat from next door. So sorry to hear the news. How horrible for you all. What a tragedy, she says, as if Grandma wasn’t eighty seven with severe arthritis but a twenty something with her whole life ahead of her. Like me.

Pat doesn’t mention the smell.

She sits at the fold out table and distracts father from the paperwork. Bank statements and bills.

A child has spilled their drink on Grandma’s faux Persian rug she got on sale at the market thirty years ago. It covers the lime shag carpet Grandad always promised to replace one day. But he died twenty years back and Aunt Maude looks panicked.

Her dilemma – leave the dolls unguarded to look for a cloth or let the orange squash sink in to the fraying fibres.

I pull a cloth from the washing basket and rescue her, dabbing the spill on my hands and knees. She looks relieved but doesn’t say thank you. I wonder if she has forgotten how to speak. Grief does funny things to people. They say that.

Uncle Rodger has got into the liquor cabinet. He pours out a sherry and makes a toast to Grandma, except no one else has a glass. She was the best of women. A real firecracker. We mutter cheers and watch him neck it back.

The nurses will be here by 1pm, father reminds us.

I wonder if we can leave then.

I can’t cope with the smell.

How about chess? Great Aunt Greta clearly thinks it’s Christmas, and no one plays with her then either.

Mother pulls her shoulders back, trying to take her new role as head of the family seriously. Mum wouldn’t have wanted us moping about.

But Grandma wouldn’t have played chess either. Her hands curled in on themselves like dead leaves and her eyesight had long gone. She couldn’t even watch her shows anymore. Even with the TV blaring she couldn’t catch the words.

She was miserable.

It’s nearly 1pm. My father has turned into the talking clock.

The nurses will be here soon.

The smell is choking me. I wonder how no one has mentioned it. I can’t bare it.

I go out into the garden, breathing in the sticky summer air.

A lawn mower hums three gardens down. The smell of death is replaced by barbecue smoke, but somehow it’s worse, like the thought of the world carrying on while my Grandmother lay stiff in her bed was more confronting. Free as the birds above, eating burgers and probably laughing, making plans. But not for a funeral.

I go back inside.

The bottle of sherry is half empty and Uncle Rodger is a mess, crying into the freshly folded handkerchiefs.

Mother consoles him with one of her new catchphrases – she lived a long and happy life.

Great Aunt Greta is sleeping in a chair.

Pat is attempting to make tea, but she has no idea where the mugs are kept.

Father is pacing because it’s now two minutes past one.

Aunt Maude has got the hint and is rounding up the hungry children but one’s lost a shoe and the other needs a wee. Desperately.

But can you use a dead woman’s toilet?

Wait until we get home.

They said they’d be here by 1pm.

Who knows where the tea bags are?

Mum loved tea.

She lived a long and happy life.

I really, really need a wee.

Just wait until we get home.

I’m hungry. Can I have a biscuit?

Who takes sugar?

Mum used to take sugar.

Yes, but she lived a long and happy life.

They defiantly said 1pm.

I’m going to pee myself, mummy!

I should call them back.

Does anyone smell almonds? Pat asks.

I freeze.

I knew someone would mention the smell.

I thought it was tasteless and odourless, but apparently that’s arsenic, not cyanide.