Grandmother's Sad Life

Personal Narrative- Grandmother's Sad Life

My grandmother died while squatting over a toilet. People say she deserved it. They say the way of her death shows what a sinful life she led. God punished her and killed her in midst her own wastes. When they wrapped her body in a yellow sheet, I did not cry. They laid her in the living room and her white hair spilled like milk onto the red carpet. They say she was very light, wrapped in that yellow sheet. Her soul had left her body and taken all her sinful heaviness away. I could see hints of her withered naked body under that sheet. She was washed clean by her own death, and like a piece of paper that is wetted and left out to dry, I thought she would soon crumble. I did not cry when I looked at the blue hollowness underneath her eyes, or the red puffiness of her cheeks when the rest of her body was a leathery yellow. I did not cry as I prayed over her body in respect. They took her away in an dilapidated old ambulance. Nothing in her life was ever stable.

Maybe that’s why I did not cry. I wanted to be the one thing she could count upon as stable. I wanted her withered body under that sheet to know that I was her one success. I wanted to thank her and say yes, yes grandmother, yes; I am strong enough. I will survive.

There was a girl who used to wake up before dawn and run to her favorite hilltop and flap her arms like a crazy bird at the rising sun. She always wanted to fly. She would scream and flap arms and send low clouds skittering around her brown ankles like snakes slipping on wet mud. Her silhouette is pinned before a rising golden orb forever. She screams and flaps her arms into eternity.

They say her father favored her since she was the youngest. She was allowed...

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...like a baby at her funeral. She has made him weak with her fear of losing him.

My grandmother died 5 years ago, and tomorrow I am getting married to the man I love. I am walking up a steep hill and there are silver hints of lightening where the hilltop breaks into the sky. I know this is the greatest purpose of my life.

I hurl a small black stone into blueness. There is lightness in my open palm. I open my arms up to my shoulders and feel the wind, hot with sparks of lightening, sweep up my face. I wonder what happened to my grandmother’s one true love. Where is he? Although there is a strong temptation, I resist flapping my arms. Let all the people looking up at my silhouette mistake me for a soaring eagle, soaring above a million more storms to come. The ghost of a flightless bird takes the first drop of rain into her mouth and soars. Soars; just like that.