I was told my grandmother had died peacefully in her sleep until I was 10. It was then that my cancer-stricken aunt let slip, casually if bitterly, that she hoped she didn’t have to suffer like my grandmother had. I asked my mother about it that night, but she told me nothing, and dismissed my aunt’s comments as a joke. They weren’t close, and I didn’t see her again for a long time to ask her about it. It hadn’t seemed much like a joke to me, but I accepted it. My aunt’s cancer went into remission. She is 68 now, and still alive in some Floridian retirement community. We haven’t spoken in years.
I inherited my grandparents’ house after my grandfather died eight years ago. We had been very close, but nonetheless when he left me the house my mother and aunt were both angry, having expected to inherit the place themselves. But they had both wanted to sell it, not to keep it as I did, and my grandfather had known that. And when the house did come to me, my mother indeed pleaded with me to sell it as quickly as possible, but I didn’t listen. I had not loved the house, but my grandfather had, and he had trusted me with it.
It was not difficult to clear the place out. My grandfather had lived an austere life, and the little he had owned was useful to me- the refrigerator, the large TV, the top-of-the-line washing machine- so I kept them, along with the few personal artifacts he’d kept, nearly all pictures of my grandmother. I didn’t touch the attic for nearly a year of living there. I’d looked in once, and found it to be empty except for a single small, rather shabby bedside table.
When I finally did go there, it was not curiosity that brought me. Bats had taken residence there, and I intended to remove them. But when I got there, I saw that the drawer of the table was open, and I was sure it had been closed and locked when I had last been there. There were pages and pages of loose leaf paper inside, all written unmistakably by my grandmother, and all written on a different day. Every day. And all in the last year of her life.
I didn’t get very much from reading them. My mother told me that my grandmother had been showing signs of dementia in the end, but the family had paid it little attention as her cancer had by that stage advanced to the point she had mere months to live. And indeed, these little scraps of paper seemed a mix of the mundane and the demented. She swore she was being watched, followed, and tormented by some unseen creature. At the same time, she spoke of the pain of her disease, and lamented how unclear her mind was because of the medication. It was sad and pitiful, but not really enlightening. There was nothing but pain and delusion, no shades of the vibrant, funny woman my mother and aunt had described from when they were young.
I placed the papers in the table in a stack and left the room, not closing the drawer as I left. I thought my mother might want the letters, sad as they were. I went back to the room to get them the next day. There was a new note to the side of the stack I had made. It was from June 11, 1991. Two years and two months before my birth. Eight days before her death. And, I could have sworn, a day later than the last note the previous day. I must have missed it, I told myself, as I read the note, which spoke first of voices telling her horrible things, then of them falling into an even worse silence. Next, she spoke of vivid dreams of being by herself in a vast empty space for what felt like an eternity. I put it back in the drawer, on the pile, and went back downstairs. I did not give them to my mother. I did not bring them down for myself. But still, I went back the next day, and the day after, and the day after that.
More appeared, and all the same as the first in content, if not in tone. She grew more hysterical towards the end. Whether the visions had worsened or she was simply sensing the end of her life, I do not know. I stopped sleeping. I set up a camera to find who was placing the letters there, but when I watched the video the new piece of paper, to the left of the neat stack of the others, was there from the very beginning, though I could have sworn it was not. I thought- and still think, at times- that I had lost my mind, just as my grandmother had done.
The last day of her life, June 19, I read her note, the contents of which I will not reveal for the sake of my grandmother’s dignity and my own sanity. I threw it away for the first time. I did not want my mother to find this, whether my grandmother had written it or I myself had in some deluded state. Each possibility would be devastating to her. I slept that night, though whether from relief at the end of the saga or merely from exhaustion I do not know. I went to the attic the next day hoping to find the diary completed, as I had left it the night before. Instead there was, as always, a new page, in her handwriting but dated the day after her death. It read simply, “Now I am alone.”
Submitted July 08, 2015 at 10:45AM by zellfire http://ift.tt/1HLPvcn nosleep
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