It was near the end of the car ride when I first realized something was wrong. I suppose my failure to notice it earlier could probably be attributed to the intrinsic nature of travel in our family. It was normal for my mother to seem nervous while we navigated though the crowded airports, and of course both the flight itself and our arrival in Virginia provided more than enough excitement to distract me from her somber mood. I watched with the usual amazement as the world outside our plane disappeared behind the thick, gray clouds of a Vermont winter, and felt the familiar thrill when we arrived in the place where the air always smells of salt and an invisible magic keeps the grass green in the middle of January.
Then, even as we began the long car ride from the airport to my Grandparents, I still did not pick up on any difference between this trip and what seemed like countless others we had made to the small, Virginia townhouse Why should I have? The scenery hadn’t changed; billboards and sand dunes and occasional glimpses of the ocean, accompanied as always by a fresh rush of excitement. The promised destination was the same quaint little house, tame and cheerful in front with a wild jungle of marsh grasses in back. And inside the car things seemed normal enough, with my mother driving in front and my brother looking deceptively angelic as he slept in the seat beside me. I think I spent most of the ride lost in daydreams because I don’t remember what the car looked like, or what any of us were wearing. I do, however, remember that I had a new wristwatch of which I was extremely proud. Its function was purely decorative (at five years old I had yet to master the tricky business of reading analog time) and smiling up at me from the pale, blue band was a radiant Cinderella. I was no doubt busy dancing at my own royal ball when I was suddenly woken from my fantasy, startled not by noise but by the lack of it. We had entered familiar territory, and I could tell from the shopping centers and multitude of florescent signs all competing desperately for my attention, that the ride was almost over. This was Chesapeake Virginia , a real-life fairytale land of brightly colored commercialism and my Grandma’s Southern cooking, but why had I been left to discover our arrival on my own? Where were my mother’s exclamations as we passed landmarks of her childhood? Words like “That’s the school where I met your Dad!” and “See that street there? That’s where you lived before we moved to Vermont!” Never had my mother remained so quiet during our annual journey through her hometown, and the silence was unnerving.
The last few minutes of that drive are some of the longest I can remember. Once I’d noticed the tension in the air, it seemed to thicken with every passing moment. At last we arrived at the familiar street, and I was temporarily relieved to see that the house had at least not been burned to the ground. We pulled into the driveway way where we were met by my father, and went through the usual routine of prying my brother from his car seat while trying to convince him that the real world wasn’t so bad that he needed to start bawling every time he awoke to find himself in it. And yet my parent’s greeting, somber words devoid of the usual “adult” humor that made my mother blush, confirmed that something was still terribly wrong. Of course she had already told me that this trip was going to be different, that we were here because Grandpa was sick. But this was a time when “sick” meant a day spent reading picture books, watching cartoons and being allowed an entire glass of the much-coveted ginger ale. For me the word “terminal” held as little significance as did the word cancer. I hadn’t really wrapped my mind around the idea that something as big as life could have a beginning, let alone an end. So when my mom turned to me to say that I needn’t be afraid if the house seemed a little different inside, I stared at her with incomprehension and a growing sense of dread.
I remember the weather outside that day only by contrast to what we found when we opened the door. The blanket of heat and golden sunlight seemed to insist that nothing could possibly be wrong with the world, but the scene inside my grandparent’s living room quickly dispelled that illusion. It was the smell that hit me first. Gone was the dusty aroma of old books and rotting wood that gave my mother allergies and always filled me with excitement. Instead my nose was greeted with a chemical assault, and my nostrils burned with an overpowering cleanness. The room, I would later learn, had been sterilized to kill germs, but to me it seemed as if all the history, all the life of the place had been killed too. And then there were all of the people. I know it can’t have been more than five or six of them, including my Grandma, but to me it was a crowd of intruders. They all seemed urgently busy, focused on something in the middle of the room, something I could not see.
And then I could. It was a white hospital bed, complete with IV bags and all the other classic horror film props. Looking at it I felt my throat close up, and I reached quickly for my mother’s hand. I did not have to ask who was in the bed. Slowly my five year old brain was beginning to make connections, and to distinguish between tween the kind of sick that made your throat sore and the kind that happened in the movies that always made my mom cry. I felt a sudden, desperate need to be somewhere, anywhere else, and I tugged on my mother’s fingers, hoping she would understand. Instead I heard her exchange words with other adults above my head, and then she led me closer to the middle of my waking nightmare. I tried squeezing my eyes shut but I couldn’t escape the smell, and I knew I wasn’t going to wake up. When I opened them again I saw that I’d been wrong after all, because the man lying in the bed was not my grandpa. Grandpa Nuckols was a laughing man. The corners of his mouth were forever turned up in amusement, his eyes always sparkling with some private joke. He bore no resemblance to the skeletal figure that lay between the white sheets. Those sad, sunken eyes could not have been the same that had so often winked at me when he made fun of my dad. My mother was saying something to me now, telling me to move closer so that the man who was not my grandpa could see me. I refused. Why should he see me? I did not know him, did not want to know him. And I was frightened. She was begging now, saying it would mean so much if I’d just go a little closer. I didn’t go. I think the biggest regrets in life don’t come when years later we realize the error of our ways. It’s the things we regret instantly, maybe even while we’re still doing (or not doing) them, that stay with us forever. At five I may not have known the definition of regret, but I felt it even before we left the room.
It was only a few weeks later when the phone call came. The one that started my mother crying all over again and meant that we’d be heading back to Virginia for the funeral. We’d just been to the doctor’s office and my brother and I each had a balloon, a reward for good behavior. The gift was my mom’s idea, though I wish it had been mine. Grandpa was up in heaven, you see, up in the sky just out of sight. It wasn’t hard to untie the balloon from wrist and I felt a sense of redemption as the string slipped through my fingers. Watching its rapid upward progress I heard my brother ask the question I’m sure all mothers dread having to answer, the one that begins with “Why”.
“Well,” came my mother’s slow reply, “he’d had a good, long life and…” she paused for what seemed like an eternity, “well it was just his time.” Instinctively I looked down at my watch. Cinderella’s once benevolent smile now seemed ironic, even cruel. And as I watched the red balloon disappear behind the clouds, gone to a place I couldn’t see and a grandpa I would never see again, I felt my wrist grow heavy with the weight of a smirking princess, and of two tiny, ticking hands.