Her knobby wrist

In January last year, my grandmother suddenly lost her balance in the backyard. When I helped her get up, I saw that her hand was limp at an unnatural angle, the skin of the wrist bulging under a suddenly misaligned joint. Although I remained calm and went on autopilot, to this day nothing has yet beaten the acute fear I had felt at the back alleys of my senses as my sister and I rushed her to the nearest hospital.

The thing about Lola was that she was extremely resilient and had a high pain tolerance; she was very adamant about going to hospitals unless the pain was already intolerable. Because of her age and her severe osteoporosis, the bones were too brittle to be corrected, which meant her right wrist would remain dislocated for the rest of her life. This also meant that, although she could still regain some use of her dominant hand eventually, she would need constant assistance for the rest of her life.

At the time, I was the most viable person who could perform this responsibility, so I stayed in her house—my childhood home—for nine months, waking early to fix our beds, making her coffee, taking out the trash on Wednesdays and Saturdays, cutting meat and vegetables for cooking, helping her bathe and get dressed, doing the laundry and dishes, among other tasks. I did not mind. Back then, I was just happy Lola was still alive.

Two months later, Lola died at the age of 87. The week of her passing, she had been confined in the hospital for three days due to a recurrence of pneumonia, which she recovered from by sheer willpower and extreme dislike of hospitals no less. But a heart attack took her the day she was to be discharged and sent home.

I was in Metro Manila at the time, training for a new job, when I got the phone call from my dad. I went back to my home province for a few days, spent time with family, staying up nights for the wake. On the last night before her burial, a small group of us stayed awake until the sun rose. I was sitting on the steps of the quiet funeral reception hall, looking up at the dome of the night sky, trying to identify the stars, the cool 4 a.m. wind running across the field and tugging at my face. There must be something to it because right then my throat hurt and my eyes began to tear up. I hadn’t felt the urge to cry until then.

I pushed it down. I sat there until the last of the stars were taken in by the sunrise. Slow light falling on everything.

At the burial procession, I walked right behind the hearse, carrying a framed portrait of Lola. It was drizzling. We walked to the burial plot where a tarp was set up over rows of chairs for the final eulogy, along with machinery to convey her coffin down into the pit. When it came time to open the casket, we each took turns to say our goodbyes. I was still dry-eyed until it was my turn. Lying supine in her white box, Lola looked to me then like she was merely taking her usual afternoon nap, even with her made-up face and skin still as a sheet.

I said my goodbye quietly. I touched her wrist. All at once, I was brought back to those last sunny months when I lived with her, holding her elbow firmly whenever she needed support to stand up or sit down, or placing a hand on the bone of her hunched back to lead her ahead of me as she shuffled slowly around the house. All the times I would say goodbye to her before heading out, bending down for a “mano” as she asked me what time I’d come back, and knowing without thinking that she would always be there whenever I returned home.

I wouldn’t have cared about any of the conditions: the chores, the dislocated wrist that meant needing constant assistance, the blaring TV, the gossiping about the neighbors, the going home earlier than usual whenever I went out. I would not have cared as long as she was alive.

But that’s all just looking back now.

A couple of days after Christmas that year, I woke up beside my sister at 2 a.m. in Lola’s empty house. At around 4:30 a.m., she would have been awake by then, shuffling to the kitchen, making coffee, looking for biscuits, before sitting on her sofa to watch Mass on TV at 6. There’s none of that when I got up at 5:30 a.m., and yet my mind thinks irrationally that she’s still sleeping in her room, waking later than usual, because my mind couldn’t comprehend the thought of her ever being gone. It was an impossibility.

The heart is such a lonely place, and grief is huge. I miss you forever even though in my bones you were never gone. In me you are alive and still asleep in your room, knobby wrist and all, waking just before sunrise to begin again.

Nic Tapia, 28, is from Batangas province. She is trying to get back to writing.