Escaping the Fishbowl

Tickle Monster

I plopped the heavy tray down on the tables so hard the Panera sandwiches jumped. I began to turn around and then froze realizing what would be behind that flimsy divider. I could not stand it; I was not ready to see my grandfather anywhere besides his rocking chair in Michigan. I bolted, back through the kitchenette, past the storage closet, and to the parking lot. A cold breeze tussled the air and the generators blocked out any sound. I sank down the bricks to the ground and took a breath that came out as a half hiccup, my teeth brushing my bottom lip. The funeral director walked by and I panicked, not wanting to explain my situation. I had already heard to many pathetic condolences. He had probably seen this before and wisely ignored me. I struggled to my feet before any one else could come out. My eyes would remain abnormally puffy and red for the rest of the day.

I took another hiccup of a breath and stepped into the funeral parlor. I walked over to a tapestry and stared at it so intently you’d think I ‘d be counting the stitches. Finally, I tore my eyes away and focused them to the coffin at the end of the room. I walked over. When a person is out of things to say to the family they will often comment on how natural the person looks. Grandpa didn’t look natural. He was a mirror image of the way they’d done my grandpa Culver. A moth creased in a frown on a pasty white face. When my grandpa Culver had died I had tried to memorize that face but today I would not waste my memory that was not the face grandpa Reichal would wear in my memory. I wanted to reach down and pull his mouth into a smile as it always had been.

The announcement had come two days ago. I had come home, mind wandering, blabbering excitedly about school. It had seemed so strange that mom was leaning against the counter while I ate my snack; she was typically always caught up in something or another.

“Fiona,” Mom took a shuddering breath and I was immediately alert by my mom’s tone, “Grandpa, this morning…”

“No!” I thought.

Mom caught me in her arms and I cried numbly into her shoulder. Grandpa had always had Parkinson but to me that simply meant his 71/2 fingers (1/2 lost to the saw) vibrated slightly, but suddenly in the past year it had come to mean so much more. Last Christmas. My mom and aunt had worked so hard to replicate the Christmases they’d spent in Michigan as kids fearing for the worst. The worst? The thought had scared me then, pecking at me while I ignored it, pretending I’d never thought of it. The worst? Now it had slapped me to the ground.

I’m not sure how long we stayed in that position, the sink biting into my side, keeping me alert. Fifteen minutes and mom’s sweater was soaked. I starred hard at the Christmas gift I had made for mom back in preschool, a Popsicle stick snowflake with tiny pictures at each point. To a normal viewer the pictures would look like marker ink in a variety of colors having bled horizontally along the ridges of the wood. I saw an apple, a Ferris wheel, and mom and I in floats in Michigan. In my mind the floats came alive, the laughing, water lapping the side of the boat and Grandpa, whose smile is too wide to fit on his face, lifts me onto his lap in the captain’s seat. “Watch out for the yellow line,” is his only advice.

Grandpa was moved to a nursing home in the spring. Gwen began to fold paper cranes and we strung them in his window, but we never got to one thousand. If grandpa was responsive we could talk to him and drive him around town. But each time we said good-by we said it knowing it could be our last. The smell of his Benyol was over powering as I leaned over to give him a hug. He kissed my fingers for the last time. It was his eighty fifth birthday.

My uncle walked over to the coffin. A man I’d always seen as so strong had tears in his eyes as he leaned over to say goodbye to his father.

When the service begins my mom gets up to say something and she barely can she is crying. I walk up I try not to cry. Instead I share a memory in which I’m laughing in wheezing, gasping breaths as I did when I was five and the Tickle Monster (Grandpa) caught me. Grandpa was ready when Gwen or I got too close to his chair. He would reach out and snag us sending what ever we were holding flying into the air. But we never avoided that chair in fact; we went out of our way to strut past giggling our heads off. We were happy only when we were shrieking with laughter. I decide to remember Grandpa as the caring one who spent the night in the car when he found Gwen and I sleeping in a tent we’d built under his chair.