I was buying a bed as my grandmother lay dying. A bed and matching nightstands, for Christ’s sake, off of Facebook. The passage of time alters memories, but I remember securing the transaction only a moment before I sensed a change in the rhythm of her breathing — the change that signaled her last breath was approaching.

My grandmother’s individual room in the nursing home (a temporary stay for rehab from a broken hip, the last in a long line of medical issues in her later years) was full of family: my mom and two of her siblings, my aunt by marriage, my oldest son, three of my cousins, and three of their kids. The single-bed room was overheated and cramped, but we were used to large, hot family gatherings, and in recent years ones held in medical care facilities.

It’s weird and somewhat shameful to admit that I was buying a bed at that moment. But, I wasn’t the only one distracted by the immediate entertainment that technology affords; we were all on our phones. The time for chatting, and whatever merriment families find during the death of an elder, had passed. We were simply waiting — waiting for her to travel between the Beginning of the End and the End of the End. What else do you do when you don’t know how long it takes to travel between the point when her breathing slows and her skin begins to mottle, the blood in her veins ceasing to nourish the most distant extremities, and the time when she makes her final exhalation?

I noticed the change before the others. I think it was a catch in her breath, a change in the incessant rhythm of deep sucking in and forceful exhale out — or was it something else, something that I felt more than sensed? I looked up from my phone and across the small room to where my grandma lay dying, my brain rushing to put together the meaning of the change that signaled my attention.

“Mom,” I said. My mother startled slightly, glanced at me, and then back at Gram. “Her breathing has changed.”

Everyone was attentive now, our phones cast aside or tucked into pockets. We crowded around her bed, trying to find a space to stand close, to touch her. My heart was racing with fear or anticipation or simply the effort of trying to consciously understand the situation. My brain kept nudging me with the memory of the first time she lay dying, three years prior.

Another medical issue had landed her in the hospital and Gram was sure she was dying. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with her — they told us that if she thought she was dying, then she must be. Struggling to breathe, she lay there with a big black respirator suctioned to her face, forcing oxygen into her blood. I held her hand and together we sang some of her favorite church songs. The family members that were there called their spouse, sibling, or child and prepared them.

“Start driving now,” we said. “She’s dying.”

Hours later when the far-flung had arrived, speeding through their ten-hour drive, she decided she wasn’t dying after all. She rallied. Her condition improved. By the end of the day she was sitting up in bed, laughing, and holding new great grandchildren. We were having a raucous party in the hospital room at the end of the hall, the room they gave to her because it was secluded, perfect for peacefully passing away. When it became a party room, and because there were so many of us, the nurses gave us a lounge across the hall to use for the littlest ones to watch TV. They brought us cookies and lemonade.

Over the years we would reminisce like this: “Remember the time grandma didn’t die?” In the nursing home, standing around her with my heart racing, I knew we would have to tell the other story too: “Remember the time when she did?”

On the day we got the call we didn’t want to admit we had been waiting for, the one where they say: “Come now. They think it could be soon,” several of us were close by. We arrived. And later more family members came and we squeezed in. There was no party, there was no miraculous revival, but she didn’t just let go. Some speculated she was waiting for my cousin who was riding hard on her Harley to get back from a trip.

The nurses couldn’t tell us how long it would be, but they were sure her death was imminent. More family arrived and we talked until the time for talking had passed. And then we played on our phones. Or bought a bed.
When we stood at her bedside, laying our hands on her as she took her last breaths, we told her she was love. Almost too late, my brain forced my mouth to work and I suggested we sing her out of the world — for real this time. As we started The Old Rugged Cross, she exhaled one final time and left this world.

There was a pause — a moment, a second or two, of quiet and stillness — when we all knew, in our heads, that she was gone — then our hearts, that always take longer, accepted it. And then we cried together.