Until the summer my grandmother was dying, my children were the only people I had ever watched sleep. I used to lie beside them at nap time, taking shallow breaths, while I waited for a thumb to fall away from a mouth or for a jaw to drop open: the signal that they had drifted off. I willed them unconscious with all the silent concentration that a white-knuckled passenger in the back row uses to fly a jetliner. Sounds from outside the room seemed magnified then; a distant door slamming or a slightly raised voice threatened to wake them. In the presence of my sleeping grandmother it was altogether different. Even nearby noises—a car starting in the lot outside her window, the phone ringing—seemed curiously muffled. A neighbor down the hall conducted mysterious business in his home office, but his voice sounded as if it were coming from far away. I adjusted the fan toward her bed and covered her legs with the sheet. I watched my grandmother’s breath enter and leave her body and willed it, not to steady into the even metronome that accompanied my children’s dreams, but to stop.

She was dying at home, and home was a shady one-bedroom apartment crowded with books. The shelves in her front room were heavy with story collections from the forties and fifties, the works of Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Adventures of Augie March, and tomes that promised cures for back pain, leg pain, and, though they did not promise but implied it, the indignities of old age.

She kept a handful of favorite books in her bedroom, as well as the latest reading assignment from the literature course she’d taken at the local community college for the last sixteen years. Volumes of contemporary poetry sat next to Portnoy’s Complaint, Dubliners, The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and a long-ago gift from me: An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. My grandmother’s all-time favorite book was Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. It came up so often during discussions of my writing (she liked a lot of my work but I was no Isak Dinesen) that I often teased her by intoning in a nasal imitation of Meryl Streep in the movie version, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” She always laughed.

Early in the summer I had thought to bring my laptop over and work while she slept. When she woke she’d call my name. Sometimes she needed help getting up from the bed into her chair. Sometimes she just wanted to make sure she was not alone. I brought my machine into the back room and showed it to her. She was suspicious of computers. I told her I was working on a novel. She brightened and urged me back to work. She wished me luck.

Luck was just one of the things I needed. I write about the challenges of parenting wild teenage girls, and late-life love, and the dramas of living in a close-knit community. I asked myself who could possibly care about such made-up stories when this flesh-and-blood woman I loved (who had secured her own release from the hospital with the firmly delivered words “I’m not interested in staying safe, I’m interested in staying sane”) had received a terminal diagnosis? Her decline was so swift that each day rendered yesterday’s arrangements obsolete. The nursing student my mother hired to pop in twice a day to help with the washing up became the home health aide to administer baths became the person to sleep on her couch at night became the twenty-four-hour companion who meted out morphine at two in the morning. All within a few days.

I arrived one morning midway through the summer and found my grandmother sitting on the edge of the bed. Josie, the night helper, stood beside her. I bent to put my arms around my grandmother’s waist. This was how we lifted her onto her legs: one, two, three, hup. Josie waved my arms away. No more. It took me a few moments to understand. Sometime during the night, it seemed, my grandmother had lost her ability to stand. She sat. We waited. She was groggy, as if she had been woken from a deep sleep. After a while we lifted her legs into the bed. Josie left to get her bus. My grandmother dozed. I reached for An American Childhood and read the opening paragraph:

When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.

She’d loved these words as I did, but I doubted she’d have any use for them now, if she could even hear them over the Morse code of pain that her body was sending her. For most of the rest of that day, and the days after, it was hard to gauge how conscious my grandmother was. Her eyes opened only partially, if at all, and when they did she seemed to be gazing at something far beyond her quiet bedroom.

My mother came to take over, and with only an hour left before I had to pick up my youngest child from camp, I headed to a reservoir located near where she lived, just north of San Francisco. The sunny fire road was patrolled by biting blackflies that I had to jog to outrun. I was sweating by the time I reached the path around the lake. I worked the muscles in my legs hard, charging in and out of shadow and leaping over roots and rocks. My grandmother’s life was falling away from her like acorns from a chinquapin, and music, literature, and art seemed to be the lightest of objects. They made hardly a sound when they hit the ground. My mother was singing to her when I left. She had been holding her hand and singing in the voice she used with me as a child when I had a fever. I stumbled and my hand clutched at the spongy bark of a redwood.

As a writer who was also the mother of two small children, I was no stranger to the nagging fear that time spent spinning tales might be better spent spinning lettuce. In the presence of my grandmother or my children or even the blue-bellied lizard that skittered over the path and into the brush, the balance seemed to tip decidedly toward lettuce. The next day, when I got in the car to go to my grandmother’s apartment, I left my computer at home.

My grandmother stopped drinking water shortly after her legs failed. Her spells of consciousness were briefer and less frequent. Each breath seemed to cause her pain. The hospice people assured me that she could still hear my voice. They told me to tell her that she could let go and I did it, thinking that if there was anything I could give her that would help her die, I did not want to hold it back. I told her that my mother would be all right. We will take care of her, I said. We will take care of each other. I turned to other subjects for relief. To the antics of my children. To books. I told her how much I liked Billy Collins, whom I had moved on to after Annie Dillard. He was funny and sneakily profound. In the tradition of the writers I loved most, he led the reader to surprising places with deceptively simple language, like a child who tries to describe what he’s seen and finally just grabs your hand and takes you to it. 

My mother stood with me in my grandmother’s bedroom and I told her about Billy Collins, not because she was a particular fan of poetry (that gene seemed to have skipped a generation) but because I was searching for something cheerful to say. On the spot, I decided to read her the poem “Dharma,” which begins, “The way the dog trots out the front door / every morning / without a hat or an umbrella, / without any money / or the keys to her doghouse / never fails to fill the saucer of my heart / with milky admiration.” Billy Collins deserves a dozen yellow roses, I thought, just for making my mother laugh. Between us lay my grandmother. I looked down and saw that her eyes were wide open, as they had not been in days, and that they were filled with tears.

The next day and for the remaining days of my grandmother’s life, I read aloud. From An American Childhood and from Sailing Alone Around the Room. One day I read a poem titled “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July,” which began: “I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna / or on any river for that matter / to be perfectly honest.”

I finished the poem and read another and then another.

Cleaning the apartment with my mother after my grandmother was gone, I would find several copies of Out of Africa and ask myself with reproach why I had not read to her from it. Grief and remorse sit close to each other on the scale of human emotions; they are easily confused. Only later would I realize that the thing I was feeling at that moment was loss rather than guilt. I would turn to “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills” and read on until the words began to blur. This was the compelling voice of a mature woman with a story to tell and it is not something that you can easily set aside before the end. It was clear to me then what I must have suspected before: My grandmother and I had not had that kind of time.

Those last days passed in high summer and the trees next to her back deck dropped layers of pollen-covered pods. I slipped outside whenever my brother the doctor would call from the East Coast with instructions to increase her Ativan and morphine. Each time I came back inside I brushed the layer of gold dust from the bottom of my bare feet. I watched my grandmother shrink on her hospital bed. I read aloud.

“You’re not alone,” I reassured her, after a prolonged silence. “I’m just resting my voice. I’m still here.”

“I know,” she said. She had long ago stopped accepting water or food; she had not responded in days. Her body was gaunt and her voice was parched but unbelievably, it was her own.

“Grandma?” I laced my fingers through hers, talking, talking, talking, hoping for more. More never came.

What had made me think there was a difference, I wondered then, between the love that we had for each other and the words we used, or tried to use, to express it? It was the searching for words that was so uniquely human and precious—it was the very audaciousness of trying to capture feeling into something as tangible as a poem or a story that meant so much. I returned to my imagined mothers and children, to all the characters in my head, and greeted them with renewed affection and respect. There are worse ways to spend one’s brief time than in the attempt to write something good. After all, is it so very disappointing if the amazing thing a child drags you to see is something as ordinary as a hummingbird or a snail? What matters is the taking of your hand.

Lise Saffran is the author of the novel Juno’s Daughters, published in January by Plume. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published stories in a variety of literary journals. She lives in Missouri with her husband and two sons.