MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Shawna
Yang Ryan
Driving
Home
For a good part of 2007,
whenever I drove I-80 East from Berkeley to Sacramento, I would begin
to weep
just past Vallejo. Here, the road suddenly sweeps from the low land of
the Bay
Area up into the desolate yellow hills that signal the approach to the
Central
Valley. At night, the road is pitch black, sometimes dense with fog. In
this liminal
space, like Orpheus shedding flesh to become spirit and retrieve the
dead, I
revert from my Berkeley life as writer and teacher back to a girl,
vulnerable
to the mysteries of family and loss. In late 2006, my grandfather had
died, and
on those drives, at first glimpse of the valley, I was reminded of the
void I
was returning to.
For two days in September, my
family had lived in the waiting room of Mercy San Juan Hospital. There
were
twenty of us: my grandparents’ six children and their spouses, and nine
grandchildren. The nurses gave us blankets and pillows, which we spread
out on
the waiting room floor among runaway crayons and loose coloring pages
and bags
of junk food. We cycled between the crackling chaos of this base and my
grandfather’s somber white room.
My grandfather was deep in a
morphine-induced sleep. A clouded respirator obscured his face and his
arms
were splotched with deep purple bruises from the IV lines. We could not
help
but stare at the monitor, mesmerized by the plodding beep and jerking
green
line that mirrored his heart. Though we hoped that he would clamber
through the
layers of drugs to wakefulness, propelled by a hunger to live, we were
all
aware that we were waiting for him to die.
It was his fourth stay that
year, and this most recent visit, instigated by his weak lungs,
revealed an
undiagnosed heart problem. The doctor said that the visits would
increase in
frequency, and that it was likely that a massive heart attack would
ultimately
kill him. Then the doctor gently suggested that my grandmother give
permission
to slowly increase the morphine, to “make him comfortable.” For the
next two
days, the nurses came in every few hours to adjust the dosage. In the
time
between these visits, we took turns whispering confessions and
good-byes in my
grandfather’s ear.
I wondered if he dreamed us,
if he desired to speak back but could not find a path out of his
opiated
slumber.
By the second day of our
vigil, we were exhausted. The nurses urged us to sleep. They would wake
us if
anything changed. My grandmother stayed with my grandfather while the
rest of
us crowded into the waiting room: slumped on the institutional chairs
upholstered in rugged fabric and curled up in hospital blankets on the
gray
carpet. The room grew quiet and thick with sleep.
It was in this peace, deep
night, when only my grandmother remained to hold his hand, that my
grandfather
finally let go.
The nurses pulled off his
oxygen mask, took out his catheter and IV drips, unplugged the
machines. They
straightened his arms and smoothed the blanket. They turned on the fans
and
deodorized the room against the remaining cast of his final breath, and
we came
to say goodbye. When I kissed him for the last time, his forehead was
cool and
dry.
This memory
unfolds in the time it takes me to speed from the amber glow of the bay
that
recedes in my rearview mirror to the glitter of suburban lights in the
valley
that sprawls out below me. By the time my radio catches the signal of a
Sacramento station, my tears have dried, and I am singing along. I realize
that a final good-bye does not exist: it comes in pieces, again and
again,
unexpected. Just when I think I’ve buried my grief, it springs up anew,
another glimpse of
Eurydice fading once
more into mist.
Born in
Sacramento,
California, the child of parents who met during the Vietnam War when
her father
was stationed in Taiwan, Shawna Yang
Ryan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and
received an
M.A. from the University of California, Davis. In 2002, she was a
Fulbright
scholar in Taiwan. Water Ghosts (originally published in 2007 as Locke
1928)
was a finalist for the 2008 Northern California Book Award. She
currently lives
in Berkeley, California.