The Stairwell

“Mom, hey wait! You forgot to wash your hands,” I say repeating the words I’ve been uttering for weeks.  
She rushes to the sink quickly wetting her hands and lathering them letting the chemical smell assault her nose.  “Thanks, Syd,” she mutters.
The sarcasm is not lost on me, her eldest daughter.  That drying soap is the only acceptable thing to complain about on our now daily trips to watch my grandmother fight for her life, and so we cling to it letting all our fear and frustration out on that small grey box of disinfectant.  As her only child old enough to enter the deadly quiet world of the Intensive Care Unit it is I who holds her now sanitary hand as we enter the fortress.
We walk slowly around the monstrous nurses’ station whose long curve gives these faithful nurses a good view of every clean bed, every sick patient.  My mom enters the room and momentarily forgets she needed me to get this far.  My hand drops to my side lifelessly as I pause at the doorway.  I don’t want to go in; I don’t want to be here.  I can think of a thousand reasons not to enter: the smells, the lack of a response I get, the tubes and the wires, and the fear.  
Suddenly my mother’s voice attempting to coax my grandmother out of her morphine induced slumber rouses me from my stupor, and I glance around quickly hoping for an out before I slip silently across the threshold of my grandmother’s room.  
“Mom, how are you today?  Are you feeling any better?  Yeah? … No?  Yup, we’re here mom, we came, me and Syd.  They still wont let the B bananya in, she’s still too little.  You remember Syd, mom…”  
My grandmother has Alzheimer’s and this condition is worsened by the morphine she is full of all the time to numb the pain of broken hips, arms, ribs and  nose and her tracheotomy meant to relieve the strain on her bloody throat that has rendered her silent.  This makes it almost impossible to discern her level of coherence and memory.
At the mention of my name I know her eyes began to search for my face, that must seem so old compared to the grandchild she remembers.  I tiptoe to the bed and reach for her hand aware, always aware, of the endless equipment she is attached to; afraid of stopping her air, or her fluids, or her food all entering her via the tubes connected to her nose, mouth, throat, and arms.  She can’t turn her head so I tell her in a steady voice that I am there, and I try to say something comforting without giving away the severity of her situation.  A sick benefit to her forgetting her life, slowing the present to the past, is that she doesn’t know she’s dying.
“Hey, grandma, how are you today?  Good?  You look so much better than yesterday.  It’s Syd; don’t worry, I’ll move so that you can see me.  That neck brace really sucks, huh?”  
Every word from our mouths is a question, and all of them we answer almost before they’ve been said, knowing that if we need a verbal response, which we do, we must create it ourselves.  I move around the bed chattering about everything and nothing all at once.  The buzz of the many machines keeping her broken and bruised body alive is keeping me calm; they give me a rhythm with which to pace my breath.  Once again at the head of the bed I gaze at the face that helped raise me.  My hand reaches out suddenly desperate to prove her existence and finds her nearly lifeless fingers bent akwardly from the morphine.  I try to hold it, but the movement disturbs her broken arm, and a flash of pain streaks across her face so I resign myself to stroking her age-speckled skin.  
“Sorry,” I whisper, the tears welling up in my eyes.  
“Hey Grandma, I’m gonna run to the bathroom so you and mom can talk.  I’ll be right back I promise.  Okay?”
I kiss her cheek, the warm flesh as familiar as my own, and turn quickly, brushing past my now talking mother.  She replaces me physically and mentally in my grandmother’s line of sight and mind.  I feel empty now because I’m free.  I’ve done my duty, made my grandmother smile her weak lopsided grin, and passed on the torch of goodwill to her daughter.
I walk slowly trying not to look out of place among the quiet sentinels of these terribly sick few.  I push open the heavy double doors and feel the buzz of the living entity that is a hospital ebb and flow around me once again.  Stilling, attempting to present myself as just a bystander of life’s little accidents, I wish I could slow down, but I know I’m almost running down the stark hall ending in elevators.  Tears have filled my eyes and have started to trickle down my face, and as I round the corner too quickly I almost collide with another of the ICU’s waiting room regulars.
“Sorry,” I mumble as I stumble the last few feet to my refuge, an empty stairwell.  
Here I am alone.  There are no nurses or patients or family members or machines, no windows or colors.  I smash open the stairwell door and wait, still, silent, listening for the reverberating click that signals its closing.  It is as if that click comes from me and signals my release because with it comes all the tears that have been fighting to be free.  My face is immediately drenched, the two small paths now rivers of hot, salty frustration.  I smash my fists against the wall welcoming the pain while angering at its existence.  My sobs echo off the endless stairs and come back to me both begging to be heard and desperate to be forgotten.  My anger has melted with my make-up, and I slide still crying down the grey wall, feeling the hard coldness of it against my burning face.  
As I sit whimpering in the corner of the 3rd floor landing I hear the impossible: the door opens and in walks a father and his teenage son.  Their conversation abruptly ends and the father glides past me in hurried indifference.  The son, however, pauses still holding the door knob, and as I look up, embarrassed by my purging, he locks eyes with me.  He smiles, and his look not full of pity, but of understanding silences me.  His father has already reached the next flat, and he quickly begins his descent too, taking the steps two at a time, but his look is still with me.  I wait until I hear the door on the floor down open and close, and then I stand.  
Trembling, with tears still leaking from my burning eyes, I wipe off the seat of my pants and pull down my crumpled shirt.  I move for the door wishing I didn’t have to leave my haven.  As I reach for the handle I pause one last time to smooth back my hair and take a deep breath.  I don’t want to go, I don’t want this to be my life, I don’t want my grandmother, the woman who made me tea when I was sick, who took me sledding, who loved me and taught me and raised me, to be dying.  I don’t want to face the confused and clouded eyes of a once vibrant woman, but I have no choice.  How could I live with myself if I let her down when she had proven herself to me so many times?  I know in this instant that no matter what I am her granddaughter, the one she had loved and the one who loved her and I am going to wash off my face, put on a smile and tell her all about the horrible weather she’s lucky to be missing in her warm hospital bed.