The Living Room

“Lord, how can I have joy when I struggle with depression or addiction?” The church is silent save for the sound of patrons shifting in their pews. “How can I have joy when I am faced with illness? How can I have joy when my loved one has died?”

My dad and I make a late-night drive to Pittsburgh when it becomes clear his mother is dying. By now I know the mountainous route by heart, but it’s been years since he and I traveled it together. The turnpike is desolate. It’s one week before Christmas, and Dad intermittently rolls down the window while driving 70 mph to exhale a plume of vape smoke. The satellite radio in his Altima plays a tinny version of the Zombies’ “Time of the Season,” which is the closest we get to holiday music.

The house my dad grew up in, a towering six-bedroom Tudor made up of brick and rust-colored shingles, is still when we arrive. The car rattles up the cobblestone driveway, a sensation that always shook me awake at the end of the long trek. I have a flashback of Nana appearing on the porch to greet us, no matter the hour. Instead, we’re met with only the sound of the wind and its rage against the frost-covered chimes.

My dad never understood his siblings’ refusal to move their parents out of this massive, crumbling home as their faculties diminished. But maybe he wasn’t meant to understand. After all, he was the only one who’d left Pennsylvania, who’d slipped away from religion and allowed his children to do the same. He bore the guilt of not being around to help with doctors’ appointments and grocery shopping, which somehow disqualified his vote when it came to their fate.

We enter through the back door into the tiny kitchen, with wall-to-wall Formica and plastic wrap covering the window to keep out drafts. The white ice cream parlor chairs with curled iron legs are pushed in neatly under the counter. Next to the refrigerator, jugs of diet soda sit where Nana used to keep her gallon of sherry.

On our way upstairs we pass through the living room, which I know every inch of even in the dark. Golden frames display the high school portraits of my dad and his three siblings. My parents’ wedding picture is atop the mantle, as if news of their divorce never reached my grandparents. Nana’s grand piano, where we’d once gathered singing Christmas songs, still occupies the center of the room.

Each unchanged element unlocks a series of memories. The fake fireplace where presents would be piled on Christmas morning. The sea of brown carpet where my cousins and I put on plays and argued over Monopoly and dug through our Easter baskets. The tattered photo albums placed carefully on the end tables. The only difference now is a hospital bed under the window.

In the morning, the cheerful greetings from my dad’s sisters, Jean and Irma, make me question whether the necessity of our visit had been overblown. Nana has an impressive record of bouncing back, outlasting the cancer and the falls and the confusion. They wheel her chair up to the dining room table, where she dozes silently as we eat breakfast. We talk about work and the weather.

Our family has always valued the unspoken. We stick to comfortable topics and avoid anything that borders on feelings, negative experiences, and addiction. When Papa spent his final Christmas in the hospital, we barged into his room with poinsettia napkins and Tupperware full of cookies, pretending this was what we did every year.

When pivotal life events occur, they stare us in the face, daring us to ignore them.

When the hospice nurse arrives, we pile into the den. The living room is not for this type of discussion. It’s for light conversations and big gatherings, rays of sunlight spilling in through the windows, voices carrying up through the second floor and into the third. The tiny den is where we end the day in silence, spilling from the sofa onto the floor, facing a TV that none of us really watch. We quietly shuffle through books, magazines, or the mail until it’s time to go to sleep. Nobody sits in the recliner where Papa spent his final years.

Papa sang “Blowing in the Wind” as he was dying. His bones stiffened and aching, getting downstairs in the morning was a long, painful process that finally resulted in the begrudging decision to install a chairlift. The descent felt tauntingly slow. Down in the kitchen, I would hear his wavering voice getting closer as he sang the opening lines, peppered with sighs and yelps of pain.

Papa never once commented on his wife’s dementia. Back when her household routine was becoming more askew every day, he acted like he didn’t notice. One morning I sat with him in the den while she brought him his breakfast three times. The third time, his cereal was in a giant serving bowl. He looked down at it, shook his head, chuckled, and picked up his spoon.

The hospice nurse tells us, with a firm but delicate conviction, that these are Nana’s final days and she’s in the process of transitioning. Jean sits next to me on the couch, holding my wrist the way Nana did anytime we crossed the street. Dad sits on the floor against the opposite wall, staring into his laptop. The nurse assures us Nana’s not in pain, and she calmly rejects everything my aunts propose to try to treat their mother’s condition. Irma offers the nurse some Christmas cookies.

Grief doesn’t spread uniformly through a family like a blanket; it greets everyone at different times and intensities.

After the nurse leaves, Jean cuts through the silence by announcing her need to buy salad dressing and apricot jam. When I offer to join her at the store, she admits she’s going to church on the way home. She’s surprised that I still want to come along. I need relief from this house, to confirm the world is, somewhere, churning forward.

No matter how long I go without attending church, I can’t shake the habits that come along with it. The genuflecting in the direction of the altar and quick sign of the cross feel hollow, yet I can’t help myself. As an infant I was baptized in the same church where my dad had been an altar boy. Family celebrations revolved around sacraments, and weekend visits meant following Papa to whichever mass he ushered at. When he came around at collections and passed us a small woven basket, Nana opened her pocketbook and gave each of the grandchildren a dollar to contribute.

I always viewed the obligation of church as an impediment to our fun. But now, an hour to gather my thoughts is a relief. The absence of religion from my life has weakened its engulfing power, and on this night, I can see the allure in hunting down a beacon of solace.

The priest arrives at the pulpit under the glow of candlelight to deliver his homily. Though this is historically when my mind starts to wander, I stare intently ahead. He speaks of the pain the celebratory holiday season can bring in the face of life’s imperfections. Grief and heartbreak follow no calendar. For the first time all weekend, I sob as he looks around the room and asks, “How can I have joy when my loved one has died?”

I think of those words so often. Yet I have no recollection of what the priest’s conclusion was, how he came back around to reassure us that surely, joy exists somewhere in the darkness.

That night, my uncle Larry lifts Nana into her chair and wheels her to the dining room for dinner, as if she can’t possibly be dying if she sits at the table with us. Opposite her is a picture window looking out over the small yard where Papa loved to feed the birds. We eat dinner as usual, with everybody hoping to avoid discussing what brought us together, the events of the previous 24 hours, of the previous ten years.

The anticipation of grief hovers above us. I can feel each of us thinking about the things we won’t be able to say to Nana once she’s gone, as if we have all forgotten that though the woman we love drifted away long ago, her shell is still sitting at the table with us.

I suggest we tell Nana what we love about her while we have the opportunity. One by one, my dad, Jean, Irma, and Larry break into tears as they talk about the rides to and from school and practices, the brownies and meals waiting when they walked in the door no matter the hour. At the end of it all I walk around the table and give Nana a hug. I’m not sure whether to mourn all we’ve lost already or rejoice in the part that remains, staring up at me blankly.

The next morning, the priest arrives at the house to perform last rites. We gather around the hospital bed in the living room, which feels empty despite the crowd.

Before my dad and I leave, I hold Nana’s hand and tell her she was the best grandmother ever. “You could have lived a little closer though!” I say. She turns to me and nods, squinting faintly as if trying to smile.

Nana was a musician and a librarian. She loved going out to nice restaurants and ordering martinis, which she claimed to only drink for the olives. She showed love by making us sandwiches we didn’t necessarily want, sending cards for even the smallest holidays, buying sheet cakes for the most mundane occasions. Every July, no matter what, we spent a week together in an oceanfront beach house. She cared for her mother in her final years, just like her children would care for her.

She was a devoted Catholic, mother, and wife whose husband still called her his bride half a century after their wedding. She never missed a holiday or birthday. She never wanted to be seen making a mistake. She never wanted her roots to show. And by ignoring all our family’s flaws, she made us out to be perfect, a prophecy that was simultaneously empowering and crushing.

In the slow descent of her final years, we were left with only the most rudimentary parts: the frail body, the reflexes, the instinctive human emotions. Was the woman inside fading away piece by piece, or was the woman inside finally being revealed?

She would have been horrified to learn how her life boiled down to Depends and nutritional supplements. And how there would come a day when she would never again climb that grand staircase to her bedroom. And how the last time I saw her sleeping, she was curled up and smaller than I ever realized, looking no more powerful than a baby.

But maybe, as her spirit drifted away from her, she recognized that this is what it was all for. Not the permed hair and pearl jewelry, but the four children and five grandchildren who wouldn’t have a place on this earth if not for her, who now keep her warm in her final days.

The night before the funeral, my sister and I sift through the clothes in Nana’s closet and cry over empty hangers. We dig through her dresser drawers, through the anniversary cards from Papa and photo negatives and a bracelet with four charms engraved with each of her children’s birthdays. It feels like we are crossing a boundary, but the truth is that once you’re gone, boundaries no longer matter. Privacy ceases to exist when there’s nobody left for it to belong to.

In the church, I recognize the priest standing on the altar. He talks about coming to the house to anoint Nana that Sunday morning, the morning after his homily about finding joy. He tells the mourners how three generations had been in that living room as she lay in her hospital bed. The living room that had held all those years of Christmas mornings and Easter egg hunts and family gatherings, that had been the backdrop to our entire family’s existence, where Papa and Nana would both die one week shy of five years apart.

I am once again crying, this time sandwiched in the pew between my dad and my husband, as the priest reflects on the home Nana’s children had sacrificed so much to allow her to remain in. When Irma gives the eulogy, she speaks of how, after Nana lost nearly all her ability to speak, the final words she would mutter were “I’m sorry” as she was bathed, fed, and carried. “You didn’t need to be sorry, Mother,” Irma says through tears. “It was an honor.”