Cannibal

It was July, nearly a year since I had seen her last. She was thinner than I thought a person could be. Her chest rose up like a plucked bird’s. It was a ribbed pyramid and the speckled blade of her sternum pierced through the faded lace of the old nightie that wouldn’t stay on her. There was so little of her left. I looked at her face and couldn’t look away. Her mouth was a round black hole and inside it was inflamed, possibly with thrush. That mouth was death itself, I thought. It was stuck open and rasping, perfectly round like some cosmic annihilator planted in the middle of my grandmother’s face, and her breath rasped out of it again and again, laboured and mechanical. I thought it would suck all the room into it but they told us she could no longer eat. Her eyes were up in her head but sometimes the pale, pale blue irises with the smaller and milkier black holes within flickered down to look out at us from far, far away, but only for a moment. She had seen the void, was seeing it, and at the same time she was the void itself. In those moments my eyes met hers I felt like I was looking into deep space, something unfathomable and infinite. Somewhere perhaps she understood what these human shapes gathered round her bed confirmed, and as if the eyes couldn’t take such exposure they rolled up again quickly to hide behind the lids from the horror of her death. She didn't know us precisely and she hadn’t for years. Over the last decade we'd grown vaguer and vaguer as her mind dissolved from the fringes inwards. Almost to the last though, bits of her childhood had still been accessible. Did she mistake us now for ghosts from her past? Were her hands grasping for ours so we could pull her free from the dogged tenacity of her ancient body or was she pleading somehow to keep the end at bay as she reached out to clamp herself to us? Her hands moved slowly, clawing the air, sometimes reaching out to grip the railings of the bed, or our hands, and I thought then that perhaps she knew it was us here and understood us as sympathetic presences at the end, especially when her head turned to me and I did not know what to say to her, but she kept nodding and twitching meaningfully towards me as if there was something she wished to communicate, had her wilted mind not robbed her of all words and memories and had her mouth not been replaced by that void. 

I had seen a Butoh dancer once and was now reminded of him. He seemed to have harnessed involuntary twitches to the telling of some awful truth a healthy body could never convey. She knew angst, of that I was sure, and I saw that it was the last thing left to her when the identity of all she loved and who she was had atrophied. I tried to tell myself that what she was trying to communicate now was that she loved us, whoever we were, and that it meant something to her that we would still be here when she was gone. She had seemed so vacant for so long that I had previously thought at least the mercy of an ataraxic death would be hers but her grip on my hand, though not strong, had a desperate determination about it that belied this. A moan somehow came out of that paralysed rictus and then rose up into the air and faded away. Then the rasping came back. The three working fingers of her left hand held mine like the soft foot of a bird.

The local priest, a friend of my uncle’s, came in to her cell to administer the last rites. At first he and my uncle stood and chatted at the end of the bed as her arms conducted some nightmarish symphony in slow motion in the air in front of her. Then he put a piece of purple fabric round his neck and moved to the side of the bed and did his business hurriedly. He seemed not to know the lines in his Bible very well and stumbled over some of them. His delivery suggested this was just something we’d best get out of the way rather than the heightened ending a very Catholic life deserved. We all chanted the prayer in unison, the one which mentions the faithful departed. It was the first time I had heard those words spoken in real life. When he was done he folded his purple fabric and closed his Bible with practised ease, relieved to clock off. He and my uncle moved again to the end of her bed and looked at the old black-and-white photos on the chest of drawers and gossiped some more before he went on his way. My brother, brought to life by outrage, attempted to make eye contact with me repeatedly from across her bed but I looked down at her again and managed to resist the unsettling pollution of his hobbled and negative solicitude.

When I saw her again she was dead. Like a waxwork she lay in the coffin in white silk with rosary beads clutched in her hands. They had closed her mouth. It was now a long, straight line, wide like the mouth of a lizard, and though her jaw seemed mannish, everyone agreed that she looked at peace. Her thin white hair was swept back and I touched her forehead. I was startled by the cool firmness of it, like the breast of a chicken in the supermarket. Where is she? Where is she now, I thought, though I knew she wasn’t anywhere. Where is she? 

A slightly Celtic hymn proclaiming Christ as the Light of the World played on a stubborn loop in the womb-like red chamber as a statue of the Saviour leered down on us all the while, as blandly benevolent as ever, though the tired eyes imposed a slight hint of boredom on Christ's perpetual worthy vigil. Come on, would you get over it already, it's just death. Other symbols of the faith to which she had devoted her life crowded around her here too - beads, cards, candles, flowers. They seemed like such heart-wrenchingly tawdry consolations. Catholicism phoning itself in at the last. A well-rehearsed and jaded ecclesiastic-corporate send-off. All that piety, for this? 

No. The family were there too, the family she had brought forth with such struggle. My father, the late child who arrived at last after many heart-breaking failures and miscarriages. He was having difficulty maintaining his composure. We are not extinct and in some sense she is in us, I thought. I see her in us. The rigidity. The sanctimony. It's something, I supposed. A deferral or reprieve of sorts. My mother stroked her head. 

Across the coffin I heard an incessant clicking and tapping from the other side of the room. I wondered if the funeral home was riddled with deathwatch beetles. But then I located the sound. My brother sat there fiddling on his smartphone, his fingers twitching and skittering around its surface. The phone clicked slightly with each swipe across its glowing blue visage. Occasionally he chewed a nail, utterly absorbed in what he was doing. He seemed to be messaging. He was doubly oblivious to those around him. Even if he had known they were watching, he could not conceive of himself as a sinner. Like my grandmother again, or my father. 

When we left my mother and I were shaken and silent, the grief infected with sullen rage, choked back for fear of outraging him and provoking a scene. Sensing distance, he went back instantly to treating us as inexcusable filth. He fell behind us on the road and I could hear him, or his other persona - witty, risque, forgivably barbed (given his past) - tell one of his acolytes that he had been to see ‘the doll’. From the way he said it I knew that the phrase was rehearsed, that it must also have been texted from the room where she lay. Perhaps it had even been gestating before he saw her. As we had been standing around her paying our respects, the last of her descendants had fed on her pathetic old body and metabolised it into a witticism.