Learning My Instincts

"Doll, help me get into my floral nightgown hanging there," my grandmother said, pointing toward the hospice closet.

I pulled out the nightgown. It was made of an itchy, polyester blend, long, with three plastic pink buttons at the top and huge pink and blue flowers. It was something that I couldn't imagine putting on in a million years, but my grandmother adored bright colors. She thought the blacks and browns that I preferred were an unfortunate side effect of my romantic life in New York City.

She slowly swung her legs over the side of the bed and prepared to sit up, laboring over every movement. Her lungs were slowly turning to stone. At least that's how I understood it. The doctors called it pulmonary fibrosis. They guessed that the disease had first taken root in her tiny body as she tended the chickens on the family farm back in Kearney, Neb., seven decades past. Now every exertion was accompanied by a quiet, but painful-sounding, inhale.

Wordlessly, she pulled off her nightgown. Here she was, my grandmother, naked and wrinkled, so tiny and sunken in that I could hardly recognize her. There were familiar signs: her mastectomy scar, and her characteristically slight shoulders. Her belly even pouched just a little. But otherwise, the woman who stepped into skirted-bathing suits to go to the pool, whose generous lap had sheltered my tears at "E.T.", whose arthritic knuckles had ached“a bi” after shooting hoops with me in the alley, was gone. And in her place was a dying creature who needed my help.

It made me feel like a little girl again, far younger than my 21 years. I had an expensive education from an elite institution. I was familiar with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. I could describe the theories of a handful of sociologists and political scientists. I knew how to pronounce Dostoevsky.

But I didn't know how to help my dying grandmother. None of that fancy education had prepared me for this moment, a moment that left me feeling stupid and worthless.