In The End

This is about my paternal grandmother-
She died when I was 13, and ended up a very bitter woman because of her crippling rheumatoid  arthritis. I always knew she loved me, that was never in doubt, but it troubled me to see how much anger she held inside of her as she grew more crippled.


In the End

You laid there behind the door of your bedroom
as feared as Homer’s Cyclops.
Those who entered did not emerge unscathed,
for you excelled in hurtling barbed words
which stung the soul and harmed the heart.

You filled your sons and daughters with dread,
your daughters by marriage with fear.
Your infirmity was like wood that stokes a fire,
it fed the burning rage of your resentment.

I never felt your arrows-
what was it?  Love?
that softened your tongue with your grandchildren.
I know that’s what I felt for you, and pity, too.
I felt sympathy for your gnarled crippled body,
so twisted that it looked inhuman.
Yes, I felt love and pity,
even though you made my momma cry.

As time passed you shriveled like a drying grape,
your fingers curled inward, pressing the flesh
of your palms. Your elbows and knees,
swollen like plump grapefruits,
were spongy and sore to the touch.
Your backside became littered with festers,
bedsores born of hours and days and months and years
of lying prone on mattresses.

The copper bracelet around your wrist,
a far-fetched miracle cure,
could not save you from the disease
that sapped your health,  stole your mobility.
But you wore it anyway, as a defiant gesture
to show you would fight until the end.

You seemed so angry at the world,
or maybe at Fate which had stripped you
of your life while you were still in your prime.
It reduced you to a human pretzel of contorted bones.

You were angry at your husband--
why was he untouched by God’s cruel hand?
You resented his health and made
him tiptoe past your doorway
lest he ignite your ire.

You were angry at your children for growing up,
abandoning you in the guise of marriage.
No matter that they came back, taking turns to care for you.
And you seemed angry most of all
at your daughters-in-law.
They had stolen away your sons,
the Adonises born of your body
when it was young and strong, unmarred by disease.
Stolen them away with their own buxom bodies
and seductive wiles just as you were stricken
by Fate’s cruel crippling arrow.

It did not matter that they came to your home,
just as your own daughters,
to wash your silky silver hair
and sponge your withered body
caressing it with powders to lessen
the friction of skin on cotton.
There was nothing they could do
to diminish your rage.

In the end, it consumed you from within.
The fiery anger and resentment
the red-hot fire in your joints and bones.
It eventually took your life
leaving only a ruined shell
of the woman you once were.

Rose S. Williams
2002-Southernstoryteller