Painless

Painless by Dana V. Gimarangan

Prologue:

My grandfather taught me the words from A to Z, when I was still not mumbling sounds at the age of 3. Others started silently looking at my mom with pity, as an unspoken rumor of her deaf, mute or mentally slow child spread like wild fire.

Grandpa was unfazed. He had a good reason to be. Turns out the toddler me just couldn’t be bothered to do things beyond the beat of my drum.

Shortly after learning the alphabet, I begun this fun habit of blowing my spit everywhere.

I loved that game! It felt like everything my spit touches is irrevocably mine. And I was unstoppable!

That was when grandpa showed me how to whistle. He believed I have insane amounts of energy, and I just needed ways on how to channel that energy into something beautiful.

But there was one thing my grandfather thought me; something I would spend the rest of my life trying to unlearn. Something neither of us understood as a lesson   – how to take pain away from the dying.

********

I was now eight. I remember waking up, running outside and looking down the road with my mouth wide open.

“Wooow! was all I managed to exclaim, as I was looking at this new fantasy land infront of me.

The streets were border lined with what looked like red cotton candy on sticks, leading to the prized candy castle at the end of the road.

Usually this time of the year, the maple trees are the star of (Kestrel Ridge), with their dreamy glow against the sun, making you feel like you are riding a bike in slow motion, inside your favorite romance series.

This October is different. The hillside looked so deep red, like the streets are bleeding from the inside out.

The house we are living in was built by grandpa’s own hands in 1961. Back when anyone can easily have a house with 3 rooms, even with a minimum wage paycheck of just one family member.

One board at a time – my grandfather (Hollis Calloway) worked to make this piece of land, a loving haven for his family.

Now that same house is slowly starting to feel like daily punishment to him.

I found my mom cooking breakfast downstairs. I remember the days that she would sing and dance to music, while frying those eggs. Some days she was floating around the kitchen in a flowing dress, to RnB tunes. Other days, she was rocking her heart out in worn out shorts, and over used tank top – like she would rival Bon Jovi or Aerosmith.

The meals aren’t any peaceful. Debates arise between my family over the news they are watching on Tv. On the background, someone will be nagging on why the hand towels are hanged in the places that they should be.

Recently, kitchen is silent. Mom is silent – except for occasional sniffing sounds. Sniffled sounds. Like the time, the wind slammed shut the bedroom door on my pinky finger. I didn’t know how I was still standing conscious, while it felt like my bones detached from themselves. I had to cover my mouth whenever I would move that mangled finger, so that they won’t know I was in pain.

After breakfast, a broad, calm woman knocked on the door. She smelled of Doublemint gum and rubbing alcohol as always.

“(Miss Deloris), what do you have for dad today”, mom asked.

“Oh the usual ma’am”, pointing at her black bag. Inside that tired looking backpack, was a deep pit of trusted mercies: pills in blister packs, a rubber ring cushion for the butt, a chart with numbers that make mom’s face  go sour everytime she reads them over Deloris shoulder.

“On a scale of  1 to 10”, Deloris asked grandpa, “where’s your pain today Mr. Calloway?”

My grandfather is a very proud man who acted like nothing was bad enough to make him bother. He never complained about the war, not the mine collapse that took lives and ripped his two fingers off, not even the harshest winter that made our wells dry a long time.

he looked at Deloris a long moment and said, “Well, I expect about a 9. Maybe 9 and a half. I don’t want to be greedy Deloris”, while looking smugly charming.

Now looking back, I understand that this was its own kind of mercy – the last gift a proud man had left to give the people around him watching him go. Mercy for both them and his self reputation. As he has always been defiant, unbothered, charismtic and the man who has a solution ready.

But pancreatic cancer has other plans. By third week of October, he cannot manage to joke anymore. He was either wincing quietly curled, unable to raise his head. Or squirming and writhing on the bed, until Deloris sticks a needle to grandpa that makes him sleep until the night.

One late autumn night, I could not sleep. I do not remember why. But I can tell you that night was pretty cold. I was wearing socks inside the house, as mom would scold me if she catches me barefoot on cold floors.

I remember watching the fire in the coal pots crackled, as its embers danced — trying to ignore the low groans I have been hearing every night. I have been afraid of it for sometime, convinced something was living under my bed. I was so scared. I have heard of things, animals and parasites who hide in the dark, inorder to get close to their victims.

I found myself standing infront grandpa’s bedroom door, confused as to why the adults told me to keep that door shut , even when my grandfather was on the other side hurting. And until now, twenty plus years after, am I the only one still haunted by that night?. How can anyone can ignore the groans, and muffled cries of someone hopelessly in pain?

Is it something one does when you are an adult, managing adult things? What if it were you in pain, and everyone around you forces themselves to shut the door behind them, put noise cancelling headphones and pretend you do not exists? Adulting sucks!

My grandfather was awake. The lamp on his nightstand was off, but the hall light spilled a yellow wedge on the blanket, across his pale forehead, his hollow cheeks. What used to be a dependable, pleasing face; now looks like a skull with sunken eyes.

He saw me at the doorway. I think he tried to make a joke, “Hey there nosy bird. You oughta be asleep now”.

“I heard you”, I said. I walked inside and stood by the bed.Up close the smell was different than it used to be – not really bad, wrong. Sweetish metallic. This is the wrong kind of smell the body senses as danger, because the mind can even have words for it.

“Ah well, dont fret about that. Old men make noises in the night. It dont mean nothing”

We both know it meant everything. But since I was eight and he was dying, and neither of us had the language for what was actually happening in that room, so we settled for the lie, the way people do.

I  did the only thing I knew how.  Same thing my mother did  for me when I had a stomachache or bad dream or a scraped knee.

I climbed up grandpa’s mattress, careful not to hurt his fragile legs and took his hand. Remember this day. Because this is the last time in my life, I ever touched someone without knowing what might do. If only I can get back to the innocence, and fully trusting myself.

I held his hand the way you are afraid of dropping so fragile and precious. His hand, rough and tired for swinging a hammer in the mines for 40 years ; are now soft and swelling that he cannot even hold a coffee cup anymore..

“I dont like that you hurt”,  I told him and mean it with my entire body.

Then something happened…

I don’t hve any better language for it now that im a grown woman, than I had then as a girl.  I did not feel any electricity nor pain.  it felt like a drain opening.

You know how when you pull the plug in a bathtub floor, nothing happens for the first second. Then it all happens all at once. The water fast swirls down the open drain, and all gone before you can put the plug again.

I felt a pull swirling in my chest before  I understood that it’s coming from my hand. I felt something move out of him and through me.

I wanna say that it hurt because that would make a better story. Atleast in that version you can pintoin teh cost and say if the price exchange is fair. But it did not hurt.

it felt good. It felt like being useful, in a way that you were not supposed to be useful yet because you were a kid. It felt like taking a breath after holding one too long

why it felt like a relief when I let the pain of another flow through me, I still dont know. And the dark side of this “good” ability is something  I  have yet to notice 20 years after.

My grandfathers hand went slack. And my heart nearly stopped as I was waiting for his chest to rise up again to breath in. The added age line he got because of  6 weeks of pain, slowly smoothened out. His eyes that seemed to always fix beyond my shoulder when he is deep in morphine, were not staring into mine looking shocked, confused, but in a good way.

“Well”, he said. Just that “well…”  Then he slept that night for the first time in 3 weeks without a sound. My mother found us in the morning, me curled up asleeep against his side on top of the covers. She cried,

I thought she was crying because something bad had happened. My confused mind took a full minute to understand that she was crying because something  good had happened – grandpa slept. Truly slept. No moaning. No calling out. Nothing. And for one whole day, my family let itself themselves believe almost anything. The prayer that his meant he was getting better.

He wasn’t getting better. He died 11 days later, on a Tuesday, when the maples changed from red to rust to bare black outside his window. But something else changed..

He never hurt again

Not once for 11 more days. Not when the nurses chart said men in his condition were supposed to be climbing past any number in any charts.

Miss Dolores kept asking him ” scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Calloway”. And he kept telling her “zero Deloris, not a thing. I dont know what you did with them pills but keep doing them”

Now I understand the look on Ms. Deloris face. Not of relief. Back them I cannot out a finger on it. But now I know, it wa the look of unease, confusion with a pinch of fear. The look of a person watching a number behave in a way, no number has ever behaved before — yet choosing not to question it because it did not bring any pain.

No one asked. Thats the thing I want you to understand about the whole strange grace-lit stretch of 11 days.Nobody asked because the only thing that strangeness offered was mercy. And no one questions mercy.

My mom believed it was God, finally giving her father an easy road home after a hard life. She thanked Him with a breaking voice for it at the funeral, out loud infront of the whole church.

My grandfather seemed quietly grateful. In the 2 or 3 lucid conversations we had that last week and a half, he had the manner of a man who’d made his peace with dying and was pleasantly surprised to find that dying itself is so gentle.

As for me, I did not tell anyone what I had done. At 8 years old, I didnt fully understand that I did anything. I thought i had comforted him. I thought that was what holding someones hand could do. That everyone could have done what I did, the way every parents kiss makes a childs scraped knee feel better – even without any medicine.

It would be years – a dog, a girl in school, a stray cat with a broken back — beforenI understood that what happened in my grandfathers room was not comfort. That ot was not universal. That is was mine, specific and localized to me. And that i would spend the rest of my life learning its darkness – one terrible lesson at a time

But that comes later.

This part – the part I feel required to tell you honestly. Because everything after this depends on how you  see it, or on how I mean it.

This time is the first that I took someones pain out of love, without understanding, without asking for anything, without knowing I would need a ledger – let alone I now had made my first entry in it.

I was 8 years old. i held my dying grandfather’s hand because i could not stand to hear him hurting.

I would like you to remember, later, that it started this way. Because it is going to stop looking like this very soon. And I need atleast 1 person in the world – even if its only you, a stranger reading this in whatever version in the future you are reading on. I want you to know it didnt start as horror.

I do not have a word for what this is. I did not even expect it to be this devastating decades after. I do not want want anyone hurt. I just want the pains to stop… All I know is this started with love… not just another story about a monster…