Determined to Die
Determined to Die In memorium JOHN CARTER I. A few months ago my gram died. Don’t be sad. It was time. She wanted to go. In truth, she’d been gone for a long time. Dementia took her away from us years ago – replaced this brilliant woman with an acerbic tongue, a mind like a steel trap, a vocabulary as thick as the ten-pound Olde English dictionary she kept at her reading table, an invincible self-confidence, an iron-clad disdain for social convention and stupidity, and sparkling, mischievous eyes, with a listless, shrinking shell that could only stare out the window and doze, unsure what month it was, or who these strange people coming to visit her were. My gram had been gone for a long time, in all the ways that mattered. Our grief was stretched out over the years like carefully rationed food in a famine, and when her spirit let go of her body, there was precious little left to give. But the sight of my grandfather sitting beside her in the hospital, crooning to the love of his life