Sands of Time

I finished my horror novel where an elderly man had suffered a heart attack from being scared to death by a ghost. I poured my heart into it. It was exhausting writing such things because it was out of my scope. I had written only about Eskimos and the frosty north. People up there would only transport things by airplanes, not by roads on the northern plains. Not many people lived up there, it was a desolate place. A tundra. I got to my feet and left my room to check on Grandpa. It was time for his meds and to make sure he would get fed.

Grandpa was reading news off of Facebook again. It was getting on my nerves. I wished he’d stop. I stood behind him as he listlessly scrolled on the computer, going through his timeline, reading up on all the slop that the internet has to offer.

Facebook had only worsened the minds of boomers and their little cliques. Seeing the pixels on the screen only makes me more annoyed as I see him with his mouth slightly ajar, glasses at the tip of his nose, and skin sagging down to the ground. The blue light from the monitor reflects and flickers as he stops scrolling and lifts his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“It’s time for your meds, grandpa,” I told him, patting him on the back.

He was dumbfounded by the touch as if he had no idea where he was or who I was. He turned to me, wide-eyed, and asked, “Okay.”

He scooted back in his chair, his gangly legs and knees bobbing together. The crown of his head is shiny and bald; he’d lost even more hair somehow.

He coughs into his hand, mumbling, “Die, damn you.”

But I guided him into the kitchen where I had prepared his cup of blood thinners and hypertension meds. Grandpa Paul was getting up in years, forgetting things, opening up cabinets, leaving them open, going outside, dumbfounded and losing his ability to properly speak.

He was knocking on death's door. It was coming near. It was here. Poor bastard.

He was hunched over in the kitchen, his back angled over, rounded. I watched him throw the pills back into the back of his throat and swallow them. No water. He started doing that.

He hobbled out of the kitchen, limbs shaking. One foot heavy, the other light and limping.

I squinted my eyes when I focused on him; I could count the amount of vertebrae going across his back. Grandpa was tensing, his skin was elastic across his bones, blue veins scattering everywhere like roads over a map. The veins were pulsing as if they were breathing.

Grandpa inhaled sharply, clutching his chest. I measured him; he was clutching his chest harder and breaking out in a sweat. I couldn’t believe what was happening. My grandpa was going into some cardiac arrest. Sweat was beading up on his skin, and he was swinging back and forth, placing a hand on a wall for leverage. The joints of his fingers were enlarged, and the shakiness went out of control. 

I held the back of grandpa’s back, rubbing circles into his back. I feared that this indeed would be the end for him. He’d only taken his meds and was shaking no different from a tree rustling in harsh hurricane weather. I was his sole caretaker, his last surviving child, that would usher his way out of this world.

I couldn’t place him in hospice care. That was too inhumane. I’ve heard of stories of bad hospice care and couldn’t bring myself to make the call. Having someone else come in and take care of grandpa, make sure he would take his pills, make sure he would eat every day because he was withering away, but what kind of life was he living where all he was doing where all he was doing was absorbing antivax shit on facebook and yapping with other elders about how their children don’t visit them often enough, about how children nowadays don’t know how good they have it, and about how they were too old for this.

I could only see the disjointed messages that grandpa was sending out on facebook, mostly how he wanted to sell all his things as if he were preparing for something. Grandpa was never the same when he lost grandma. She had always completed him. 

They had done everything together. They ate together, took art classes together at the local community college and walked everyday at the hiking trail. Then grandma took a tumble down the stairs. Broke her hip. She never could recover. He had taken food to her bed every day, taken her to the bathroom, and taken her to her doctor’s appointments. But grandma died to her fall, and it seemed like grandpa was going on his way out too. They say that once you get married to someone, it was death till you part. And often so, when one died, the other came tumbling too.

I propped him up, asking, “You’ve still got some more years in you, young man.”

And he coughed into his shaky hand again, looking at me with dazed eyes. Upon closer inspection, at the corner of his mouth, I saw the long blue pill he was meant to swallow.

I went into the kitchen to get him a glass of water. There was no way he’d be able to swallow his meds dry. But the second I turned around, I heard a thud. I spun around to see him on the ground facedown.

I gasped. I couldn’t believe what had happened. I ran over to him to pick him up, but when I did, his body had disintegrated into sand between my fingers. Hot sand. The body of my grandfather had fallen through my fingers as if we were on a beach again, making sand castles and watching the day go by. Except there was a pile of sand in the living room of my grandfather’s house, scalding, as if he had come straight from a volcano, rolled out from magma, and was steaming there.

There were families laughing, and people running in and out of the waters of the ocean that ebbed and flowed off the coast. Grandpa was long gone, lost to the sands of the beach, and I was stuck dumbfounded to where I was. There was only the sounds of seagulls squawking overhead, distant murmurs of chatter, and vendors selling their wares.

Facebook was gone. No more boomer antivax circles. No more garbage on the internet served up from a screen.