I'd Give My Life To Have You Back

The hands on the grandfather clock in the living room of my grandfather's house fly around, counter-clockwise. I squeeze my eyes closed as the last 40 minutes or so play in reverse around me. I can hear the sounds of the events, though they’re muffled, almost inaudible. I can feel myself moving backwards through the motions and the emotions too. As the clock rewinds, the events that occurred disappear. I get to choose the moment they begin to be rewritten. I choose now. The hands on the antique clock pause for a brief moment and then begin again, moving at a much slower pace, and in the opposite direction.

My grandpa sits in his favorite green recliner, where he always sits, and I sit across from him on the couch. That chair is the only place he'll sit, sometimes he'll even sleep in it. I remember my grandma once said, “It drives me crazy. We spent two thousand on this couch and he won’t even sit on the damned thing. Just that ugly, busted recliner that he got for twenty bucks at a garage sale." She hated it. She has since passed, one month ago today, and grandpa's health has deteriorated ever since. He doesn’t leave the house to go anywhere. He never even goes outside to sit on the porch or for an evening walk. He just stays in the house all day watching The Price Is Right and enjoying his recliner. I think it comforts him.

Mom says he’s waiting to die, maybe even trying to speed up the process. We bring him meals twice a week to keep him fed, but every time we come back they're mostly untouched. We also brought some groceries when my grandma first past, but those have since either spoiled or still remain unopened except for the Cinnamon Toast Crunch and some packs of crackers. “He’s surviving, barely, but he refuses to live. I’m worried about him.” Mom said. After she said that, she developed a sudden wave of anger. I watched redness spread across her cheeks, marks that looked like they were left behind by a slip and fall onto a hot stove burner. To her, him giving up on life meant that he was giving up on his relationship with her and all of us who cared about him, and that hurt. Oh, it hurt. She marched out of the kitchen, shaking the house and the little precious moments trinkets on the shelves in the living room along the way. I don’t want to repeat exactly what she said to grandpa, but it was mostly about him being selfish and that he wasn’t really there when we needed him to be. I couldn't blame her for her outburst, but I couldn't blame him for his distance either. She lost her mother and her father wasn’t here anymore, not really. He lost his wife and I think he wished that it had been him.

Mom emerges from the kitchen with a tray of reheated lasagna and walks over to sit it down on grandpa's side table. When she steps in front of the tv to do so, grandpa doesn't attempt to crane his head around her to see. He just stares right through her. She speaks the same words she spoke the first time we lived this moment “Dad? You need to eat something. Your body is not gonna be able to keep running off of processed cereal and crackers. Try to eat some of this.” He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even look at her. He’s fully invested in the television. She gives a sigh and moves to head back into the kitchen, giving me a brief smile tinted with sadness along the way.

He hasn't seemed to pay much attention to anything since grandma passed. It's like he's not even here more than half the time and on the rare occasions he does acknowledge anyone it's only with a grunt or moan. He rarely ever leaves the living room, he even uses the recliner as a makeshift bed. Before I rewound the clock and our lives, I thought it made sense. I could understand why he wouldn’t want to sleep on the same mattress that he and grandma had slept in together every night. Now I know the truth. I know that he sleeps out here because the mattress that he and grandma once slept on together is a mattress that her dead corpse still occupies.

My mother comes back out of the kitchen and I know what happens next. I've lived it already and it was hard enough to watch the first time. She begs my grandpa to eat, and when he doesn't respond or at least pay attention to her she breaks down. "Why won't you look at me? What's so goddamn fascinating about this show?" She'll take the remote off of the table and click the button that makes the screen turn fuzzy and then black, but he'll continue to stare at the now blank screen. Then she'll grab the tray of lasagna "Dad, i'm serious. I need you to eat." She'll grab the fork and form a bite sized amount, then she'll hold it up to him. However, her shaking hands will drop the fork and get red sauce all over grandpas shirt. He won't react, but I can tell my mom feels horrible. She'll try to use a napkin to dab at the stain, calming herself down as she tries to fix the mess she made. When the dabbing doesn't work and just enlarges it, she asks me to go to his bedroom and pick him out a new shirt. This is where everything goes wrong. I make my way down the hall full of loose, creaky floorboards until I arrive at the door on the end. When I open it up, there she is. Laying in the bed, face up, with her arms folded over each other. Similar to how she looked at the viewing.

I'll take one step and then freeze, caught off guard by my grandmothers corpse, but that one step will cause the floor to creak and she will wake up. "Jim? You know you can't just be up and walking around. I need lots of energy today. Jim? What's yours is mine, right darling? That's what you said." Tears will fall down my face. My whole body will clench, holding my breathe hostage. So many emotions flood my body. From surprise, to sadness, to disbelief, to fear. My heart thumps so loud I think its making its way out of my chest through my ear canal. Then i'll panic, and do what I always do when i'm afraid. Run to my mom. My footsteps shake the house like an earthquake, sending a couple of figurines to the floor from the shelf in the living room, one of them breaking in two. I'll run to her and pull on her arm and tell her to come see. That grandma is alive. "Why would you say that? Ellie Jean, that's not funny." She'll look at me like i'm a stranger. "I'm not lying. She's there and she can talk." My mom looks at me with disbelief and then turns and glances at grandpa. "Oh my goodness, I'll get the shirt myself." She starts making her way down the hallway. I lie down on the couch, face down, and ball my eyes out. My grandfather makes no attempt to comfort me. He's still staring at the lifeless television screen, like he has no clue what's going on at all. Like he's the one whose dead.

After a few minutes, I start to calm down and lift my head up. I realize that my mother hasn't come back with a shirt for grandfather and turn my head to face the hallway. To my surprise, my mother is standing there looking disoriented, like she's been sent down a spiral of thoughts and emotions and doesn't know how to process them. Her eyes are wide and she stares, just like grandfather. "Mom? Are you okay?" She doesn't look at me. She turns and makes her way to sit on the other end of the couch, staring blankly at the entryway to the kitchen, like she didn't hear me at all. "Mom?"

Then she emerges from behind, my grandmother, looking even less dead than before. She also seems to be able to walk just fine, something she couldn't even do before she died. "Grandma?" She's just standing there smiling, unconcerned about the condition of my grandpa or my mother. "Yes dear. It's really me." Even though there's four bodies in the room, it feels like there's only two. Her and I. I look over at my mom and the tears start to form again. Her eyes look like there's nothing behind them, and grandma? I swear her eyes were blue before she died, but now they're brown, like my moms. That's when I become extremely uneasy. My stomach tugs at me, trying to send a message from my gut to tell me to run. That an unimaginable fate was waiting for me.

But those events unfold in another timeline. Not here.

When my mother asks me to go grab a shirt for grandpa, I don't panic. I take an alternate route to the bathroom, and choose the cleanest looking shirt I can find from my grandfathers dirty laundry basket and then bring it to my mother so that she can dress him. I then tell my mother that we need to go now because I have a massive book report due tomorrow. This obviously isn't true, but I need a way out to get us out without telling her the truth. It pisses her off that I told her about it at the last minute, but she still agrees to leave. I feel bad leaving my grandpa, but he doesn't eat, he doesn't speak and I don't think he can even see us. In my heart I know that he's too far gone to be saved and also that he volunteered to be this way. For her.

I don't need to know exactly how my grandma is alive again. I just need to protect my mom. I don't care how she's able to open her eyes. How she's able to speak. All I know is that my grandpa is pretty much gone because of it and I can't believe that the grandma I knew would have wanted that.

It's like the life has been sucked out of him, so that whatever that thing is that's pretending to be my grandma can live.