And the beat goes on...

I am newly transplanted to New Jersey. My boyfriend and I are firmly in pre-engagement bliss, nesting in our “Martha-Stewart” apartment, talking puppies. I never considered that potting mums on the back balcony and decorating the tiny square of concrete that passes for a front stoop could be so apple-pie-fulfilling. We buy wine and sip at it during dinner like we’re grownups. I drag him to Pier 1 on Saturdays for the “fun.” We read in bed, we melt into the couch after dinner and luxuriate in the comfort of calling this, all of this, ours.

Impossibly, we’ve made it here. And, impossibly, what comes next will include a white dress, a mortgage and a lawn, and, like abstract art, a sonogram or two. We’re not really sure of anything. We feel tender and new. But somehow, we’re sure of each other. 

I have turned my flower face fiercely toward the sun, but the problem with transplants is that the new soil can be a shock to the roots. With the way things are going at home—I still call it home—my roots here can’t quite take hold.

~~**~~

I go home because my grandmother, my Mammaw—a name no one besides my family can pronounce and even we can’t agree on how to spell— is slowly dying. It’s Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but to us it doesn’t really matter what it is. She’s southern and beautiful and soin love with life. She can sew on a button just as well as she can blaze through a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle— in pen. She makes the best— and there is no hyperbole here— the best tomato soup and grilled cheese in the world. But she’s not any of those things right now. 

Heavily medicated for the pain, she’s only half here. Fed, bathed and freshly pajamaed, she sits listlessly in her chair, eyes rheumy. My mom turns on music. Al Green drips like honey into the room. “For the Good Times.” Mammaw opens her eyes just a little bit bigger and pushes her palms flat against the cushion. “You want to get up?” I say. I anchor my arms under her armpits and gently, gingerly lift, feeling us rise. I am so afraid of hurting her. Once she’s on her feet, she throws her arms around my neck and starts swaying. “You want to dance?” I say, breathless, amazed. 

“Yes.” She nods. Suddenly she is here. My fearless grandmother, who loves to dance. We are elegant and cumbersome all at once, moving in tiny, tight circles. She, now a half a foot shorter than I, fits seamlessly against me. She shakes a hip, she shrugs a shoulder. The ground, or maybe her legs, is shaking beneath us. Maybe it’s my legs. But we have never been more beautiful. 

I think about all of the dances that have come before this one— Sam Cooke, Joe Cocker, Tina Turner in the kitchen, the thousands of times she’s said, “Dance, Taylor, dance”—and I know, surely, this is the last one. I hold this knowledge in a cupped palm, and I don’t know what to do with it.  

All our lives are filled with people loving and leaving us. But when you’re 20 something, or maybe it’s because I’m 20 something, it feels more dissonant. This cymbal crash of living and dying. Death has shown his face before—exceedingly often in the past few years. Great aunts and uncles, second cousins, gone. But this is Mammaw. I am not ready to live in a world without Johnnie Maureen Russell in it. I am not ready to be a girl without her grandma. I’ve come late to the party. I’m just now figuring out that death happens to us all. But it doesn’t make it any easier.  

~~**~~

Dance is the thing that’s punctuated our lives. The first time he met Mammaw, my boyfriend and I danced for her. The swing, the cha-cha, the foxtrot. We waltzed around the square of her living room. We trotted out every basic step to every dance we knew. We didn’t know much, but her exclamations made us feel like a floating Rogers and Astaire. Her eyes were so bright, glittering with joy and pride. She wanted to try, too.  

Dance is how we met, my boyfriend and I. In our college’s ballroom dance club. He pulled the strings and we became competitive partners—and then real partners. Before home decorating and wedding magazines, there was date night and midnight peanut butter shakes. I did his Italian homework on top of his unmade bed. We practiced golf as the sun set. I knew I belonged to him immediately. There was no long courtship, no wooing romance. It just was. It just is.

~~**~~

The call comes when all of these calls come. In the middle of the night. I answer the phone still dreaming, but my sleep warmed skin chills instantly. I will never forget the sounds my mom is making. Mammaw is gone. And there is nothing I can do about it. And although I have imagined this moment countless times over the past two years, the shock knits into my skin and steals my breath still.   

Nothing makes sense. I don’t want it to. I do all of those things you expect. I hold my head. I wail. I dry heave. I get on the floor and curl into a ball. She won’t be here, won’t be here. My babies won’t know to love her. Now there’s only a chair, empty next to a wedding reception dance floor. Just two days ago, my boyfriend gave me a ring. Now my fiancé takes my hand, and holds it.