Running Away from Grandma
by CLS Sandoval
Every Saturday growing up I spent with my great-grandparents, who we called Grandma and Grandpa. My little sister and I would sit on the stools in front of the little tables that our great-grandfather had carved out of wood in his spare retirement time, watching X-Men, Happy Days, The Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy. Sometimes it was just Saturday morning; other times we would stay later into the evening. On one Saturday afternoon when our mom and dad came to pick us up, I wasn’t ready to go. Instead of simply getting into my mother’s pink Cadillac, I ran away, as fast as my little legs could take me, thinking I would somehow outrun the inevitability of going home, outrun the inevitability of being separated from my great-grandparents. My great-grandmother ran after me. She was at least eighty years old. She fell. It was my fault. Her bone was broken and her skin bled.
When the cancer had stolen too much of my great-grandfather’s independence that he could no longer hide his wife’s Alzheimer’s, it was time to put my great-grandparents into a nursing home.
“I’ve always been good to you,” Grandma declared, backing me into a corner, her fading blue irises somehow a more intense hue. “You have got to get me out of here! I’ll pay you!”
Her offer of money made my throat swell. Her gold wedding ring was the only thing she owned worth any money at all. I looked at the uneven hem of her pink polyester pants, knowing they had met the same fate as the canary yellow dust ruffle she had been forced to leave behind. She always trimmed them when she thought one side was looking longer than the other. Her eccentricities had shown long before her dementia.
After my great-grandfather’s body could no longer sustain him, even to stay with his love, my great-grandmother walked every day. She walked in a circle around the nursing home. She was looking for her husband. She knew he wouldn’t leave her. He would be right back. He must have gone to the grocery store or perhaps he went out to pick up Kentucky Fried Chicken. She just couldn’t remember these days. But she remembered he would never leave her.
When my great-grandmother’s legs were too frail with age and osteoporosis, a femur finally fractured. The doctor later told us that her bones were so weak, he was shocked that her legs supported her as long as they did. The bed rest was what really killed her, keeping her from searching for her husband. My tears were grief and joy. Now she knows she’s right. Grandpa would never run away from her.
CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s a flash fiction and poetry editor for Dark Onus Lit. She’s presented at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, and both flash and poetry pieces in literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Magical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter, son, and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.