"Last Visits"

"Grandma Jane’s long decline was scary for her until she could not remember being different, and exhausting for my mom the whole way. But my grandmother’s watch on the precipice also felt like a precious protection. During her long death, I finished high school, college, and most of law school, lived at nine different addresses, and cycled in and out of love how many times. My mother packed up my childhood home right before my parents split up and my family dog died. I went to my first funeral for a friend, wearing the black dress my mother had bought for me.

Yet my grandmother, the long-time smoker, even as she fussed, even as she dwindled and forgot each of us (me first, my mother last), held on, like the last levy resisting a flood. After she died there would be nothing to hold back the quickening years...

I was wrong, though. I was wrong about how different it is to be dead than to be dying. And I was wrong about how much smaller a chain of two is than a chain of three when you’re the only daughter of the only daughter of the only surviving sister. Two isn’t much of a tether at all."
http://feministing.com/2015/05/08/last-visits/