I've been out of town for the last 12 days because my grandmother was dying. Her physician called for hospice care in the small apartment and I was there last week every day all day with my three sisters and my father and my Aunt Bernie. We held Nonna's small hands, bathed her with warm washcloths, squeezed morphine drops into her mouth when she had pain, fed her water in the end of a straw. My sister Nina took her pulse on the hour, Gianna tried to make her laugh, Aunt Bernie changed her colostomy bag, I read the newspaper beside her bed, and we took turns kissing her forehead and sunken cheeks. My father stood in the doorway and waited to be of help, but he was a help just standing there, another deep layer of concern. We watched her chest move while she slept, and when she was awake we listened worriedly to anything she whispered in case it was meant specifically for one of us.

On Wednesday, she told my Aunt Bernie goodbye, and when we heard the crying we all rushed in for our turn with her. The little dog downstairs, Luigi, had come upstairs to visit, and he kept trying to jump on her bed. I think the crying worried him. That afternooon, Nonna saw her mother and St. Francis, and she raised her arms like she wanted to be picked up. She told me to remember I was loved. She said she heard wind.

Thursday morning, while my sister Gigi dusted her room with lemon Pledge, I held old photographs for my Nonna to see and she touched faces like they were 3-D. She watched Gigi clean, like good TV, and she told us where she'd bought her bedroom suite - Fleishers - when she and Nonno married seventy-something years ago, although she couldn't remember what they'd paid for it.

We expected her to die at night, in her sleep, and every morning when we awoke at the Marriott and realized the phone hadn't rung, we were surprised and relieved and a little disappointed. Her death is what we were there for. So we'd jump in the rental car and go back to the apartment and enter her bedroom, and her face would be even smaller against the pillow. Every day there was less we could do for her because she wasn't eating, drinking, peeing in her diaper. Her BP was 70 over 40. She mostly slept and moaned. My sister Gigi manicured her nails.

On Friday, while I sat with my aunt and my father in the living room, my sisters bathed her one last time.

The hospice nurse, Rosalie, came once a day, and we looked forward to seeing her and didn't want her to leave. After two of her visits she told us it was a matter of hours, but my grandmother seemed in control of the time of her death.

Gianna, Gigi and Rosalie:


She waited until 10:40 in the morning and died on Saturday the 27th, which was my wedding anniversary. Malcolm and I will always share this day with her. My sisters were there to hear the death rattle, but I stayed back at the hotel with the cell phone in my hand. I couldn't go.

This is a photograph of my father and sister, Gigi, taken one day last week, Wednesday, when he cooked dinner: pork roast, potatoes and carrots thrown into a plastic bag that doesn't melt at high temperatures.



Nonna was 93.