Me and Mephistocles

My grandmother dying was probably the worst day of my life. She was always more like a mother to me. While my actual mom was more concerned with men and drugs of all sorts, my grandma stayed behind and picked up the slack. She never made me feel like I was any type of burden or inconvenience. Maybe she was my best friend when I think about it in hindsight. Or maybe she was just an excellent Abuela.

Most people have one set name that they call their grandparents. Like Dad’s mom is Grandma, Mom’s mom is Abuela or Dad’s mom is Nanna and Mom’s mom is Mawmaw. My mom’s mom, my only grandparent at all, didn’t go for any of that though. She figured there would be no confusion since she was the only one around anyway. She could never decide on what she wanted to be called because she never thought she’d get here. She never wanted to be a mom and my mom didn’t either. She wasn’t supposed to ever have to decide. So we decided together when I was 3 that we’d just call her everything.

When she died my mom was high. I was in the hospital, at my mawmaws bedside. Reading to her from her favorite book, the Bible. She asked me to do that. She looked so frail and spoke so soft and felt so weak, I had a feeling it was a last request. Otherwise, I would never have been caught reading a bible. Especially not in public. I’m no a believer even in the slightest. Still, I sat there, uncomfortably cold with my dying grandmother reading the book of Psalms while my mom was across town in a bando shooting up crack.

How do I know this ? Because she was texting and calling me incessantly. Promising she would be here. That she didn’t want to disappoint her mom. As if she hasn’t been doing that for the last 30 years. In the midst of those promises, she was also promising that this was her last time shooting up. She’s tired of it. She’s so tired of this life and she’s going to make a change. She made a bargain with God and her mom was going to make it and she was going to get clean and she was going to find my dad and they’d work it out and we’d be one big happy family. That’s what she was saying. And I was ignoring her. And reading the bible to her mom.

She died that night.

And that night my mom was in her house, rummaging through everything with reckless abandon. With her “friends” taking everything they thought they may be able to sell or trade for drugs. Which was everything, I fear. When I made it to my grandmothers 3 days later, nothing was left but this cactus. Hanging out in the middle of the floor and surrounded by trash. Clearly moved from its original location. So I took it. That’s all I touched. All I took. The first thing I saw. As a memento.

I guess life is just sad like that sometimes but it’s hard not to wonder exactly why.