Adaro

Most parents tend to read their children upstanding stories like “The Little Engine That Could” or some Aesop fable (moral: only cute animals ever need help), but not mine. David and I got told stories of monsters from all around the world. Real ones.

Adaro was always a favorite. He lives in the Solomon Islands, but, more accurately, he resides in the ocean. On the rare occasions in which he’s sighted and the gazer survives, he’s seen sliding down a rainbow, as if he was tobogganing. Other noticeable features (just in case there’s more than one monster/man gliding down that particular rainbow) include his fish tails on his feet and the shark’s fin on his head. And then there’s the coup de grace: Adaro’s main form of attack. He launches poisonous flying fish at people. For no good reason. It’s adorable.

Oh, to say the trauma stopped there, but we were told the Adaro story on a visit to a dying relative, one of the many. I didn’t think it was possible to have 47 different grandparents, but it seemed one bit the bullet every week for a good year and a half back then.

I stood over Grandma Margie’s bed for about an hour.

“Watch her,” mom said, her shoulder-length bobbed blonde hair bouncing with each subtle (and not-so-subtle) movement. She kept turning her head back and away, until she finally just left the hospital room. Tuesdays with Margie.

Except it was Friday. And pluralizing any weekday implies there was going to be another. But there wasn’t. Grandma Margie was on so many devices her death certificate should have listed her as “cyborg.” As she breathed, so did the entire room. Everything moved up and down, in and out, beeping along the way. The naïve, child-like, ten-year-old green eyes I possessed at the time may as well have been sugar cubes, because the whole memory has become glossed over in sepia, with old lines like from World War I film reels running along the front.

Grandma Margie leaned forward. Her eyelids were permanently covering nine-tenths of her eyes, so I was never sure if she was awake or not. As she reached for me, I nervously moved back. Her eyes caught mine and we stared at each other. I examined the corners of her pupils, all around the exterior (this part’s not in sepia, by the way). There was an honesty to them.

Responding to said honesty, I moved forward, hearing the footsteps of the undead – the nurses, the patients, everyone who waits in this purgatory until someone’s kind enough to cut their heads off and end it – moving up and down the hallway. Grandma Margie moved her lips next to my ear.

“I want to…” she said, temporarily unable to finish the sentence.

I started to lean away, but suddenly Grandma Margie finished.

“I want to leave…this world,” she began. I wasn’t sure where this speech was heading, but I was expecting religious connotations. She was probably the last real Catholic in the family. She continued, “The way I came into it. Untethered.”

I glanced around at the mechanics, the tethers. When she breathed her last breath, she wanted to breathe them alone.

Just on cue, Grandma Margie leaned back as a tall, unibrowed nurse stepped into the room. She smiled at me, fakely, and began towards Margie.

I joined the room in a gigantic breath and stood directly in the nurse’s path. “Grandma wants to be unhooked,” I told her. Again, I’m like six years old here.

The nurse just flashed me another grinning lie. “Unhooked from what?” Following through with the patronizing, the zombie shuffled around me to Grandma Margie’s side.

I didn’t back down. It was the one time I was strong. “Everything.”

The nurse saw my confidence and responded. “Sorry, honey, but we can’t do that. The hospital’s required to keep your grandmother on these things. So she stays alive. You don’t want her to die, do you?”

“She wants off. She told me.”

“Even if she told you,” said the nurse, “It’s a long process to have something like that done. We’ll need all kinds of signatures and statements. It’ll take at least a week. And, honestly, we don’t think she has a week. Or a day.”

The nurse looked to the floor. I’m not sure what it was about me that made her open up like she did. Especially to tell me some things she, more likely than not, wasn’t supposed to be sharing with a little girl.

I held my hands in a pair of fists and looked at Margie. Her breathing had slowed, her eyes seemed to be drooping down their last tenth, and her lips were turning pale. Immediately, I rushed towards the equipment and started ripping cords off of her – drips, EKG’s, whatever the hell else they had on her.

Very few doctors (1 in 10?) would tell you that hospital recklessness is looked upon fondly. It’s never first-rate to be that crazy girl, the one they have to get on the loudspeaker and call “Mr. Armstrong to Room 107” to take away.

Grandma Margie’s breathing slowed even more, the more tethers I removed from her body. The nurse looked up at me and I froze. She looked down at Margie and then back and me once more. She didn’t do anything.

Once all of the tethers were undone, Grandma Margie survived another five minutes or so. She seemed at peace, as her abilities gradually declined into nothingness. She slid down the rainbow, and with just enough time for David and my parents to return to the room to see her take her last breath. Alone.

I was grounded for a month.