Paisley

2011

Penelope was the first dead body I ever saw, and what I hadn’t expected was how simple dying could be. Even though the planning and preparation for her funeral was done months ahead of time, I’d expected the actual moment to be longer, louder, uglier. Her breaths per minute were twenty, sometimes twenty-four seconds apart for at least half an hour and with each gurgling exhale I assumed it would be the last, until finally twenty-four seconds passed, then thirty-four, fifty-four, two minutes and four. 

My eyes burned from staring at Pen’s chest without blinking, but I held them there for two full minutes longer just to be sure—four minutes and four seconds total—before lowering the wrist with my watch. 

This is dead. This is what it looks like. 

I placed my hand on Pen’s to see what it felt like. Even though she was eighteen years old, her hand was tiny in mine.

I don’t think about the day Pen died very often. She wasn’t the kind of sister you thought about years later and remembered as dead. It was like she’d been born with a propensity to celebrate life forcing those around her to admire her quirks and forgive her faults. 

Admiring her was easy. To my after-school dumping streaks she’d respond, “But right now, right this second is great. Yes?” To my complaints about mother she’d say, “Imagine that everyone is doing the best they can, Pais, and let’s be grateful just to be alive.” 

But forgiving her, that was something else altogether. 

And now, remembering that last touch of Pen’s hand with a warmth so familiar I can still feel it trickling away, it comes to me that I’ll never be able to fully forgive her. 

When we were kids, I’d forgiven her for being sick and unable to play outside with me for very long. And the day she died, I forgave her for that too, not an easy thing for a sixteen-year-old.

I stood with her hand growing cold in mine, the hard metal railing of the hospital bed digging into my ribs as an unfamiliar stillness seized the room—mother had unplugged the pumps and the sound machine was turned off. It was as if the lifeless calm of Pen’s body was the only thing in the room, as if her hospital bed, medicine bottles, bedside commode all faded, and the stillness was seeping its way into mother somehow, while goose pimples prickled my arms and legs.

Mother, stiff at the head of the bed, had her hand large and rigid against Pen’s dead forehead, quiet tears dripping onto her tight, pale lips. We were both still in our pajamas and had been up since 4 am. It wasn’t the first time Pen had us out of bed before dawn. And this morning, just as it had done my whole life of mornings in Pen’s room, the sun was slowly plugging itself in, pressing itself beneath the blinds, steadily stepping inside as if it had no clue that this wasn’t a typical Pen day. 

What I couldn’t say, what I was really thinking, was that I was glad this wasn’t a typical Pen day and relieved there’d be no more. And that day, standing next to mother, I wondered if we should call the hospice nurse and tell her not to bother today. But I knew that wasn’t my job. My job was to stand there, twisting my fingers around Pen’s soft hand, pretending that I wasn’t ready to move on.