Through the Branches

The hospital room was flattened by the dim overhead lighting and a lack of exterior windows, the way sad memories become flattened, like overexposed Polaroids thumbed over a thousand times. Bubba, a large woman for most of her life, had shrivelled, her failing body forced to survive without the machines that only minutes before had been keeping her alive.

She was my maternal grandmother, a quarter Cree, a quarter French, and the other half a smattering of European nations that no one had ever bothered to keep straight. My Auntie Nan, my wife, and I sat beside her as she died. We watched silently as her chest rose and fell at increasing intervals. At some point, when we were sure she was gone, her chest rose again.

“Is she dead?” Nan asked, a hint of gallows humour in the question.

Nan had a way of making even the worst things funny, a gift shared by most of our family. It was the propensity to laugh in the face of despair instead of succumbing to...