Yielding

Darlene McLeod Yielding

My grandmother always had sensitive skin. Her flesh crawled at the thought of wearing even the softest wool; she swathed herself in ancient cottons, washed and worn to gossamer delicacy. She could bear no adhesives, her skin violently rejecting medical tape and bandages with welts in livid shades. Her bathroom always smelled of Dove soap, one of the few she could tolerate, and even a necklace chain or a coarse cloth could damage her skin, rubbing her neck raw or abrading her face. But for all that painful susceptibility, so much more could she enjoy what was soft, what was smooth, what was gentle. Sensitivity allows not only pain but the most beautiful of sensation.

For 25 years she lived a widow, and for 26 years she fought cancer in her skin. No one battles melanoma for so long, but she did. One constant from my late childhood until having children of my own was my grandmother’s cancer. Over and over again, she and that corruption reached a détente despite increasingly bad odds and while her cancer was never truly defeated, neither, though, was she. They abided one another, unwelcome companions, each quietly pursuing the other’s destruction. And while the skin of her body was distorted by cancer and the scars of surgeries in her ongoing efforts to outdo the treachery of her own flesh, her lovely face remained untouched, affected only by her years. As I entered her house my grandmother sat in a wooden rocking chair, cushioned and braced on its arms, wrapped in a housecoat. So strange, to walk in without her usual lilting, Maritime greeting; a stroke had stolen away her words. I leaned in to hug her, kissing her pale cheek, and it was soft and yielding, her skin like tissue, dry and thin as a whisper, a fragile barrier between her and the outside world. Her body shook in desperate, silent sobs as I gently folded my arms around her. When you’ve waited so long that fear loses its grip on you, the moment of change—when anticipation becomes arrival—comes abruptly, and it is somehow both more and less horrible than expected. I sat in my grandmother’s living room that day and thought, “This is awful and wrong” and also “This isn’t so bad.” Because it was, and it was.

As we age, our skin bears the record of our living. Sun damage and scars from our revelry and misfortune, stretch marks from our growth, and always wrinkles counting our days. Gradually time marches across our surface and leaves its footprints—our skin thins, it weakens, becoming increasingly vulnerable to incursion, and we wrinkle, our surface becom

ing a network of texture, a visible manifestation of our aging body’s increasing liability. Our skin is our largest organ, measuring roughly 20 square feet, a small room to house our living. The outer layers protect us, while the innermost layer, a thick membrane of connective tissue, acts as a cushion, protecting us from damage and housing our nerve endings. And as the nerves in our skin communicate inwardly with us about our physical experiences, our skin also serves as an outward part of our identity—we cannot look on the face of another without appreciating their skin. The curve of a cheek, the sensation of the touch of a hand: how we look, how our skin feels, plays an undeniable role in our interactions with one another. Our skin is the barrier between our body and the rest of the world, between us and other, and as we age that barrier lessens. Our skin degrades, replacing cells at ever-decreasing rates, and the protection they afford becomes less complete. The division, while still defined, decreases and is more easily breached. The body’s outward resistance is compromised, and we are made vulnerable, susceptible. My grandmother had always said she did not want to linger. Decades earlier, looking my mother firmly in the eye as my grandfather lay in a hospital ICU bed—a ventilator breathing for him as the pulmonary fibrosis increasingly stiffened his lungs—she said, “Never. I do not want this. Never.” Maybe there was an enduring strength in her body that refused to submit the night of her eventual stroke. Or perhaps the strength was in her spirit, that fibre of her being that made her her and had, every time, compelled her to try one more treatment rather than seeking palliative care. Until that sudden, wordless Saturday morning, every one of those lastditch efforts had been more or less successful, another time for my mother and I to shrug our shoulders and say in tones of amazement, “Well, I guess this isn’t it.”

On that day when I visited my grandmother, she was ready to go, her Do Not Resuscitate order signed and filed years before. Her physician, a refreshingly forthright and accommodating woman, came to the house that Sunday afternoon, my grandmother’s file in hand, and looked her in the eye. “I know this isn’t what you wanted,” she said. “You would have preferred to not wake up,” and my grandmother, leaning forward in her rocking chair, eyes wide and intent—and understanding everything—nodded with wordless resignation. Years of struggle with a body unable to be well had exhausted my grandmother’s resources, and now she was silenced. She was done, prepared to cease her effort and concede to rest as her husband and daughter already had. And just as her spirit readied itself to surrender, her body made ready to consign itself to the earth.

My mother did not get old. Oldness was a privilege denied to her—that she looked old in her final days was a lie perpetrated by sickness and pain, sketched across her aspect. The outward vulnerability that marked her mother’s aging was, for my own mother, an inward one, the compromise of her body internal, hidden and unknown. The year of her cancer began with a lie. Or not a lie, precisely, but a pretense, one we would carry with us to the end. For that year, we pretended: she would survive, and I believed her. That pretense sat between us like a veil, thin and translucent but of enough substance to prevent our ever fully reaching one another. She never expressed her feelings about her brain cancer to me, and I, in turn, did likewise. Our relationship had been shaped by feelings, emotions deep and compelling and shared, but somehow, in the face of fear so great, of loss so complete and shattering, we said nothing. To say aloud what was in our thoughts would be to invoke what we most feared, so we kept silent lest our words make manifest horror. We replaced the health and longevity and time that

had once and should still have been hers with a thick skin of silence. To break through that shell, to pierce that skin would require an act of extreme vulnerability, a willingness to see and have seen the terror that lay beneath. I saw her cry only once that year, just before six the morning of her final brain surgery. That was our one moment of unfettered candor. I arrived at the hospital unexpectedly— even I didn’t know that I would be there. I had set an early alarm the night before, unsure if I would go, but woke before it sounded, desperate to see her. I found her that November morning sitting in a wheelchair in the surgical intake room. “I found you,” I whispered gently, playfully, as I came from behind her to see her face light up in recognition and joy, and briefly the veil between us fell away. Then, and only then, we wept together, my arms around her, she clinging to me in a strange reversal, and for that moment I was her support, her shield. Afterward, she could no longer be alone for any length of time—her body weakened, her memory dampened, she would forget her own infirmity and try to walk, falling instead. I stayed with her one evening and we sat in the dimly lit den, the family schnauzer on my lap, my mother reclining on the hospital bed that now dominated the small room. I asked her if she wanted to watch something, but she declined, preferring the quiet. I trimmed her nails for her, brought her dinner, and waited silently, her eyes closed and resting or open and sedately staring. It was early December and I thought, “Now. We should talk now.” But I did not want to rush into the end or steal whatever semblance of peace or ordinariness that evening may have held for her, and the hours passed wordlessly. Weeks later she sat in her wheelchair in my apartment, my daughters, three and six years old, circling just outside her reach, awkward and unsure. I sat on the carpet, trying not to stare, desperately attempting to maintain that

pretense of normalcy for one more day—for her benefit or for mine, I couldn’t say. In the eleven months since her initial diagnosis, this had been her aim; a final, happy Christmas was what she’d wanted and that would be my gift for her. We wheeled her to the dinner table where she sat next to her mother for the last time, tucking into a plate of turkey and stuffing and her cherished cranberry sauce. I have no memory of whether my grandmother ate, only of her gaze lingering on her daughter’s face. She would furtively turn away toward my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, and hastily, with a shaking hand, brush tears away from a cheek webbed with the lines of years and living before turning back to my mother. Her eyes hungrily preserved the look of her—the curve of her forehead, her hazel eyes, her slightly snub nose. If my mother was aware of my grandmother’s silent tears, she did not betray it, and we said nothing of what was coming, of what already sat alongside us and our sorrow at that table. Her body relented, not gradually—as her mother’s would years later—but rapidly, an accelerated leaving that took us by surprise only weeks after that Christmas dinner. It robbed us of what few months we thought we had to come to terms, to accept what was unacceptable and maybe, if we were willing, to be honest with each other. We left years of words unsaid. We cloaked ourselves in silence and called it strength, but what value is there in a strength that robs us of the honesty that comes with vulnerability? Some things are unavoidable. Death comes to us all and if we are very fortunate, indeed, it comes when we are old and full of days. That our bodies diminish and degrade may seem undignified, a harsh and cruel punishment of time, but there is a wisdom in how the body gives way, relinquishing first its fortitude and then its matter to the earth. We are such fragile creatures, a miracle of proteins and stardust delicately stitched together and when, in time, we can no longer contain ourselves the frame succumbs. When that physical resiliency

is lacking, we may choose to erect a false shell of stoicism, a carapace of pretend, where instead we could choose softness, a yielding to each other as the body yields its substance. I remember my grandmother’s cheek, the paper-thinness of it, the gentle submission as I held my own against hers, mine young and smooth, pink with liveliness and freckled from the sun, hers white and translucent, crimped and pale. It seemed there was very little holding her together and there was so little between us I felt her flesh would simply surrender to my own. What was left to divide us? What division can there be, in the end?