kasey thornton

another stupid note from a girl to her dying grandmother

You are dying down the hallway. “Actively” dying, says the Hospice nurse, which sounds absurd since you haven’t really moved in days. I’m in your bathroom cross-legged on the floor, cabinets and drawers emptied around me—your smells, sprays, powders, pink combs strangled with strands of silver hair.

“Take whatever you want,” Papaw had said to me. “You wear makeup, and I don’t even know what half of it is, and I don’t want to mess with it.”

Like I’m doing him a favor by stealing from a dead woman. An almost-dead woman who is, apparently, actively trying to be dead.

An old boom box has the Gaithers singing “Down to the River” in the bedroom, and your daughters are groaning along, holding your hands on either side. There are pamphlets on the kitchen table that describe what the final days will be like. Death rattles. Second winds. Confusion. Hallucinations. I keep rereading them, grossly fascinated and ashamed of it. 

Until recently, when you called Papaw’s name, he would rush to your side and say, “I’m here. Come on back to me, baby. I’m here,” so the Hospice nurse took him out onto the porch and told him to stop, you’ve got other places to be, other things to do, and you need permission to go, and you can’t go if the love of your life keeps calling you back.

A few hours ago, I turned the radio off and laid in bed with you, staring at your face, your thin lips parted, eyes open toward the dim light coming in through the curtains. For once in my goddamned life—damned, darned, sorry—I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I said nothing, and you whispered “Well, isn’t that good, baby girl, I’m proud of you, that’s great” even though all I was doing was lying there, existing in a world-between-worlds where the dust fell through the window’s sunbeams, and I became more aware of the silences between your broken breaths than the breaths themselves.

You never seemed to spend much money on yourself, but I see now that you were signed up for all kinds of delivery beauty services on the sly. I push dozens of sample packets of lotion, creams, sunscreens, and anti-aging serums into a pile on the bathroom floor. I’ll take them to a homeless shelter later. You’d like that.

I pull out your flowered makeup bag and decide, before unzipping it, that I want it. I dump its contents onto the rug in front of the sink. A pale lipstick in a golden tube rolls onto the tile, but I catch it before it flees from me.

“Go to Jesus, baby,” I hear Papaw say in the other room, exactly like the Hospice nurse told him, exactly as he’d rehearsed. “Go on to Jesus, now.”

“Go to Jesus, Mama,” Mama says. “Don’t stay here with us. It’s okay. Go to Jesus.”

The first three fingers on my right hand start shaking when I pick up a large case of eye shadow. You’ve scraped the soft pinks, nudes, and light browns until they're nearly empty, so I touch my finger to the bright teal and drag it onto one of my eyelids. My pointer and middle fingers press against the hot pink powder, and I look too long at the way it fills the swirling creases of my fingerprint.

So I can’t say you didn’t leave me anything, but Jesus, what am I supposed to do with this? Your parting gifts are crimson, orange, purple, navy, lime? You’re taking all the piety and obedience with you, leaving me nothing but boldness and the unbearable feeling that I’m supposed to do something with it. 

I get it in my head to run to your side and ask—wait, please, there are things I must know, things you don’t know, just wait—but there’s a quiet, collective groan from your bedside, and I know what it means. We’re not in the world-between-worlds anymore. Now it’s just a bedroom with the crumbled bodies of my family orbiting around the empty space where an imploding star once was, and I am standing in that doorway with a turquoise bruise on one eye and magenta staining my fingers like blood. 

Kasey Thornton writes literary fiction about the culture of the American South with a focus on religion, family, mental illness, abuse, and grief. After earning her BA in English from Elon University, she attended both the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and North Carolina State University for her MFA in Fiction. During this time, she had the opportunity to study with Wilton Barnhardt, Nina de Gramont, John Kessel, Cassie Kircher, Rebecca Lee, Jill McCorkle, Drew Perry, and others. Thornton lives with fellow author Kevin Kauffmann in Durham County, NC, where members of her family have resided for over two hundred years. Her work has been featured in the Masters Review, Colonnades Literary & Art Journal, and Apeiron Review.