The End is a series about end-of-life issues. The ants were a portent, I thought. This was all my fault. My grandmother was going to die in this filthy hospital, far from everything she knew and loved, because of me and my insistence on medical intervention.
A few days before Christmas of , my mother called me in New York from Kerala in India to tell me my year-old grandmother, Laxmi, had fallen on her way to the bathroom.
We can look after her here. I had moved to America in and missed the deaths of everyone I loved. A penniless grad student, I had lived the immigrant nightmare — first my father, then my grandfather had died without me beside them. Their passing had been reported to me from 8, miles away, over the phone.
This time around, I was determined to be there. On the flight over I thought of the ritual we had. I always felt as if she had been waiting in that precise spot for the years it had taken me to come back. Her pupils hardly moved. I had ordered the rickety ambulance that brought my grandmother to the hospital. As I watched the ants scatter, I wondered at my own motives. Was I hoping that the doctors would revive her enough so that she would know I had come?
That I loved her enough to fly halfway across the world? Had my guilt at missing those other deaths led me to make such drastic amends? I had no answers. She would have been mortified. I had never seen my grandmother appear in public in anything other than a cotton voile sari in her favorite pale blue or lavender, her knee-length hair in a soft bun. She had the classical beauty one saw in the faces of the goddesses in the vivid calendars that hang in Indian stores. In the hospital they had her in a cheap nightie, purple with garish pink flowers, its neckline gaping.
