I’ve been staring at my grandmother lately.

When I’m home, I sit near or around her, sometimes behind her. She sits all day in a wheelchair, asking for people alive and dead, forgetting things. And I’ve been trying to feel a connection with her because I know it’s important to have something tying us together that isn’t our failing memories. That is still a project in progress but this was a recent dream I had from all that staring and thinking grandmother thoughts.

—

I dreamed that my grandmother died, but not only that, my grandfather was alive and died too for the second time. I was the wife of a governor, burdened with obligations and recited to people who sat in front of a classroom for the class open day. My friends wanted to sit in the front but they couldn’t. I had to learn how to sing a song called Glory by holding an infant toddler and having him recite the lines to me.

We were in a school because the family had moved to the canteen. All of us. Then all the women in the family found out their children smoked, cousins and all. But my sister and I were the only girls who did. We decided to leave in sets of convoys.

In the car she was in (a truck actually), my grandmother tried to open a tin of biscuits. She opened it wrong, jolted, and the truck she was went into a manhole. The manhole caved in and the truck sunk underground. It was a smoky mess. I put my face into the manhole (it was suddenly only big enough for my face) and screamed out for my grandmother. I remembered thinking my grandfather was okay because he had died before. I only saw my cousin’s daughter walk out and look up. It’s the daughter that looks a lot like my father’s sister, even though it’s my mother’s family I’m dreaming about. She’s only a toddler. I knew the others were dead. She was crying, but her mouth was shut. Her eyes never left me.