There she lay in her adopted bed, covered by thin, foreign sheets and surrounded by machines that's cold humming and buzzing just bounced off the even colder gray walls. Her fingers were laced together, resting upon her swollen stomach, swollen from sickness that poured through her body. Sickness that wouldn't evaporate and couldn't be dammed.

Here eyes were open, but to say she was awake would be lying. Her eyes were like stones, which is how I imagine they felt to her. Boulders that even one healthy man alone could not move, certainly not a weary seventy-year old woman whose mind had been torn apart for decades, her body just now catching up with the hopeless wreckage.

My father walked to her side without any knowledge of the situation apparent on his face. He bent down awkwardly for a hug, an act that he obviously was not accustomed to. Hugs were not to be given out impulsively, they were to be exhibited almost as scarcely as crying, this was the Caines' Family Philosophy.

As they knotted their arms around one another I felt the air of the room turn to steam, searing my throat with each wispy breath I inhaled. My vision became opaque; the tears in my eyes having constructed a wall that now blocked my sight. I knew that I couldn't let them spill. As much as I wanted to let them go, release my vocal chords from their binding position, I knew that I just couldn't.

To accomplish this task I had to stop my mind; I need to make it numb. I had to forget each thought almost as quickly as it would come, like windshield wipers slapping away dangerous rain drops.

I had to forget that my father's mother was lying before us, death smothering her. I had to ignore the signs of pain my dad let slip as he looked over her face so pale and drawn in, of which the lines were deep like canyons.

I had to force myself to overlook what pained me most, my guilt. I had never tried hard enough to reach her. Instead of working through my ignorance of how to talk to her, I had just given up.

I had spent so much time observing her, like a mathematical equation that actually had a solution. How much had been wasted trying to figure out the abnormalities of her mind? How often had I thought myself short-changed for not having a regular' grandmother? Why had my father and his sisters been, in a sense, cheated out of a mother? How long had I resented her for things that she couldn't change about herself? Logically I knew that she didn't choose

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