text: I’m just about 25 years old, and each day when I’ve woken up for the past four months, I look more and more like my 90-year-old grandmother. That is, seven years ago, when she was home on hospice care, dying just about 10 days after her 90th birthday. I’m starting to look like that version of her: grey from head-to-toe, save for her tobacco-stained fingertips. Barely a flicker of life in her eyes. I close my eyes and the entire experience of her death feels like just yesterday. My mother would pick lilacs from the tree in the back yard to place them at her mother’s feet, and one by one I would crush the barely-purpled petals and rub the oil into her creped skin. I don’t know if I thought that fresh flowers and sheer will would keep my best friend from leaving this earth, but it didn’t work, regardless. I would stare up at her from being at her side, interlacing her cold fingers with mine, and I would just stare for hours. She rested with mouth agape and the sound of phlegm-filled death rattle, though truly just disturbing white noise, sounding like it was projecting at such a decibel I couldn’t hear myself think. I would recite for her poetry in tender whispers, which I think now was more in effort to keep myself sane than to help her. All the while my entire soul was violently fracturing watching her existence crumble into nothing. March 30th, 2011, ten days after her 90th birthday, she took her final breath. Of course, I wasn’t right there for it. I sensed it was coming and like a god damn coward I excused myself to the bathroom at the last second. Sitting bare-assed on that freezing porcelain I heard my mother’s wails from down the hall. As a searing sense of grief shot through me in that moment, I thought, the things I would give to sit in this ugly pink bathroom again, but instead of a daughter crying out for her mother, I could hear the People’s Court blasting from the living room TV while she dragged on a cigarette at the dining room table, taking her blood pressure meds along with a lukewarm coffee (black) and a handful of cheese puffs. Kept her “regular,” she claimed. Part of her charm. This wasn’t the first person I had lost, but my grandmother’s death brings me to my knees easier than the rest of them. One, two, three years after, I still couldn’t really talk about it. If I did, I’d get choked up, not be able to speak without risk of blubbering. And I hate to blubber. I didn’t think I could ever be okay again. Finally, about six years in, just about last April, I really started to feel “okay” with it all. It wasn’t, of course, like she died tragically young or in some great catastrophe. She was a poetic, hard-working, resilient woman who had fought her way through life for 90 years before expiring. Many would call that I triumph. I should be proud. I guess I was... am. But, once I started being able to think about her without crying, look at old photo albums, watch old home movies, something... I don’t know. I felt myself scratching the surface of a grief I could barely comprehend. They say that as human beings, our sense of smell has a way of triggering memories and feelings of nostalgia better than any of our other senses. It’s sometimes bitter sweet, the smell of an old lover’s cologne, or stumbling upon the scent of a familiar family recipe. For me, there’s that smell of lingering, stale cigarette smoke. But it’s not all cigarette smoke, I can specifically pick out my grandmother’s brand that she loyally puffed for decades. In the few years just after her death, I couldn’t smell it at all. Occasionally, my father would claim he smelt something, but we chalked it up to the fact that anything we wanted to keep of my grandmothers was moved into our own home since we were preparing to sell her house. It was like when I was little, and I would sleep over the house and bring my stuffed animals, and when I’d go home then next day, the cigarette smells had infiltrated Mr. Bunny and Mrs. Bear. It was my favorite thing because it reminded me of her, of that home-away-from-home. Now we had boxes of her around the house, and those things inevitably smelt of lingering tobacco after forty-something years of exposure. It wasn’t until maybe year four or five that I began smelling it every once in a while, but I didn’t attribute it to her. Though sobering and melancholic and would cause me to pause and smirk to myself, I would move on with my day and assume someone had chosen to take their smoke break by my car, or something I kept of hers shifted in the closet. Then around last May, when I had grown more accustomed and welcoming of the phantom scents, I noticed they became more constant. I felt like the smell was... following me? I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense, but none of this does. It started to get to the point where I thought someone in my house had taken up smoking. I assumed it wasn’t either of my parents, who had quit decades ago. My brother swore he’d never touch the things, and I made a strict promise to my grandmother I never would either. I cornered him anyway, but he denied it. He didn’t smell of it either, and he claimed he hadn’t smelt a bit of it around at all. I started to believe I was going a bit crazy, but I didn’t know where to turn. So, I just decided to accept it as my new normal. It wasn’t the worst, I supposed. As the months went on, and the year progressed from Spring, to Summer, to Fall, my body began to ache with the change in weather. Assuming I was coming down with a cold or the flu, I thought nothing of it. Then as Fall became Winter, it was hard to get around. My knees and shoulders were stiff, my hands weak, and everything seemed to worsen when it rained. My lungs felt damp and heavy. I booked an appointment to see my doctor, who then sent me for a round of tests for autoimmune disorders, cancers, and anything that would cause a rapid decline in health. Nothing came back that inferred a diagnosis, my white-cell counts were normal. Sometimes that just happens, though, as autoimmune diseases are tricky and often present in multiples, so they prescribed me some general medications to cover a variety of symptoms. Though things seemed to help for a while, it seemed to just slow whatever this is, treating only the signs and not the cause. I’ve continued to decline for months. A few weeks ago, around the beginning of July, a coworker pulled me aside. She’s a good friend and had been checking in with me occasionally as it was visibly obvious I was in poor health. She pulled me into the lunch room, closed the door, and reached for my hand. Interlacing my cold fingers with hers. “Can I meddle?” she asked. “You don’t normally ask first,” I replied, smirking. My yellowed teeth peering out from my bloated lips. “Why are you smoking, especially when you have no fucking clue what is going on with you?” “What’s that?” I asked, leaning closer as she was a bit hard to hear. I heard her, but I was frankly shocked by her question. I’d never touched a cigarette in my life. “Come on, Kate. Everyone smells it on you. We’re all so worried about your health that nobody has the guts to pester you about it, but it’s really starting to get offensive.” I had become so accustomed to the scent that I didn’t notice it was on me. “I... I don’t know.” I started to panic and pulled my hand away. “Tell Eric I have to leave for the day. Tell him I’m sorry I’m taking more time, he can take it out of next year.” I got up from the table and made my way to the door. Had it been even just a year earlier, I would have been able to move swiftly. But now, I stood and waited for my joints to unlock and my atrophied muscles to propel my skeleton forward. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...” she said as she helped me with the door. “It’s fine... I mean, you didn’t... I’m just not well. Thanks for your concern,” I coughed at her as a spoke, clearing the foul mucus from my throat. I patted her arm and avoided eye contact and made my way back to my desk. Once I reached the cubicle after what felt like an eternity of reaching for door knobs and walls to steady my balance, I started to collect my things to leave for the day. As I reached for my phone to place it in my bag, I unlocked it to check for any new texts or calls from the doctors or my mother with news of test results. I was desperate for the answers nobody has. Instead, I fumbled around with my arthritic fingers and opened my photos by mistake. I froze. The most recent photo was showing as a picture of my grandmother I took on the last day she was partially conscious. I remember because it was a photo taken of the same day when I answered the phone next to her hospice bed, and upon my saying “hello” to the caller, she thought I was speaking to her. She woke from her near-death state to say, “Hi, Kate,” and fell back asleep. They were her last words. It’s not something you’d forget. Sitting still, I studied the picture. She was still a bit pink and her eyes were open, but she was already one foot out the door. I locked the screen and threw my phone in my purse and made my way for the exit. I made it to my car and started the engine. I struggled to reach over my left shoulder to grab the seat belt and pull it across my hunched body. After a few tries, I clicked it down and reached up to put the car in reverse. My eye caught the half-dozen vanilla-scented trees that hung from my mirror, but all I smelled were cigarettes. In that same second my eyes caught the figure of my grandmother in the back seat staring back at me in the rear-view. My heart instantly beat up into my throat as I shook and froze all at once, failing to scream even though my mouth flew open to do so. After a second or two the scream came, but she was gone. I started to cry as my hands came to my face. My wailing sounded just like that of my mother’s on March 30th seven years ago. It echoed in my memories as it bounced off my windshield and back into my warped face. As I rubbed my hands down my face, I felt my fingernail catch on a wrinkle in my cheek. A warm liquid trickled down my chin as I felt around for where it went. Leaning forward to inspect the object, I pulled my hand up closer to my eyes and saw a nicotine-stained finger nail that had peeled off as easily as wet cardboard. I could feel the dark, gritty blood pooling in the vacant space on top of my weathered finger. I passed out. The next time I woke up, I was in the hospital. Apparently, my colleague found me in the car in the parking lot of my job, doubled-over with my head on the steering wheel, my bloody finger nail in my loose fist. My doctors cannot explain why I am dying at 25. My psychotherapist cannot explain why I constantly smell cigarettes. I cannot explain to my coworkers that I have never smoked, no matter how many times I try. I do not know how that photo from seven years and three phones ago wound up as my most recent photo in my camera roll. I cannot explain why I have spider veins running down my legs. I have no clue as to why my finger nails have yellowed and have begun falling off. I cannot explain this rattle in the back of my throat. I cannot explain why the days are so long, but the years seem so short. I turned 25 eight days ago, and I’ve spent the last three weeks in the hospital. They are talking about sending me home on hospice, that maybe resting at home will make me “better.” Lately, somehow, the smell of cigarettes that has haunted me for three years has now been replaced with the subtle scent of fresh lilacs. I am so tired. I hope my mother brings me flowers.