Levi stood silently over his Grandmother’s body. He didn’t want to believe she was gone, he desperately reached out and grasped her wrist feeling for a pulse but knowing he would find none. Her body was now completely devoid of heat and her mouth hung partially open as if to steal one last breath. The morning light reflected off her glasses momentarily concealing her lifeless gaze. Levi let her wrist fall back to the bed and let himself fall back into the chair behind him. He had known people who died before, he’d seen the process that a person goes through from being completely healthy to being a husk devoid of spirit and life. He’d worked with cadavers and been to funerals of friends and family but he had never in his life had to actually watch with his own eyes someone die. He had taken care of his grandmother for almost a month and he’d watched as her once ample and healthy form had faded and shriveled into the corpse that now lay before him. 

Jack, his grandmother’s chihuahua-pomeranian mix, was curled beside her with his one eye locked on Levi. Jack wasn’t an unintelligent dog, a moody one prone to holding grudges but not stupid. Levi knew and Jack knew that the woman who had cared for them for the past five years and who had helped raise Levi as a child had like so many other’s before her succumbed to her disease. The last thing he had said to her was that when she got better he would go with her to Italy to visit her hometown. She had smiled at him and held a week hand to his cheek, mumbling something in Italian he couldn’t understand. He had smiled back and merely whispered back ‘Si’. 

But now she was gone. As far as he knew she was the last of his family and she was gone. Levi reached across the bed and removed her glasses from her face, folding them gently and placing them on the nightstand. He carefully closed her eyelids and mouth with his hands and made to start wrapping her body in the bed sheets but Jack would not move from his spot beside her.

“She’s gone Jack, come on. Get off the bed,” Levi muttered grimly, but the dog only pricked his head up slightly at the sound of name, “Come on, off,” Levi said more urgently as he tugged at the sheets. But still the dog would not budge.

“Jack get off the bed now!” Levi yelled angrily, slamming a fist down on the bed beside Jack and causing the frightened dog to flee from the room tail between his legs. Levi watched him go. He truly felt bad for scaring Jack but his anger and pain would not let him apologize just yet. Levi sunk back into his chair and put his hands over his face trying to hid the sudden flow of tears. The first funeral he had been to was his grandfather’s funeral, his Opa’s funeral. He remembered crying but that was the only time he had ever cried for any of his family’s deaths until now. For many minutes Levi just sat there sobbing but he finally worked up the strength to go on with his grim task.

He picked up her wrapped up body like it was nothing, he knew that he wouldn’t have had the strength to do it when she was healthy and the thought of his grandmother’s subtle slip from life to death brought fresh tears to his eyes. The house was cold and dim, the morning sun barely peaking over the hills and penetrating the foggy air. Levi nearly slipped and fell down the stairs but he regained his footing and carefully carried his grandmother outside to the garden. At first he had planned on just outright leaving, he had packed his belongings a few days ago in anticipation of this moment, but as he put more thought into it he realized that he might need to come back here some day. And the as he thought about it more he felt guilty for not even considering giving her a proper burial. She was religious and he knew that she would have had the decency to give him a real funeral if she were in his shoes. 

There was a spot in the garden that Levi had prepared for her just yesterday. He had dug up an ugly yellow bush and planned to make a hole seven feet deep. He would bury her next to the roses and then plant the fig tree over her. His grandmother had always loved figs and he thought she might enjoy the thought of helping to bring life to something, even in death. When he was finished digging he made the sign of the cross over her body and began piling the dirt back into the hole. He uttered a short prayer that he had looked up in her bible and painstakingly translated into Italian. The whole thing seemed fake, unreal to him, both her death and the ceremony honoring it. Levi had never been religious and it all seemed bogus to him. If there were a god he would not have done this to the world, Levi thought to himself. But he knew that it would have meant a lot to his grandmother and quickly dispelled his irreligious thoughts.

Levi got up off his knees and brushed the dirt from his pants. There was still more work to be done.