Guilt - Mark Maynard

I’d flown to Hawaii with my eighty one year old grandmother so that we could say “goodbye” to her daughter, my aunt. The lung cancer had metastacized in her brain and I was shocked to see her eyes – permanently crossed and unable to focus clearly on me as I sat in her room taking stock of the end of her life.

I let the two of them have a little time together and I hung out in the front room with Darling, the enormous hospice worker who’d grown up on Kuai. We chatted about how little time my aunt had left on this earth and how the girls were doing everything they could to keep her comfortable. I knew this to be the case as I’d driven to the pharmacy in Hilo earlier that day and picked up enough morphine to relax a beef cow on the way to the slaughterhouse. They didn’t even make me sign for it.

When my grandmother needed another cigarette I helped her out to the far side of the porch (I’d already broken up a mother/daughter conversation earlier when my grandmother lit up too close to the open doorway and my aunt caught a whiff of the smoke):

“Mom, since I’m in here dying of lung cancer, do you think you could wait until you are all the way outside and the door is closed before lighting up a cigarette at my house?”

When I came back inside, my aunt called me back to her bedroom.

She had been waiting for me. Sitting on the bed next to her was a cardboard shirt box and a large manilla envelope. Inside were the hand drawn illustrations and a manuscript for the children’s book she had been working on for years. I hadn’t seen the drawings (many which had scared me) since I was a child. The sketches of the polar bears were beautifully done, but the bearded, heavily browed, green-skinned “Grow” had always set uneasily with me.

I had never had anyone make a dying request of me before, but it’s best to be blunt. My aunt knew of my aspirations to be a published writer and thus she bequeathed her book to me. I sat there and looked in her eyes as best I could and told her that I would be honored to try and find an agent and a publisher that would get her book out there in the children’s market. Then, after saying a last good bye, I put it carefully in my suitcase and brought it home to the mainland. The dusty shirt box that contains my aunt’s dreams, the pinnacle of a vastly creative life, sits under my bed and collects dust. I have done nothing with it other than occasionally slip it out and look at the pages.