A day after my grandmother was tucked into bed for the last time by her youngest daughter, my family sat around a long, heavy table in a small dining room where the walls stood just a few inches behind tall, wooden chairs. It was summer in Phoenix and the heat spoke from its fiery mouth that summer.

My Nana suddenly fell very ill with some vicious combination of Alzheimer’s, COVID, and a lifetime of physical ailments resulting from nearly nine decades of carrying an entire family on her back. She couldn’t walk on her own, and very quickly needed round-the-clock care.

It still amazes me that my tias and tios sprung to her bedside, filling in her needs by turning over her bed with fresh linens, feeding her, giving her drink, monitoring her medicine, and listening to any murmuring that she might utter over those last couple of weeks.

That day, there were a few people in that little house in the desert: the eldest brother Antonio; his first son, Michael; the eldest daughter, Yaya; and the youngest, my mother Rebecca. Antonio (Tio Tony) is a retired cowboy with a long, white mustache known for his tall cowboy hats and his taller tales. Many have sworn they’ve seen his mustache dance. He walks bow-legged from years on horseback and you’ll often see him gathering attention wearing cowboy boots that may as well have had spurs on the heels.

Sitting in the seat my grandfather sat, he was neither cowboy nor eldest brother that day. Tio Tony was a storyteller. That retired cowboy used the table as an instrument, banging it as he gave his story life, leaning onto it while wiping his face from laughing so hard. He was telling my family about hanging onto a merry-go-round with his friends.

An older boy had come and started spinning the wheel while he and his friend Omar were still on it, and their older classmate had decided not to hold anything back. Apparently this kid was strong, and Antonio and Omar soon tightened their grip on the bars, looking at each other for reassurance that they were both spinning faster and faster.  

Omar and Antonio soon found themselves white-knuckling the bars, and Omar recruited the help of his shoulders as he wrapped his biceps around the stainless steel pipes, even placing the hot bar underneath his chin so that he wouldn’t slip off. Of course, Omar’s small, sweating body weakened against the force of the rotation as his shoulders gave out, and then he only had his forearms, and soon after that he only had his wrists, and sooner his wrists tired, and even sooner he only had his hands, and finally his hands tired and he only had his fingers, and his fingers tired, too, and he had nothing.

His grip was freed from the spinning. And my tio watched as his friend careened into the air.

He rolled through the hard dirt of the red desert floor before getting up, dusting himself off, and yelling out to my tio “I’m okay!”  

And this is how I like to imagine my family holding on to my grandmother’s glorious exit from this world. They held on as tight as they could, but nothing could stop her from spinning into her next thing. I see my family, determined to stay until the ride stops spinning, looking at each other in the eyes, telling their brothers and sisters that everything was going to be okay when they knew it wouldn’t, and that they were okay even though they were scared. And somehow by sharing in each other’s presence in a dining room that would never again feed the woman resting just a few meters away, they could create something better than what was happening. They could laugh, and breathe into a story that begged them to let go.