Years later, I was home from New York one October when I went to see my grandmother. Over the past few months, she had been "deteriorating." Mentally. In the span of six months she'd gone from living on her own, to being in a nursing home. Or, "assisted living," as they call it now. She was in Central Baptist Village. Not that she's Baptist. But it was closer to my mother's house than any Catholic place, and my grandmother agreed to it.

Moving her was hard on my mother. Not just the packing up of my grandmother's house, winnowing down her possessions, but the stress and strain of being responsible for her. I'd hear it in our phone calls.

That morning, my mother asks me to take an afghan to my grandmother.

"I think she needs an extra blanket," she says.

The afghan is the same one that we had in the basement when I was a boy, the one my brother and I wrapped ourselves in when we watched re-runs on the TV—our Zenith. My grandmother knit the afghan years ago, for my mother. A wedding gift. Over the years, my grandmother has knit too many afghans to count. She makes them as wedding gifts. Somewhere in my mother's basement there is one she knit for me. "I can't wait forever, honey-child," she told me, when I caught her knitting mine. "You're forty. The way you're going, who knows how long it'll be?"

On my way to see her, I stop at Fannie May, the candy store. I get a small, mixed assortment. A blustery, chill day. Fall, advancing on Chicago. Leaves—yellow, rain-battered, pulled down in the night—cling to cars and the damp blacktop.

I find her in The Common Room. A bunch of grey tufts and bald, liver-spotted heads seated in a semi-circle. At the center, a heavy woman in white pants and a purple smock. The woman is leading them in group exercises, getting them to raise their arms over their heads, move their limbs in small circles.

"Let's repeat our vowels," she says, "A, E, I, O, U."

From the group, a murmuring. "Ehh… Eee… Eye… Oh… Ewe…"

With each vowel, they lower their arms a few inches. They look like aged mariners, sending semaphore. Signaling to ships in the mists somewhere out at sea.

Eighty, ninety years ago, these people are sitting in a schoolroom, in the same messy half-circle, being lead through the same drill — minus the arm exercises. And here they are now, on the other side of life. Trying to hold on to what they learned so long ago.

I walk over and touch her shoulder. I'm prepared for her not to recognize me. Her eyes, all exaggerated behind her glasses, try to focus on me. She takes my hand.

"Michael…"

We walk the long hallway to her room. She leans on her walker, plows ahead, slowly. I walk beside her, my hand on the small of her curved back. She's like an old car — she drifts left so I have to ease her away from the wall.

"Look at me," she says. "I'm just a skeleton. I should go trick-or-treating. I'd scare 'em all good, I would."

Her room has two single-beds, hospital types, made to be raised-up, angled. The bed near the door is un-made, waiting. On it, the Sunday Tribune sits un-read. The bed beneath the window is my grandmother's. On the nightstand are two photo albums my brother's son made for her. "Moments of her life," he told me they were, "to help her remember." My nephew is eight.

To the right of the bed, there's an armoire. On it, someone has taped a piece of paper, computer-printed:

ESTELLE HUDAK
FAMILY DOES OWN LAUNDRY

She maneuvers to the bed. There's a wheelchair in the corner and I pull it up, sit toe-to-toe with her.

"I brought you a trick-or-treat," I say, and I place the box on her lap.

For a minute, she holds the box and gazes at it, then hands it back to me.

"Can I have one?" she asks.

I give her a chocolate cream. She raises it to her mouth. A tongue emerges, takes the candy. Like a tortoise I saw at the zoo. She bites, almost in slow motion, chews so slowly I swear I can feel her tasting it.

She asks, "Why'd you bring me candy?"

"I told you," I say. "Halloween."

She says, "Is it Halloween? I can't remember."

As I put the candy on the nightstand, I notice a piece of paper. "That's my bed-time reading," she says to me.

It's a pamphlet from Resurrection Cemetery. Inside, there is a form filled out. My grandfather's burial record:

Name: Frank Hudak
Grave: 3
Lot: 13
Block: 21
Section: 59

"That's going to be my address soon," my grandmother says. "I read that every night before I go to bed so that if I don't wake up, I know where to go. I don't want Saint Peter putting me on the wrong bus. Grave four. Right next to my little Franta. Sixty-seven years we were married, Mike."

Her head droops down, chin against her chest. I reach out, my hand under her chin. Raise her head. Tears are in her eyes and I wipe them with my fingers.

"I wish it were over, Mike. People weren't meant to live this long."

"Did you take your pills today?" I say to her.

"Yes."

Ninety-five years old, and she's on anti-depressants. What's the world come to? I think.

Truth is, she never got over my grandfather's dying. That whole year after, she'd sit at the kitchen table and cry, stare out the shutters.

She reaches out, takes my hands in hers.

"Warm my hands," she says. "They're cold."

She slips her hands inside my cupped hands. Her hands like two small mammals burrowing inside a hollow, hunkering down against each other, against the coming freeze.

"I used to worry about you," she says, "but I don't anymore. You're over the wall."

"What's the wall?"

"Fear."