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My Grandfather Oliver said that his heart hurt. We thought that it was my grandmother who he was talking about and it probably was, but it was also that his physical heart, the muscle in his chest, hurt. Breathing had become difficult for him after she died. It was probably difficult for him before she died too, but none of us had noticed it then, and he hadn't said anything about it or about any pain in his chest. I'm not sure that he had noticed it before either. We were all so focused on my grandmother back then. We could only pay attention to one dying person at a time.

My grandfather went to the doctor and the doctor told him that his heart valves were clogged and weak, that there wasn't enough blood being pumped out of his heart and through the rest of his body, that he needed to have a heart valve operation, but that he wasn't strong enough to have the operation then. The doctor gave him an oxygen tank to help make breathing easier for him, to keep him alive, and to maybe help him get his body and his heart strong enough again so that he wouldn't die if they could perform the heart valve operation on him.

My grandfather's heart had become weak. He had given everything in it away to my grandmother as she was dying. The lack of blood pumping into and out of his heart also meant that he would sometimes black out. His brain would stop when there wasn't enough blood flowing through it and he would be dead for a little bit.

He said that he would wake up again and try to remember where he was and what year it was. He said that his chest would hurt and that his head felt as if somebody were squeezing it and that he would try to remember where my grandmother was. I'm still not sure if my grandfather separated the physical and the emotional pain.

It was because of this that my mother hired a woman to help my grandfather out at home. The woman was supposed to come to his house for a few hours of each day. She was supposed to clean the house up, do the laundry, do the dishes, and do any other household chores that she could. She was supposed to make lunch and then make a dinner that my grandfather could warm up to eat later that night.

But my grandfather said that the woman didn't clean right, that the food that she cooked tasted wrong, and that he wouldn't let her come back to his house. He didn't say that she didn't do any of these things the way that my grandmother would have done them, but that was probably what he meant.

I think that it made my grandfather's heart hurt more, that other woman doing those daily things in the house that he had shared with my grandmother for all those days and for all those years. My mother tried to hire another woman to help out, but my grandfather wouldn't even let her come into the house. The woman said that he wouldn't get up to come to the front door. She said that at first she thought that he was hurt, but that when she cupped her hands around the sides of her eyes and looked hard through the window that he was just sitting there in his chair looking at what looked like an old picture album. My grandfather was hurt, but none of us could get inside of him—not the doctor, not the pictures, not his sister or daughter or any of his grandchildren—to make it stop.

My grandfather couldn't keep himself enough alive then. He needed the oxygen tanks filled up and changed. He needed the food that other people made. My mother tried to help him when he would let her. She worked fulltime and also had her own house to keep up, but she would go over to his house every night after work after my grandmother had died. She would pick up a few things, make sure that my grandfather had something to eat, make more food for him to warm up, and make sure that there was enough oxygen for him inside his oxygen tank. My grandfather didn't want my mother doing these things for him either, but she had keys to his house and could let herself in.

This wasn't just that my grandfather didn't want other people doing these things for him. I think that he knew that he was going to die soon too. He didn't think that he needed to keep the house clean anymore. He didn't think that he was going to be alive long enough for it to get too dirty. He didn't think that he needed to do the dishes anymore either. My grandmother and he had accumulated so many glasses and bowls and plates and so much silverware over the years that they had been married that he thought that it would be weeks before he didn't have something clean to eat with or on.

My grandfather also wouldn't buy any new clothes for himself. He put cardboard inside his shoes to cover up the holes in the soles of them and he wore two pairs of socks so that the holes in his socks didn't show through either. There were places in the shoulders and the elbows of his dress shirts that had worn so thin that you could see his skin through the weave of the cloth. The shirt cuffs and the shirt collars were frayed. The cuffs of his suit jackets were frayed too and some of the pockets were missing or torn.

He sewed patches on the elbows on his suit jackets and on the knees of his suit pants. There were holes in them from when he had blacked out and fallen down. But my grandfather wouldn't wear any of the new clothes that we bought for him. He left them inside their shopping bags with the price tags on them. Somebody returned them to the store after he died.

My Grandfather Oliver believed that living people can communicate with the spirits of people who are dead. He believed that he had witnessed this when he was a child and lived with his Uncle L.P. who was a spiritualist medium.

He said that his Uncle L.P. could do what was called a corner séance. His Uncle L.P. would sit in the corner of a room that had all its curtains pulled closed so that no outside light could get into it. An oil lamp would be placed on the floor in the middle of the room, though the light from it had to be kept low and shaded so that Uncle L.P. didn't go blind or die.

Uncle L.P. would play a trumpet until his eyes rolled back inside his head. He would stop playing and start to shake. The voices of other people would start to come out of his mouth or the spirits would start to form out of the light from the oil lamp and speak through their own mouths.

The spirits and the voices would say how and when and where they died. They would answer any of these questions about any other dead people and they would take messages or questions back to the spirits of other dead people.

My grandfather said that when his Uncle L.P. would begin to get tired, the voices of the spirits would start to get quiet or their forms would start to dissolve into a weak fog that seemed to slip away down into the floorboards. Uncle L.P. would collapse down into his chair in the corner of the room and his eyes would roll back out of his head. Somebody would put the oil lamp out and Uncle L.P. would stand up. They would open the curtains back up and somebody would bring a glass of buttermilk and a plate of warm biscuits with honey on them into the room so that Uncle L.P. could eat and drink to get his strength and his voice back.

It doesn't matter to me if this were truth or fiction. It only matters to me that it seemed true to my grandfather. He believed it and it was a comfort to him. It helped him to make sense of the death of his mother and of his father, the death of his daughter, and then the death of his wife. He believed that he could talk to all of them after they had died.

This is part of the reason that my grandfather learned how to communicate with the dead too. He would write questions down on little slips of paper and the spirits would answer him in the form of knocks on the walls or on the wood furniture. One knock meant no. Two knocks meant they didn't know. Three knocks meant yes.

My grandfather told my grandmother about the code of knocks and asked her to come back to him to talk to him if she died before he did. My grandfather said that there was a lot of knocking on their bedroom furniture after my grandmother died, but that he never could understand all of it. He believed that the knocking was her, that her presence was meant to be reassuring, and that she was telling him that there was another world after the one that he was living in then.

But the house that my grandmother and grandfather lived in was old too. It made lots of sounds at night—the foundation settling down, the wind in the chimney, maybe footsteps on the floorboards, maybe a knocking sound in the walls.

I tried to communicate with my Grandfather Oliver after he died. I wrote questions down on little slips of paper and kept them in my pockets waiting for answers for them. Sometimes, I still find the little slips of paper in the pockets of jackets that I haven't worn since it was last cold.

I lay awake at night and thought of questions to ask my grandfather. I listened for the knocks on the bedroom furniture or for the footsteps on the old wood floors of the house that I live in with my wife, but I never heard anything that might be an answer from him. Still, sometimes I think that what I may be doing is channeling voices. I hear people who aren't here saying things to me and I write them down.

I went back inside through the back door and walked back to what used to be our bedroom. I was going to take my funeral clothes off, but it felt too difficult to untie my tie or my shoes. It felt too difficult to unbutton my shirt or my pants. I couldn't take my suit jacket off. It fit a little tight around my shoulders and it felt as if my wife had her arms around me.

My funeral clothes were all that were holding me together then. I was afraid that I would start to forget my wife if I took any of them off. But I didn't know what else to do after her funeral was over and my wife was buried inside a casket under the ground and I was back inside our house. I kept waiting for her to come back home to me or back to life.

I walked back down the hallway, into the living room, and sat down in a chair. I got up out of the chair and then I sat back down in it. I looked out the window, out into the backyard, and then looked back inside myself.

I didn't want to look inside me or be inside myself anymore, but I kept thinking of things that I wanted to tell her—that I liked the dress that she was wearing, that I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, that I was going to bring her some flowers and her hairbrush and a change of her clothes when I came to see her soon.

I kept thinking of her grave and her inside her casket and all the dirt on top of her and between us. I wanted to dig her casket up and stand it up and open it up. I wanted her to be standing up and for her to step out of her casket and step back into our living room with me.

I always liked the way that she stood in a doorway and the way that she walked into any room. I always liked the way that she chewed her food and the way that she drank from a glass and I wondered if she could feel hungry or thirsty.

I didn't think that there could be any insects inside her casket yet and I wondered if she itched and I thought of the way that her nose wrinkled up when she didn't like something. I wondered if the insects would mess her hair up or get under her clothes and bite her skin like they always did.

I always liked the way that she took her clothes off and put her clothes on. I always liked the way that she said my name and touched my hair. I kept waiting for her to come back home and touch my hair and say my name.

I pulled one of my wife's dresses off a hanger in her closet and pulled it down over the length of a floor lamp. I pulled a hat of hers down over the lampshade. I glued a pair of her shoes down onto the base of the floor lamp and waited for the glue to dry. I plugged the floor lamp into an outlet in the living room, turned the floor lamp on, and her head lit up.

The dress was full length and it had long sleeves. I held onto the cuff one long sleeve of her dress with my palm and fingers and tucked the cuff of the other long sleeve into my waistband at the small of my back. I placed my other hand behind the long stand of the floor lamp just above where the base of her spine would have been if the floor lamp were my wife.

I waited for the music to start playing inside my head. I pulled the floor lamp up against my body and felt the heat from the light on my face. I tipped the floor lamp back with my one arm and leaned over with her. I stood back up and spun the floor lamp away from me along the edge of its round base and along the length of my arm and the long sleeve of her dress. The base of the floor lamp made a scraping noise against the hardwood floor and so did my shoes.

I could see myself dancing with her on the living room walls. I could see the shadows of us dancing on the walls all the way around the living room.

I stood in the bathroom over the bathroom sink and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. I leaned my face in close to the bathroom mirror so that I could only see parts of my face—one eye and then the other eye, each side of my nose, parts of both ears, the wrinkles around my eyes and my mouth. I was trying to see my wife inside my eyes, but I couldn't see her anywhere on my face anymore, so I needed to go see her.

I was going to take her some of her things. I pulled some of her other dresses off their hangers in her closet and laid them out on our bed. I took some of her blouses and skirts off their hangers and laid them out in matching outfits. I picked out matching shoes and matching boots.

I pulled a few days of clean underwear out of one of her dresser drawers—matching sets of her underwear, pairs of nylons and pantyhose and tights and socks. I picked a few of her nightgowns out of another one of her dresser drawers and a housecoat out of her closet. I got a spring jacket and a winter coat out of the coat closet and a hat and gloves that matched them both.

I folded her clothes up and stacked them up in little piles on our bed. I got her suitcase out, laid it out on top of our bed, and packed up all those clothes inside it. I opened her jewelry box up and untangled some of her necklaces and paired up some of her earrings. I went back into the bathroom for her hairbrush, her box of curlers, her make-up kit, and some of her other things from the bathroom. I put all those things inside the suitcase and closed the suitcase up and snapped its locks closed.