The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

MY GRANDMOTHER, TOLITHA Wingo, is now dying in a Charleston nursing home. Her mind, as they say, is wandering a bit, but she still has rare moments of perfect clarity when one can glimpse the full, illuminant personality that her advancing age has veiled with a shroud of senility. The capillaries in her brain seem to be drying up slowly, like the feeder creeks of an endangered river. Time no longer means the same thing to her as it does to us; she no longer measures it out in hours and days. It is a river she walks from its source to its delta. There are moments when she is a child asking her mother for a new doll. In the next eye-blink she is a gardener concerned over her dahlias or a grandmother complaining that her grandchildren never come to see her. On several visits she has mistaken me for her husband, her best friend, my father, or a Rhodesian farmer named Philip who evidently was once her lover. I don’t know which part of the river I shall enter when I approach her wheelchair. The last time I saw her, she lifted her arms up to me and said in a quavering voice, “Oh, Daddy. Oh, Daddy. You’ve come to hold me.” I sat her carefully in my lap and felt the terrifying fragility of her bones as she laid her head against my chest and wept like an eight-year-old child being comforted by a father who had been dead for forty years. She weighs eighty-five pounds now. Eventually she will die the way all old people in America die . . . from humiliation, incontinence, boredom, and ...