Grandma is dying. She’s had a long life, 97 years so far. I wish I could say she’s had a good life, but I don’t think it ever was.
Her father was murdered in Mexico when she was a toddler. Her mother remarried an abusive man who beat the crap out of her and her two little brothers. (If I live long enough to see time travel, I will go back and repay him myself.)
When her mother died in childbirth, Grandma and her brothers were banished to an orphanage in Leavenworth. The rest of the story I’m kind of foggy on, but for some reason, Grandma left the orphanage on her own, barely finishing eighth grade, and moved back to Emporia where she had lived with her mother and stepfather before her mother died.
Grandma never saw her brothers again. I tried to Google them once and couldn’t find any trace of them.
In Emporia, Grandma cleaned houses for The Wealthy. That’s how she described them. After she married my Papa and had two children, including my mother, and built a life on a small plot of land in Chase County, Kansas, she went to nursing school and became an LPN.
I’ve seen the picture of her graduating class at KU Med. She looked so much older than her classmates. Hard work does that to a face.
We had to move her into a nursing home in Olathe a few months ago, and ever since, she’s been winding down, like a clock that’s lost its tick and tock. She sleeps, a lot, and does this weird thing of closing her eyes when the aides try to feed her.
I don’t let her get away with it when I feed her.
“Grandma, open your eyes,” I tell her. “Look at me.” And she does.
Lately she has started telling everyone that she loves them. The other night when I took her clean laundry to her, she was lying in bed and I heard her say out loud, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said back. But she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the nurse who had slipped into the room behind me.
We’ve hired the hospice my husband works for to keep her comfortable. I really didn’t want to do it because it was too public an acknowledgment of what I feared/knew in my heart.
My Grandma is dying. But I think she’s ready.
I just hope I will be, too.
glindagirl
My grandpa is dying, too. He used to be a math wiz, but slowly he lost the ability to calculate the tip. Then he had trouble holding conversations. At big family dinners, the once-boisterous man would lead conversation, throwing out jokes that would take us all about 5 minutes to get. A few years ago, he started to sit at the end of the table, quiet, tapping Morse Code on his plate with a fork, still ingrained in his memory from WWII. Now he has started to refuse to eat. Nothing he says makes sense. You can tell by looking at him that he knows how bad he is. The rest of my family isn’t ready to lose him, but I know how you feel. I know it’s time.
Hang in there Aunt Lisa, we all in this together and will be there for each other. It’s amazing what you have done for “Gi-Gi”. You have given her so much that she loves everyone!