The D-Word
I think I’ve said here before that one perk of having moved to Beachtown is that it’s much easier to visit my grandmother, who lives about three hours away from here. She turns 92 this month. She’s lived the majority of those years independently, and willfully so, by herself in the same ranch-style house where my mother spent her teenage years.
I admire my grandmother more than I can say for this independence, and for her snappiness of spirit, her good sense of humor and her amazing adaptability when it comes to changing with the times. (“I don’t know, Alice, why—you know—gay people are like that, but I guess it don’t matter. I guess they just love each other.” This, out of the blue on any given afternoon while slicing up chicken for salad, the kitchen scissors held aloft in that way that you can tell she’s been chewing on this idea since she saw a segment on Larry King the night before. And this, let me remind you: from a nonagenarian who’s lived her entire life in a very small southern town whose major feature amounts to the tobacco, soy and cotton fields that surround it.)
What’s true about what’s happened to her is true even though I hate it, and I hate it because: 1. it seems so preventable in retrospect and also because yes, 2., it’s such a freaking cliché, and who wants to have the circumstances of her life or that of those she loves so easily explained and discardable?
I start and re-start this same sentence:
She had a fall
Since my grandma had a fall last spring, she’s
There’s no denying that my grandma
False starts. I don’t want to use the word “decline,” because it sounds so inevitable and I don’t want to believe in the inevitability of this. I want to get mad at the doctors for not figuring out what’s still making her back hurt her so, after so many months. For not getting it: This is Nona. You have no idea how amazing a woman you’re dealing with, here. She’s never been on a single medication on her life, and now she’s on this horrible merry-go-round of painkillers that she hates and which make it hard for her to keep up much of an appetite and that make her groggy and confused. It’s not her, I want to tell them. I feel angry at them for making her not her.
She had a surgery on her back a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to slug the nurse who shouted to her, an hour into the recovery room, in this horrible sing-song, “Nowww, Elizabeth, are we ready to try to eat something?” The lurch of pride and anger inside me, at this woman who looked at Nona and saw only her lack of hearing (hearing aids out), her grogginess at the drugs which caused her to move her denture plate around in her mouth as though it itself were food. This is not the entirety of who my grandmother is. It’s a moment; it’s not her identity. I wanted to tell Nurse Kindergarten Marm to stand the hell back: This woman’s worth three of you.
Maybe all this anger is in part, confusing messenger with message.
I guess you can’t prepare yourself for this. You can’t make yourself feel everything as hard as possible in the anticipation of what’s to come. Every time my best friend in the world takes off on a plane to a rainforest village in some Central American country as part of his job, try as my hamster-wheel mind might, I can’t make myself dream up every terrible scenario as part of some superstitious Terrible Event Prevention method. And I literally, cannot tell him I love him, enough.
My grandma knows what’s up. She’s scared of the physical pain and scareder still, of the increasing loss of independence it’s meaning. That hour after her last surgery, she really didn’t know up very well from down, but she was sitting up and looking for her shoes; she wanted to go home, now.
She is not afraid of death; at least that’s what she’s said for the last ten years: that she’s ready to go up and sing with the angels. It’s all that comes before. And what I’m scared of, in the end, is that same helplessness: on her part and on mine and on the parts of my mother and uncle: As she walks down this road, we cannot follow; we cannot fix. The most I can do is to be there through any decline that happens, pat her soft hand and tell her I love her, as many times as I want.
I think I’ve said here before that one perk of having moved to Beachtown is that it’s much easier to visit my grandmother, who lives about three hours away from here. She turns 92 this month. She’s lived the majority of those years independently, and willfully so, by herself in the same ranch-style house where my mother spent her teenage years.
I admire my grandmother more than I can say for this independence, and for her snappiness of spirit, her good sense of humor and her amazing adaptability when it comes to changing with the times. (“I don’t know, Alice, why—you know—gay people are like that, but I guess it don’t matter. I guess they just love each other.” This, out of the blue on any given afternoon while slicing up chicken for salad, the kitchen scissors held aloft in that way that you can tell she’s been chewing on this idea since she saw a segment on Larry King the night before. And this, let me remind you: from a nonagenarian who’s lived her entire life in a very small southern town whose major feature amounts to the tobacco, soy and cotton fields that surround it.)
What’s true about what’s happened to her is true even though I hate it, and I hate it because: 1. it seems so preventable in retrospect and also because yes, 2., it’s such a freaking cliché, and who wants to have the circumstances of her life or that of those she loves so easily explained and discardable?
I start and re-start this same sentence:
She had a fall
Since my grandma had a fall last spring, she’s
There’s no denying that my grandma
False starts. I don’t want to use the word “decline,” because it sounds so inevitable and I don’t want to believe in the inevitability of this. I want to get mad at the doctors for not figuring out what’s still making her back hurt her so, after so many months. For not getting it: This is Nona. You have no idea how amazing a woman you’re dealing with, here. She’s never been on a single medication on her life, and now she’s on this horrible merry-go-round of painkillers that she hates and which make it hard for her to keep up much of an appetite and that make her groggy and confused. It’s not her, I want to tell them. I feel angry at them for making her not her.
She had a surgery on her back a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to slug the nurse who shouted to her, an hour into the recovery room, in this horrible sing-song, “Nowww, Elizabeth, are we ready to try to eat something?” The lurch of pride and anger inside me, at this woman who looked at Nona and saw only her lack of hearing (hearing aids out), her grogginess at the drugs which caused her to move her denture plate around in her mouth as though it itself were food. This is not the entirety of who my grandmother is. It’s a moment; it’s not her identity. I wanted to tell Nurse Kindergarten Marm to stand the hell back: This woman’s worth three of you.
Maybe all this anger is in part, confusing messenger with message.
I guess you can’t prepare yourself for this. You can’t make yourself feel everything as hard as possible in the anticipation of what’s to come. Every time my best friend in the world takes off on a plane to a rainforest village in some Central American country as part of his job, try as my hamster-wheel mind might, I can’t make myself dream up every terrible scenario as part of some superstitious Terrible Event Prevention method. And I literally, cannot tell him I love him, enough.
My grandma knows what’s up. She’s scared of the physical pain and scareder still, of the increasing loss of independence it’s meaning. That hour after her last surgery, she really didn’t know up very well from down, but she was sitting up and looking for her shoes; she wanted to go home, now.
She is not afraid of death; at least that’s what she’s said for the last ten years: that she’s ready to go up and sing with the angels. It’s all that comes before. And what I’m scared of, in the end, is that same helplessness: on her part and on mine and on the parts of my mother and uncle: As she walks down this road, we cannot follow; we cannot fix. The most I can do is to be there through any decline that happens, pat her soft hand and tell her I love her, as many times as I want.
Labels: home life
posted by Alice at 11:07 AM
4 Comments:
This post meant so much to me. I lost my hellion granny Ena back in July--what the HELL was she doing, dying on me like that? You express so many things that I haven't yet had the courage to dig into and say out loud. No, I don't want those hospital images to cloud all the others; I don't want her brief illness and death usurping all my other memories.
Ena was independent and sassy her whole life; she only was bedridden for about ten days. She was cussin' every minute of it, too. By crackies!
You're a good granddaughter with a good grandmother. It makes me so glad to think of the two of you together, even though it makes me miss Ena even more.
May Nona have many more seasons of feistiness!
Aw, thanks, Crackergirl.
That means a lot for me to hear/read. I meant to send you a note after I heard about Ena, but of course, I went with the ridiculous Waiting for the Inspiration of the Right Words nonsense. What's all this waiting for the perfect moment to do anything(?); there is no perfect moment and anyway, the point is, I am heartily, heartily sorry to hear that she's gone and you know what? this: it's really great to have a friend like you who's had just such a relation; I think they've made us bold and sassy; so here's to Nona and Granny Ena.
And mwah.
I'm so sorry to hear about Nona's struggles -- that really sucks! It sucks for her and it sucks for you. I don't know what grandmas think they are doing, getting older and frailer and having things happen like this.
When Oma was hospitalized (and we were told to visit her to say goodbye... and she's still alive 7 years later...), I brought a yellow legal pad in and wrote down everything that was happening in her room, medically. No one gave a crap about my big list of medicines and diagnoses, but it gave me a sense of control over a totally *unacceptable* situation.
The older we get, the more awesome our grandmas seem to get. So they have no business getting older too.
I never know what to say to people after someone they love dies, either. Sympathy cards are insipid. And I sure as hell am not going to start spouting some bad theology, no matter how "comforting" it might be. My expressions of sympathy are usually along the lines of, "That sucks. I'm so sorry." Not eloquent, but true, and it gets the job done!
As for Waiting for the Inspiration of the Right Words--your post was composed of precisely The Right Words. And at the perfect moment--which is any moment, because I miss Ena every single day. So thankee, my writery friend.
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