I post this morning with an extremely heavy heart. At the beginning of this week, my mom found my 88 year old grandma, Alice, who still lives alone, still in her bed at 4:00 p.m., disoriented and obviously very sick. She called 911 and had her taken to the hospital by ambulance.
After a couple of difficult days it has been determined that my grandma had a severe urinary trach infection and dangerously high calcium levels. She has been on antibiotics and fluids for a couple of days and is not doing any better. In fact, she may be worse. It was also determined that she has a golf ball sized mass on her lung that they suspect is cancerous. We have been told that her body would not be able to withstand any cancer treatments, so they are not even going to biopsy it.
On Friday they are releasing her from the hospital to a nursing home.
This has been what my grandma has never wanted to happen.
Now, there is a lot to my grandma's story, and some, if not a lot, of her health issues could have been avoided with different choices by herself. She has, unfortunately, contributed greatly to the decline of her health.
But nobody wants to send their grandma, or anyone else for that matter, to spend their last days in a place like she is going. It's fine, I guess. But, have you ever visited a nursing home? It's not the most uplifting place in the world, especially if they have sent you there as your death sentence.
When I was little, my brother, sister and I spent the night every Saturday night at my grandma's. She taught us to play double solitaire. We watched
The Love Boat and
Fantasy Island. Before we went to bed we would wind the antique clock on her t.v. and then take turns sleeping with her. (I have that clock now.)
She often had trouble sleeping and would turn on her bed lamp and read in the middle of the night. She would be up before light on Sunday morning preparing her Sunday School lesson for the adult class she taught. She would take us home so we could get ready for church and then come and pick us up and take us to Sunday School. My mom would meet us for church service later.
We ate many meals at my grandma's eating the best fried chicken and spiced apples in the world! She would never sit at the table with us. She ate at the counter and served us.
My favorite holiday was always Christmas Eve. It was real! It was amazing!
When I was little my grandma sewed many of my clothes.
There are things in her house that have been there since I was a little girl ... the portrait of my aunt, mom and uncle in her bedroom. The mirrored tray on her dresser. The antique brush, mirror and comb. The red velvet bench. The Armstrong chair. Many things she has already given me through the years ... the clock, the tea set from when she was a little girl, her kitchen roosters.
She was always a strong woman, which makes her current health situation so sad. She worked hard and did exciting things as a young woman. And somewhere along the way, the past 10 years or so, she decided to stop living. I've lived several hours away from her for about that same period of time. I have thought of her often and not followed the prompting to call her or write to her. I regret that now because there are so many things I want to know about her that I will never know.
I'm sorry, grandma, that your last days will end like this. I know it's not what you wanted. I wish that 10 years ago, or even 5, I would have insisted that you come live with us to keep your daily health up and to keep your mind stimulated. I wish that I would have been as stubborn as you and made that happen despite all of the difficulty it would have caused. Who knows, maybe me and my family would have been blessed more than you.
Guilt is an ugly thing. It makes you believe things that probably never would have been. It makes you see things that once were, but ignore things that are. It makes you forget there were ever bad times and believe that only good existed.
Realistically I know there was nothing anyone in my family could have done over the past 10 years to make things different for my grandma. But Guilt likes to tell me differently.
Kyndal once asked me if I was going to be sad when my grandma died. I told her that I would, but that, to me, my grandma had died many years ago and
that made me sad.
I have (hopefully) learned something very important, however. I am quite a bit like my grandma in many ways. I am independent, stubborn, confident to the point of being a know-it-all, enjoy my solitude and could sit in my house for days, even weeks, without leaving it. But I don't want to be a lonely old lady who slowly dies in a nursing home because I have shut out the world and not let people take care of me when they could have made a difference.
I love you, grandma, for what you taught me in my life. Rest easy.
