October 2, 2019

Awesome and life-altering things happen at 5:15 in the morning on your day off two days before your birthday. For example, the realization you just received THE phone call the previous night sets in as you’re waking up, taking one long, deep breath and finally slipping back down into your tired human suit. Your grandmother is about to take the final shopping trip. She’s giving up the ghost, she’s about to kick the bucket—she’s giving up her fight with an exhausted meat suit and going to finally be fucking free. The ‘let’s settle here for the rest of eternity or go be reborn and do this bullshit all over again’ special for one, please. Yep. She’s about to bite it. I know what you’re thinking. How insensitive, how crude, how shitty her last best friend and granddaughter would say such things in such tasteless fashion on the eve of her decline into an increasingly slow and painful death?? Well. Too bad.

I see it like this.

First, the starvation will kick in. We’re about a week into that already because my DNR, stubborn-as-hell grandmother is refusing food. And oxygen. So that’s comforting to watch. She’ll drink water but only when the straw is held to her lips and she always finishes off with a “thank you, thank you God” gasping and rasping for air as her eyes close again. You can only hope she’s slipping back into a peaceful place where she feels no pain and the morphine has her flying on pink elephants through a cloudless sky on an October, fall morning in Maine.

Second, the lack of relieving herself will become apparent as her insides shrivel up causing her organs to fail, first the kidneys and then the rest will follow. The one thing I remember about biology in high school was the tiny kidney-shaped “powerhouses” in the animal cell called mitochondria. “They make everything work,” I remember my teacher instructing and I always related that to the kidneys in a human body, without them everything fails. I can’t seem to get the tiny image of my Animal Cell Diorama stuck from behind my eyeballs as I think about my grandmother dying.

Third, she’ll literally shrivel up. Further and further until she no longer looks like the curly brown-haired, plump of build woman I grew up knowing. She’ll be nothing but a wrinkly shell that occasionally groans and mutters the words, “no, no, no…” over and over again causing your ears to tell your eyes to tear up as you hear her from down the hall. Slowly inching closer to the room until you walk in and see her propped up in her hospital room bed, so she doesn’t choke on her own saliva.

Knowing that this once brave, bold, savagely surviving woman that lived through so much and saw so many years, living passed so many before her was literally decaying before my eyes turns my stomach. I can’t go in there without wearing a hood anymore because it’s something to block the view of my eyes when I start uncontrollably sobbing and it’s a way to block the smell when it becomes too unbearable in her room. She must look at me as the Angel of Death, when she’s not mistaking me for my own mother, but otherwise I feel cold and naked. Standing before her without a right word to my lips to calm her or myself, it’s like a comfort blanket I can wrap around me like the hug I really need. She would understand.

She lived through two abusive husbands, a sick father that beat her and the sweetest mother who ended the same tortured way. She saw wars then peace, she saw poverty, sexism and racism. She lived through some of the most tumultuous changes for so many and came out a stronger, better person in the end for having lived that life. She struggled with the depression and the feelings that come along with being an oppressed ‘50’s housewife and overcame it. She hated herself for years and then found inner peace. She never gave up—even now she’s still fighting. She was a woman I’m proud to know. She was far from perfect, but she was mine. Grams. I will miss her. But, she should be allowed to pass now. It’s just time and we have to come to be okay with that.

I feel anger that she’s leaving me, happiness she’ll finally be free of suffering and sadness she’ll be gone.