For the last few years, I've seen my grandparents less and less. From weekly visits and phone calls to monthly visits, then bi-monthly calls, and so on and so forth. This is, of course, in part due to the distance that life has put between us. First my grandparents moved from their house down the street to the assisted living down the series of roads adding up to about five miles. Then I moved down a longer yet series of roads about 20 miles long. Then I moved yet again down a couple more roads, as you do when you're an apartment dweller in your 20s.
This whole time, though, I wasn't simply putting miles between us, I was building a wall. The older my grandparents became, the more photos of the past I hung on the walls. The more ailments I was told of, the stronger I tried to build it. Although I adamantly denied it, I was doing this on purpose. I wasn't busy enough that I couldn't have called them back or spent a few hours with them. As these realizations came to light, more and more holes appeared in those walls I had worked so hard to build.
I didn't want to believe that the days of traveling to their cabin in Gold Bar to sit on the huge rocks by the Skykomish with my Papa watching us over his newspaper on the deck behind us. I didn't want to believe my grandmother's Macular Degeneration would win. I didn't want to believe that my grandparents would shrink, shrivel, and moan in pain throughout the day. So, I didn't.
Last Sunday evening, I couldn't quite ignore this hollow, sinking feeling in my belly. In an attempt to distract myself, I picked Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking from my bookshelf and dove in. By the second page I was absolutely spellbound. By the end of the night I was 60 pages in. What I didn't know was that, as I was putting that book on my nightstand to drift off to sleep, my grandpa was on the other side of that wall and down some roads going into cardiac arrest.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.
The last week has been a blur of tears, long drives, and holding hands. I know the third floor of Issaquah's Swedish Hospital quite well by now. I know that the hospital machines make much more pleasant noises now than they did in prior visits. I know that my grandparents are not invincible and that they are dying. I know that, but I don't know that I believe it yet.
Self-pity is the question.
Death is harder than I imagined it to be. I don't know about death itself as we are not at that part of the story yet; but even the concept of death is so much heavier than I could have ever imagined.
I'm not going to tell you to cherish your time with your loved ones, or to appreciate what you have, but I urge you not to build that wall. Or at least to try not to.
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