This is the one little corner of the internet where I’m going to mention that my grandma is being moved to hospice, where her breathing and feeding tubes will be removed, and where she will be cared for as she dies
She has suffered from dementia for years and become very weak, and a series of strokes and seizures have left her completely unresponsive. She’s not coming back from that, and she had made sure family knew that she didn’t want to be kept alive like this. There is a little bit of comfort in knowing that my mom and her siblings are able to let her go according to her wishes.
I am halfway across the country trying to go about my business as normally as I can as I wait for the call from home. I have a bag packed so I can just go right to the airport and get home in time for the funeral, whenever it happens.
I’m supposed to play a small set of new music at a house show tonight. My grandma taught me how to play piano; she was a phenomenal pianist, I’m not even half as good as she was. I’m thinking about that a lot right now.
I had a good cry in the shower. I sat down in the tub and thought about the bathroom where I took baths at my grandparents’ house. It was a spacious room with really 70s tiling in orange, yellow, and brown. The shower curtain and towels were all super bright, loud prints. I remember sitting in that tub after playing in the pool, with my grandma alongside me (and often my brothers) still wearing her swimsuit.
I feel like I’ve already mourned her as dementia ate away at parts of her over the years. She stopped recognizing some of her other grandchildren, my younger cousins. I last saw her over Thanksgiving, and though she seemed very lost and didn’t know I graduated college years ago or that I no longer lived in town, she still recognized me. Dementia hadn’t eaten far back enough into her memory to erase me yet. That was one small thing I was thankful for, that she had formed memories of us together early enough to weather what was coming.
It is very strange to sit around waiting for someone to die in another state. I want to be with my family but not get in the way when they also have their normal lives to take care of AND a dying loved one to monitor and make arrangements for. I’m trying to do all the normal things—making meals, cleaning, going to work, seeing friends, paying bills, doing errands—as if everything is normal, but everything is not normal. I take breaks to cry and then get back on with what I was doing. I feel very fractured, but not in a dramatic or destructive way. Just like nothing is really flowing together into the usual daily narrative of my life, it’s all just kind of spinning off into unconnected ends.
All I know is that I’ll be flying home within the next few days, possibly even tomorrow if she passes very quickly.
This has been a very rough and bizarre week. But however hard it is for me, I am most worried about my mom, who has been her mother’s main caregiver and who has been present through most of the illness and decline. I’m thinking about her, a daughter losing her mom. I am a daughter who still has my mom. You don’t get to pick and choose how your loved ones die, but I really really hope this does not happen to my mother.
2087
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