On April 27th, my uncle Robert came by my house. I knew as soon as he showed up that something terrible had happened, because it was the first time he had showed up there since I had moved out last July. He told me he had tried to call me, but he didn’t have my new cell number (even though I had emailed it to him a couple of months before). Anyway, here was the news: my grandmother had taken a turn for the worse and wasn’t expected to live past the end of May. Brittany and JD were in there with me when he told me, and both had met her several times, and both took it fairly hard as well. What most of you don’t understand is this: my grandmother raised me, not my mother, so being told she was dying was the same as someone else being told their mother was dying. So, in essence, I was absolutely destroyed. This woman meant more to me than possibly any human being to walk this Earth. To me, she hung the moon and made the stars, and definitely made me who I am.
She was put into a nursing home when I was ten, and (I admit) I visited her fewer and fewer times as the past eight years wore on. She developed Alzheimer’s, which made visiting difficult, because sometimes she didn’t even know me. When I turned fifteen, it got worse and worse, so I would make excuse after excuse not to venture to the nursing home to visit. So after he told me, I vowed to spend as much time as I could with her over the next month.
The next day, Friday, I worked a full eight-hour day. After my shift ended, Matt & Josh picked me up from work. I went to shower, and we headed to the hospital to visit Matt’s soon-to-be stepfather, who has been ill as of late as well. On the way there, I decide to call my aunt Edna’s husband, Dennis, to check on my grandmother. He informed me that earlier in the day, Edna, my uncle Robert, and my mother all had a meeting with a representative from Hospice. Basically, he told them all that if Granny made it through Sunday, that it’d be a miracle. She had had no food or water since Saturday the 22nd, because her organs had started shutting down. We were told if a feeding tube or IV were used, the food would just build up in her stomach until it eventually went all the way up her esophagus and she choked. After smoking for almost 70 years, her lungs had gotten to where they refused to exhale carbon dioxide, so it stayed in her lungs until they expanded so much, they ruptured a lot of vessels and tissues. So with that, on top of starvation and dehydration, and no respirator, IV, or feeding tube, there was no way she was going to live much longer. The nurses were just keeping her doped up on morphine, to make her last moments as comfortable as possible.
Of course, after hearing this, I jetted up there as fast as I could. I was told to expect the worst when I saw her: she was unconscious and wasn’t responding to anyone. I get to her room, take one look at her, and I just lost it. I had never seen someone look so unbelieveably frail. She was struggling with every breath, and she couldn’t catch a strong one for anything. I gently grab one of her hands, lean down in her good ear, and say, “Hey, Granny, I’m here.” And she opens her eyes, looks straight at me, and she smiles so big at me… I tell her I love her, and she says, “I love you too.” She couldn’t get the whole sentence out, so she mouthed the rest of it. It didn’t matter; I understood her. And she didn’t have to say it… I felt it with everything I was. I could tell that took all the energy she had, because after that she seemed to just collapse back into her bed and drift back off. I realized then that it wasn’t that she couldn’t comprehend us; she could but didn’t have the energy to respond. And even though she was at her absolute worst, the worst I have ever seen her at, she was still at her most beautiful, I swear to you. There was a certain peace around her, like she knew she didn’t have to fight much longer.
I stayed a little bit, and then left for a few hours. I returned at around ten that night with Nick, and we both stayed the entire night with her. I never left her side, and I’m so glad for that, because that was her last night. She passed away at 11pm the next night.
Like I say in the title, late is much better than never. I don’t know if I would have ever been able to forgive myself if I didn’t spend that night with her. I miss her terribly, but I know she’s much better off now than she was.
