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Aug. 8th, 2013 07:47 pmWeirdest moment at my grandmother's funeral: Seeing an old woman from behind as I approached, thinking it was Grandma, and not seeing anything odd about that at all in the split second before I remembered where I was.
So yeah. That happened. She had a stroke on Tuesday, July 23 which left her paralyzed in her right arm and unable to speak. There were plans to transfer her to a place for rehab therapy, but then she got pneumonia over the weekend. On Monday, it started getting worse. On Tuesday, her four children (including my mom) made the decision to take her off any kind of support and switch to palliative care. On Thursday, August first, four days before the sixth anniversary of her husband's death, my grandmother died.
I've been telling people individually because I wasn't ready to post about it. I managed to spend the days between her death and the funeral on top of that surface layer of stunned calm, but I could feel the grief bubbling right below and I knew it would break through if I thought about what had happened for too long. But now the funeral has been and gone and it's time to let the grief do its thing, and now I'm able to write this.
I thought I'd be ready when she went because I'd been through it with my grandfather, but this isn't like that. He had emphysema and had been declining slowly for years; when he died it was sad and awful, but also a blessing and a release. Grandma's health wasn't so great, and just a few months ago my sister and I were speculating about whether she'd be around for Christmas, but this happened so fast. It wasn't time yet. And what a shitty, mean little sendoff. The hospital she was in is right across the street from me and I'm still unemployed, so I spent a lot of time visiting with her and saw firsthand how frustrating it was for her to be unable to communicate beyond near-unintelligible words written laboriously down with her left hand. Isn't that just wonderful? Spending your last few days of consciousness occasionally bursting into tears because you can't fucking talk and the people around you don't always understand when you try to write instead? What the fuck. Thanks, universe. Thanks a lot.
She deserved better.
I love you, Grandma.
So yeah. That happened. She had a stroke on Tuesday, July 23 which left her paralyzed in her right arm and unable to speak. There were plans to transfer her to a place for rehab therapy, but then she got pneumonia over the weekend. On Monday, it started getting worse. On Tuesday, her four children (including my mom) made the decision to take her off any kind of support and switch to palliative care. On Thursday, August first, four days before the sixth anniversary of her husband's death, my grandmother died.
I've been telling people individually because I wasn't ready to post about it. I managed to spend the days between her death and the funeral on top of that surface layer of stunned calm, but I could feel the grief bubbling right below and I knew it would break through if I thought about what had happened for too long. But now the funeral has been and gone and it's time to let the grief do its thing, and now I'm able to write this.
I thought I'd be ready when she went because I'd been through it with my grandfather, but this isn't like that. He had emphysema and had been declining slowly for years; when he died it was sad and awful, but also a blessing and a release. Grandma's health wasn't so great, and just a few months ago my sister and I were speculating about whether she'd be around for Christmas, but this happened so fast. It wasn't time yet. And what a shitty, mean little sendoff. The hospital she was in is right across the street from me and I'm still unemployed, so I spent a lot of time visiting with her and saw firsthand how frustrating it was for her to be unable to communicate beyond near-unintelligible words written laboriously down with her left hand. Isn't that just wonderful? Spending your last few days of consciousness occasionally bursting into tears because you can't fucking talk and the people around you don't always understand when you try to write instead? What the fuck. Thanks, universe. Thanks a lot.
She deserved better.
I love you, Grandma.