Letting Go and Holding On

I don't use the journal function on mibba much (obviously), but I kind of felt like talking...or writing, as may be the case.

So...my grandmother died. On Thursday. It's not like it was something horribly unexpected, out of the blue. She had been sick my entire life (and when I say "sick," I mean she had enough health problems that her medical chart came in on a hand cart...I'm not exaggerating), and she had been REALLY bad for the past few years. This wasn't the first time my family thought she was going to die...she even, in fact, died once before (flatlined, that is), but came back. In a way, I've been saying goodbye and grieving for her for years.

That doesn't make it easier though.

And it's a different situation than most people have--besides the fact that she battled numerous ailments for the past few decades, she lived with me and my parents for nearly twenty years. My entire childhood. I grew up with this woman. When I used to have nightmares as a little girl, I'd go running down the hall to her room. She always had all the lights on and the TV blaring, normally some cheesy late night horror flick or those hour-long infomercials they run in the wee hours of the morning. Hardly conducive to sleeping, but it was my safe haven from a world where things go bump in the night--because most of all, she was there to hug me and tell me that it was all right, that it was only a bad dream. Of course, as I grew older, I didn't need that anymore--I could simply tell myself to get a grip, roll over, and go back to sleep. But I woke up from a nightmare the other night, something vague and indefinable that I couldn't even remember upon waking, but for the first time in a good fifteen years, I felt that sense of lingering terror, the urge to go running to her room and snuggle up with her. And more powerful than that, was the stark realization that I never could again. She was gone. Please understand that it wasn't all sugarplums and sweetness--as a teenager and young adult, my grandmother often drove me off the wall. She was not an easy person to live with by any means. But I wasn't remembering wanting to tear my hair out--it was, instead, her hugs when I was frightened.

My grandmother has been on dialysis for nearly ten years. Dialysis, for those not in the know, is for those who have gone into kidney failure. The kidneys filter your blood--obviously, if they have ceased functioning, toxins build up and quickly kill you. For most people, dialysis is only a temporary affair--something until they become eligible for a transplant. For my grandmother, being unable to survive such a surgery, it was essentially life-support. More than that, it became her life. For the past few years, she really did nothing more than go to doctors' appointments, hospital visits, and trips to the dialysis clinic EVERY OTHER DAY for five hours at a time. The dialysis center is perhaps one of the most depressing places I have ever visited in my life. It smells like blood and death. Between the renal failure and typically coinciding complications from diabetes, many patients have lost circulation in their legs and have had limbs amputated. It is a horrible existence. And though my grandmother hadn't quite gotten to that point, her life, really, was only misery and pain. But through absolutely remarkable fortitude and the most ironclad will to live I have ever seen, she kept fighting to go on. But as I said--she was in so much pain, and any semblance of a life that she may have had, was slipping away.

Last week, she fell and broke her pelvis. For a younger or healthier person, this is a serious injury, but something one could recover from after a process of healing and physical therapy. But for my grandmother, whose home now no longer had the facilities to care for her, this meant moving into a nursing home, in diapers, probably losing her feet in the next several months. This was never something she wanted. And she had had enough. She had been dealt an unfair, cruel hand when it came to her health--it came to dominate and control her existence, make it into something miserable. But her death was something she could control, something that could finally be on her own terms. So she decided to quit dialysis. No more surgery, no more meds, no more pain.

I went to say goodbye to her in the hospital on Tuesday, and that was the worst, most difficult day of my life. My family wasn't sure how long she'd hang on--when one quits dialysis, it is actually not a terrible way to go, but can potentially take two to three weeks. As the days pass, you simply sleep more and more until, at some point, you don't wake up. But we wanted to say our goodbyes while she was still relatively lucid and conscious. We just sat there in that hospital room all day, numb and awful. You make that stupid, inane chatter about nothing, and have the sobering realization that the world and all its stupid and inane chatter will go on without you, that everything continues to function without you in it. But then again, what are you supposed to do? Have some deep, existential conversation about life and death? You couldn't even really have a conversation with my grandmother, as she was on so much morphine, she was continually slipping in and out--occasionally she'd ask you a question, and fall asleep before she finished speaking. She knew who people were still, but kept looking out at something past you--even though nothing was there. She kept seeing people--and smiling. At one point when my mother was sitting with her, she looked off to the side and said, "I think that's my dad there." When my mother shook her head and told her no one was there, she just shrugged and said, "Oh, well, I'll be seeing him soon." I don't know if she was just seeing things because she was so hopped up on morphine, but I like to think...well, I'm hardly going to get into a treatise on what possibly awaits us after death. In the late afternoon, they released her from the hospital and she was moved into a hospice house. She didn't want to die in a hospital--the hospice house was something beautiful, something more...homey, I guess--even though there's a full staff there with you all the time, there's no IVs or that awful sterile antiseptic smell. And then I had to say goodbye. What do you do when you know it's for the last time? That you will never hug them again, never see them again, never hear their voice again. What do you say? Or you realize there is nothing you possibly can say but "I love you." I almost wanted to say "I'll see you later," but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, when I knew I wouldn't. You just hold on to them, not trying to completely lose it, knowing that in a few seconds, you have to let go. You have to let go.

She died around two on Thursday morning. It was very peaceful--she woke up and smiled about half an hour before, and then went back to sleep and just...stopped breathing. That was it. And hearing that she died wasn't anywhere near as hard as saying goodbye. It's sad, certainly (I'm kind of a wreck right now writing this), but...it was nice to know she wasn't in pain anymore.

I had promised awhile ago that I'd write her obituary. Aside from the fact that I love to write, I've always despised those ridiculous obituaries that can seem to say nothing about a person's life except, "She liked flowers and birds." And I wanted to do something nice for her--one last thing. I wanted it to really say something, that her life stood for more than a couple dumb hobbies and when she was born and died. I got something written, which I thought was rather nice--but then found out that the newspaper (along with every other funerary service) gouges every last penny they can from you, charging you exorbitant fees by the line if you go over fifty lines. There you go--encapsulate someone's life in fifty lines or less (tiny newspaper column lines; it's not like you get the whole page). That is why obituaries are often so inane and stupid--people can't afford to say anything about their loved ones. Obviously, what I wrote was chopped considerably (as my family is hardly in a position to pay $1000 for a small obituary to run for two days in the local paper).

It feels weird knowing she'll never call again. I still have her number under "missed calls" in my phone from a couple weeks ago. That she won't be here anymore. That I'll never hear her voice again.

I don't know how hard the funeral's going to be. In a way, as I said, my goodbyes were the hard part. And her hard part is over now. Death is not the worst thing--or the last thing.

But I'm still going to miss her.