That last post was taken from a Facebook note, dated October 7. My grandma was able to sit up on her own. She could speak and chew and eat and swallow. She recognized us as her family, calling us by name, and she loved having my little niece in her bedroom that sublime, sacred Sunday evening.
I sit, now two weeks later, after having sat with my mother in Grandma's room earlier this evening, listening to her slow, uneven, shuddering breaths and small moans and sighs. It is a difficult experience to describe, witnessing the weakening and darkening of the loved one who was so solid and full of sunlight and smiles. I remember staying overnight at Grandma and Grandpa's with my cousins. We'd record our "Radio Shows" on tapes Grandma saved for us. Grandpa was a chronic tease -- he liked to slap our feet and spit out his teeth (and it always made me nervous when they shot out!). We'd wake in the morning to pancakes with rabbit ears, bubbling syrup, scrambled eggs and hot chocolate made with evaporated milk.
I've watched her decline as I've helped care for her over the past few months, but tonight's visit left me reeling. She's on morphine for the pain. The only really noticeable response we see from her happens when we have to turn her in an effort to reduce the indignity of bedsores. Her eyes, usually heavy-lidded anymore, open bright-wide and fish scale blue (not her eyes at all), and her eyebrows slant in a voiceless agony. It's hard on all of us.
Tonight, I entered Grandma's bedroom after Mom sat down on the hospital bed we recently traded with the one my grandparents had slept in for years. Mom was leaning over, stroking Grandma's face and calling her "Mamma." An overwhelming sense of wonder, as well as a desire to shield my own mother from the unconscious and open pain written on her mother's face flew up in front of me, and I was almost ready to weep or run or collapse. I stepped up behind Mom, making sure I didn't step on any tubing or anything like that, and told Grandma I was there. I don't really know if she saw me -- her eyes were so dim and milky, filmy with the morphine and fevery dehydration, I guess -- but she did turn her face toward my voice a bit, and, after a little coaxing, gave me a brief, fleeting smile. I felt so tender I had to leave the room for a minute.
In the end, I was there for about an hour and a half. I've cried for 3 days. I've thought a lot about death, and the divorce that splits the body and the spirit or essence of a person when death happens. The divorce of death is as ugly and hard and terribly powerful as any divorce I've ever heard of. It seems to me, in seeing the struggle my Grandma is experiencing, that the body and the spirit do not want to give each other up, though their separation is inevitable. I think our bodies are such incredible creations, giving our spirits a wonder-ful vehicle for feeling and emotion and physical sensation; I also think our bodies crave the energy of our spirits. Can you imagine not having a body? I believe one of the reasons death is so difficult is because we really can't imagine not having a body, even if it is weary of its 80-some-odd years. I'm seeing this in my thin Grandma. It's 2 AM, and I don't think I'm making sense, but that's what it is.
She's not going gentle -- she's trying to so much to stay here, for whatever reason. I wish I could whisper to her peace and tender to her release, if not for her sake, at least for us, the heavy-hearted who have been watching.
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