a cold january

happy independence day. it's not deliberate, but this post happens to have something to do with independence.  and liberty.

when i got to my mother's house, it was unclear how long i was going to stay.  in my head, it was three to four weeks, and then i had to "snap out of it" (yeah, we still try to convince ourselves we can do that, even if history shows painfully obviously otherwise) and get back to my life.  i kept looking at plane tickets, but i didn't pull the trigger.  the schedule wasn't exactly right, or i couldn't get a nonstop (important because of the dog), or whatever.  of course, the truth was that i was simply stalling.

and then on january 14th, 2012, my wonderful grandmother (my mom's mother) passed away.  i wrote about her here last august, pointing out that i had only one surviving grandparent but that she was "still going strong at 94."  in november, a maintenance man at her senior living facility went to her apartment, where she'd lived alone for more than 30 years, and noticed she wasn't looking well.  someone was called, and she ended up in the hospital for a few days to be treated for severe dehydration.  my mother, who lives three hours away, and one of her brothers, who was local, were told that she couldn't, or shouldn't, live on her own anymore.  sick as she was, she was as stubborn as ever.  she'd been refusing for years to come and live at my mother's house, and she wasn't changing her mind. the hospital wanted her gone (naturally, since she was on MediCare), so my mother and uncle had to quickly find a place for her to go.  within a few days, they found a facility about 15 minutes away.  it was adequate, if not wonderful.  so there she was delivered, directly from the hospital, kicking and screaming (figuratively, but still) the entire way.

lord, she was a handful those first days, apparently.  she refused to eat.  she called the nurses and orderlies nasty names.  she spit her dentures out at them so many times that they eventually took them away.  let's say she probably wasn't a fan favorite.  but she was still my grandma, speaking her mind and fighting for her way, just as she'd done her entire life.  and i secretly loved her for her bad behavior, because it showed she was still in there, that she wasn't giving up.

but her decline was shocking.  within three weeks she could no longer stand and barely said a word.  she stopped eating and drinking - whether out of a lack of interest or in some sort of protest, i don't know, because she stopped speaking coherently at about the same time. and this would go in waves. they'd call my mom (the primary contact) to tell her that grandma had fallen out of bed or had stopped eating or had stopped drinking or had started again or had stopped again and did we want to give her IV fluids, etc.

it was just around this time that i arrived at my mother's house.  of course, i'd been hearing the news about my grandmother and wanted to see her right away.  so a few days after christmas, we made the three-hour drive together.  i was apprehensive the whole way.

my mother tried her best to prepare me, but i was horrified when i walked through the doors.  i'm sure it wasn't anywhere near the worst of these places, but it was bad. there was a lot of moaning.  there were no lunch carts in sight even though we'd arrived at about 11:30, which was lunchtime. and there were a lot of orderlies who appeared to be standing around, not doing much of anything.  (i don't know how these places run, and i know the people who work there are grossly underpaid for what they do, so i didn't want to judge, but i simply couldn't help it.)

in my mental state, it was very difficult to control my emotions, and i started crying almost immediately after walking into the facility.  my mother led me to my grandmother's room, but before she let me in, she turned to me and said something like, "I know this is incredibly difficult, but you have to think of her.  Please don't let her see you like this."  she hugged me tightly, which made me cry harder.  then she pulled me away, looked at me, nodded, and turned on her heel and walked into that room with a big smile on her face.  "Hi, Ma!  How you doing today?"  she's the fucking bravest person i know.

it took a few minutes for me to collect myself, but i finally took a deep breath and walked into the room after her.  a whole new sense of shock and dismay, and even fear, welled over me when i looked at the woman in the bed.  she was a shell of my grandmother. her skin was tissue-paper-thin; it almost looked as though the veins were sitting on top of her hands. her lips were horribly dry and cracked. her hair (oh, she was such a proud person that she still washed and set her own hair every few days while she lived alone) looked dirty and was brushed back from her face in a way i'd never seen before. her mouth was sunken because they'd taken her dentures away. and she looked tiny. she never broke five feet at her tallest, but she looked like a child in that big hospital bed.

i held back tears with immense difficulty and greeted her with the biggest smile i could muster.  she looked up at me and seemed to attempt a smile and some words, but without her dentures they were unintelligible. i just smiled and nodded and stroked her hand and told her how i'd missed her, how i loved her.

we stayed for about an hour, during which i had to approach an orderly twice to ask where her lunch was and once because it was clear from her distress (my mother had come to recognize it) that she needed to be changed. i was polite, even sweet, during these interactions (the dutiful, concerned granddaughter), when actually i wanted to wring someone's throat.  the visit took its toll quickly and my grandmother started drifting in and out of sleep, at which time my mother suggested we leave, that any meaningful interaction we were going to have was over.  i clasped her hand and kissed her forehead and told her how much i loved her and thought, "this is not my grandmother; this is her shell of a body.  her soul, while still present, is searching for and will find a better place." and this time i did cry. and left. and that's the last time i saw her.

when we got the call a couple weeks later, my mother and i had just barely begun a game of scrabble. (this was one of the first times since i'd been at her house that my mother had tried to engage me to do something active with my brain and i'd actually agreed. she used to beat me handily when i was a kid, but i'd had plenty of practice against worthy opponents and had learned a lot of strategy in the intervening 25 years and was prepared to kick her ass.) i knew what had happened as soon as she picked up the phone. she was off in less than a minute and turned to me with tears in her eyes. we hugged each other, and as is typical of my mom (of all moms?), the instant she realized how much i was hurting, she put her own feelings aside and began murmuring comforting words in my ear.  my ear.  it was her mother, with whom she'd had a complicated but very close relationship, and she was putting her energy toward trying to make me feel better.

there's a lot more to the story, of course, but what's important as it relates to this line of thinking and act of writing is that when my grandmother died, i let myself off the hook. i gave myself over to the fact that i couldn't go home just because i thought i should - in other words, just because i was a fucking grownup, for god's sake, and should act like one, whatever that meant.  i camouflaged some of that thinking in the convenient part of it: i have to stay and be here for my mother for a while. but that wasn't the half of it. it would have been disrespectful to my grandmother not to fight for my life, to do everything i could to get better.  and realistically, i was not confident that i could do that in san francisco, where i was basically entirely on my own.  i let go of the shame and guilt i felt about "dropping out of life" and decided that i had to do what i had to do to get myself back in. and if that meant staying at my mother's for a few more weeks or a few more months or longer, that's what i had to do.  and whereas i'd been poring over travel websites almost every day for the previous few, i didn't visit one for at least a month. i liberated myself from a damaging vein of critical, punishing thinking and behavior. it was an important turning point.