Saying Goodbye to Grandma

My grandmother is dying.

We visited her while we were back home in Ohio. She’s in an assisted living facility, a pretty and cheerful place, but she doesn’t know it. She’s past knowing.

She didn’t know me. She had trouble remembering who I was the last time I saw her, so I wasn’t expecting her to remember me this time. But she’s not recognizing anyone now.

She’s delusional, maybe due to the all the meds she’s on for pain. We couldn’t tell what she was talking about—things that weren’t there. Nothing that made sense.

I held her hand. She’s lost so much weight—she’s only 80 pounds or so—that her hands are skeletal. So withered and bony.

I held her hand and thought of how these hands used to hold mine. We’d go for walks on the farm, and always she’d hold my hand. When I got older, she’d take me shopping sometimes, and she’d hold my hand when we crossed the parking lot, even when I got embarassingly old for it. But I never let go.

These hands had changed my diapers. They had baked cookies, prepared meals and wrapped gifts for me. They held me and helped me hold open a book on Grandma’s lap—Aesop’s Fables, children’s poetry books, Sesame Street picture books. They pointed out flowers and kittens and family heirlooms. They taught me to make pie crust and Rhubarb Dream Dessert.

Now these hands, this body, are slowly wasting away. Her 97-year-old heart is still beating strong, but she’s not eating enough to sustain herself. She has occasional bouts of scary coughing, maybe the beginning of pneumonia. It’s just a matter of time--a short time.

I took my children to see her. I debated a little at first: Should I leave them with the memories they had of her, before she was like this? But death is part of life, and we are so insulated from death, in our age of modern medicine. I think of the “birth and death room” that old houses used to have, and I think of the statement of a friend, who had lost a child, that “you can’t control birth and death.”

And we can’t control this death. We’d love to see her suffering end quickly. Both her children and half her four grandchildren—and their families—were there over the past weekend, and we discussed among ourselves: Do we leave, or do we wait? She’s very close, but she has such a strong heart…

Such a strong heart.