Everyone, this is Carrie. Carrie, this is everyone. Carrie can normally be found at Stop screaming, I’m driving. If you would like to comment about Carrie’s post, please DO NOT comment on her blog. Here is where any and all comments should happen. Thanks!
The hot tears stream down my face, prematurely as I sit here reading emails about the battle my grandmother has had with an upper respiratory infection over the weekend.She was on oxygen. She had a temperature. She’s off the oxygen. She’s feeling feisty (feisty is good). She’s better.
My grandmother lies most of the day in a “Care Center,” after being discharged from the hospital for a hairline fracture in the same hip she broke for the first time in December (it is May). I’m sure she does her exercises, when told. I’m sure she still watches her beloved baseball games on TV, when reminded.
Her 90th birthday came and went, the day after Mother’s Day.
We were planning a big (but not too big) party to celebrate and then she fell. She fell in the apartment that she and my step-grandfather share in a retirement home. An apartment that they just moved into 2 weeks prior. An apartment that gave them their independence while protecting them from the things that happen to people in their nineties, things like injuries, illness and forgetfulness.
I was so relieved that they got in, as the wait list period drug on and on and on.
My grandma drove herself to town and had coffee with her lady friends before she broke her hip. She swam laps at her community pool religiously. She shopped for her own groceries, drove her own car and tended to her beautiful African Violets with the skilled hands of a master gardener.
And now she lies in a “Care Center.”
I have purposely not written about her, not because she isn’t at the forefront of my thoughts, but because my family reads my blog. My Aunts print my posts and bring them to my grandmother, as she gets so much joy from reading my words. I want nothing to do with adding to the sadness that they are already feeling about their aging mother.
But in honoring and protecting them, I am stripping myself of my voice. The voice inside that wants to scream and cry and write it all out. The voice that is sad about her aging grandmother. The voice that doesn’t want to lose her just yet. The voice that thinks there will never be a good time, but knows that it is inevitable. The voice that has lost a grandmother, 16 years ago, but who feels the pain of her passing like a wound that will just not heal. I miss her. I miss her. I miss her.
In losing her, I gained my “I love yous.” I learned that I never wanted another day, another minute to go by without telling those around me that I loved them. I want nothing to be left unsaid. I shower my grandma with “I love yous” every time I speak to her or see her. I squeeze her hand tight, tight like I don’t ever want to let it go.
How can grief become such a part of a person before the final act actually occurs?
How can it feel so raw?
How can life seem so fleeting?
I feel for my mom, my aunt, my uncle. I try to be strong, be calm, be happy - but I feel like a brittle branch waiting to snap. I want to cry too. I want to be sad too. I am losing her too, little by little, just as they are.
And it is just the beginning.
