I feel like I haven't written anything in forever and a day - Today, Tuesday is usually my decompression day, my day to bake in the sunshine, catch up on my reading for school and take a lot of deep breaths, knowing that really all I HAVE to do is breathe. Tuesdays are a nothing day....
And as of late, my fav day of the week except for, unfortunately, this one - my kiddies have a meet tonight in spite of the fact that our usual meet nights are Wednesday - I fear this may have me all out of whack for the rest of the week - I desperately need my decompression time this week....I worked four days in a row at the shop which is unusual for me, I really should have just set up a cot in the back room and slept there as I literally returned home only to sleep and shower - I would have saved a bundle on gas...This was a long weekend for me, capped off by my night class last night after a nine hour day at work - I will admit I am a little crispy fried feeling in the brain this morning, a little fuzzy...And, yesterday mid - afternoon I received news that my Nana was being admitted into the hospital - she has kidney stones and an infection and has apparently been vomiting for over twenty four hours - I got the report from my sister, she is confused and looks terrible.
I am going home in fourteen days and desperately want to see her - but I will admit I am more than ready to have her pass on now and find some much needed peace.
I never thought that I would ever be in a position to admit that I am ready for my Nana, my best friend, to die, but I am - have been really for quite a few years now. I start my everyday with a thought of her that is half prayer, half beg - please God give her peace.
Sad when life gets to a point where peace = death. Unfortunately we are there and I think although my entire family has arrived at this place with fiercely mixed emotions, we are all on the same page - we love her, we will miss her, life will suck for us without her, but, there is no real quality to HER life and so it is time for her to go.
Maybe this illness will be her breaking point, maybe she will hang on until I can see her one more time, maybe either way is okay with me, although I would love to kiss her and look into her beautiful brown yellow green eyes one more time so that I can get one last really good impression of them for the memory bank - truth be told that is not necessary, those eyes are burned in my mind for all of eternity, the kindest eyes I ever did see.
I was talking to Mary about it last night as I drove home from school - ironic that her Nana is also not well and probably in her last days too...I said to Mary, "I was ready for her to die, the day I saw fear in her eyes" - that day came many years ago and has never left me in all the days following.
Fear in the eyes of your elderly, paralyzed and essentially helpless Grandmother, is not a good thing, in fact it is right up there with the worst thing ever.
She is helpless and I am helpless to to fix that. No Good, absolutely no good can come of that.
Years ago when she suffered her stroke and was put in the nursing home, I witnessed things that were just unimaginable to me - life in a nursing home, even the best one possible, is all bad in my experienced eyes. There is a moment where a humans dignity is lost - death as a preemptive to that moment is the only good answer - if only death would come on a working and convenient time schedule - leave the kids out of it and just man the elderly instead, swiftly taking them as dignity begins to diminish.
My Nana is a Catholic and I KNOW that I have watched her pray for forgiveness and that maybe she feels that this suffering is part of her lot in life - she would tell me to offer my pain up to God, that Jesus had to suffer, so why wouldn't we? Yeah Nan, I'm all set with you suffering that's the thing - I am not sure that suffering for anyone is part of the equation, or should be. I don't offer any of your suffering up to God, in fact I am rather irritated that if he exists, he would let someone like you linger in a living hell so long - but I shouldn't go there - there are a lot of shoes suspended in the air that could drop at any moment and so I should just keep my big mouth my shut.
Not that my big mouth has any effect what so ever, but whatever I shall not rant anger at God this morning, it'll do me no good anyways and it would, if she knew, make my Nana's heart hurt so - God it's in your capable hands...
sigh/grunt
I thought last night about her eulogy. What ever will I write? How ever will I get through that one? As if Papa's didn't suck the life force right from me - How ever will I write one for my Nana???
Papa and I were close, as close as a Papa and a Pumpkin could be, but my Nan and I - well we are on a different plane altogether and the pressure to do this monumental relationship any kind of justice, is daunting to say the absolute least...Forget about us - to do HER justice, to encapsulate her life and personality is almost more than I can even comprehend as I sit here and think - where would my jumping off point with words even begin???
I think of a place and well up with a grief so significant it hurts unbearably even at conception phase.
But I will do it, when the time comes, no doubt.
She was the first person to tell me I could write and that I should write. My letters to her from camp when I was ten, are some of my most prized poems to date.
For her I will write my heart out and bleed it directly onto the paper if I have to.
For her, I would do just about anything...
I said to Mary last night "She saved me, because long before I knew real fear and would have been to afraid to take the bottle of pills, I had a love for her that surpassed all - the guilt involved with knowing the sadness my death would have caused her, made me live even when I didn't want to"
Her love, is that kinda good.
So, if I owe anyone my words, it's her.
And I realized just now that I am speaking although this is already in motion - what the hell does that mean? Were the Robin's eggs just what I thought they were? Is the end approaching and I feel it?
I certainly did with Papa - I sat in my bed all day long the day before he died, staring out the window in my bedroom. Flipping through the reels of family photos and home movies in my mind - seeing my life with him play out in the gray glass of the window. I wrote in his eulogy, "I watched as you packed your bag and prepared to leave us, tucking us all safely away, memory by memory" - or something to that effect.
And I say it again (I know I repeat myself from blog to blog) this here, this shit, losing the loved ones who are your mentors and significants, this is the truly shitty part of aging.
I would take the belly flab around the middle, ten fold, to get to keep my Grandparents and have them retain their quality of life.
This is the part of growing into middle adulthood that really and truly sucks.
I think what is weirdest about the experience is my readiness. Who ever could imagine that I would be ready for my Grandmother to die? Me, who fears death so? I am ready God, ready for all the pain. - Just hurry up and take her please.
That whole thing right there, my eagerness for death - it just feels so weird.
It's a sign of real maturity - not just in the emotional sense, but in the life sense - yes I am forty now and see a beginning and end all rolled into one and at this point her death would bring me as much joy as a birth.
Crazy.
I wish that I were with her, wish that I could crawl right in her hospital bed like I did so many times before and hold her - tell her to let go if she is ready - we are all okay.
But, I have done that - she and I have no emotional debts to settle - nothing more to say. Been there already, done that years ago.
I don't have to be there, as much as I would like to be. She knows exactly how I feel about her, she always has.
When I think about her - I see her in the funniest images. I see her in her "bermuda" shorts and white ked sneakers, blotting her red lipstick on a kleenex.
I see her in the kitchen singing kookaburra to me while pulling a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies from the oven. I see her purse on the bed, open and organized, a healthy bunch of tissue is the inside pocket (she loves tissues).
I see her in the back yard by the rose bush, clipping perfect red roses and smiling in the sunshine. I see her muscular calves tense beside my chicken legs as we walked up town together, me always galloping a trot to keep up with her fast stride. I see her putting the cozy covered in green shamrocks over a fresh pot of tea. I see her with her plastic rain bonnet in a spring shower, she just had her hair "set" cannot get it wet - and I see her look down into my cleavage as she sticks her finger down the front of my shirt, and hear her tell me to keep covered up, "men have a hard time controlling themselves" - And I just laughed aloud.
I see her in these abstract ways - these moments of real time. Nothing especially profound, nothing especially dramatic - the real time moments.
The best time moments, when we just were.
I am so glad I have them. So glad I had them all.
And I say to you here and now, I have no idea what I have written today - the words on the screen look long in length but unfamiliar to me.
The brain haze is mixed with an emotional one today I guess - it is just an out pouring of thoughts I guess.
And me without my decompression time, oh my.
Yesterday a sweet girl in my class said "can I ask you an awkward question?" SURE I love awkward...
"How old are you?"
"Me - I am forty, almost forty one actually"
"Wow", she said.
She proceeded to ask the ages of my kids yada yada.
She told me that she hopes she looks as good as me after kids and at "my age" - I laughed and told her my secret to my youthful looks are the CRAZY.
I just live a crazy full life that leaves very little time for me to get old on the outside.
Not enough minutes in the day for me to form age spots and wrinkles (so not true)
BUT in some way very true.
My zest for life, is in that it beats me over the head at a constant pace - I have no option but to keep ducking and counter swinging my way through it - I think in a lot of ways that energy gives off the illusion of youthfulness.
Whatever the case, she made me laugh, that cute young girl, whose mouth gaped when I told her I had an almost twenty one year old - "yes dear, I could be your Mother."
She said her Mom is not nearly as cool as me. Oh honey, I bet she is if you would look a little deeper.
I just wear my cool heart on my sleeve is all - simply cause I have no time to tuck it in.
Nana always encouraged me to be myself, but always warned to know when to keep my mouth shut - laughing again....
Love her and how well she has always known me.
I think if she knew all I had accomplished of late, she would be really proud and pleased to see me with not only THICK SKIN, but skin period. Be, beside herself with joy to recognize that FINALLY - I am comfortable in it, whatever it may be or look like.
It's been a long time coming Nan - huh? Quite a laborious task for us both to undertake.
I couldn't have done it without you kid.
And with that I realize that I have to make sandwiches or something for dinner tonight and pack a cooler that will sustain us from 4pm thru 11pm at an away pool.
I think I have decompressed here in this blog as much as my day will allow - Tomorrow I hope to be in a coma poolside all day long, pretending I don't know who my kids are and wait, "why do you kids keep calling me MOM?"
If you see me tomorrow and I act like I don't know you - don't be insulted, it's the coma and I am in character is all.
I will return to me, after Dave and I have a private concert in my big old school earphones and the sun melts away all the stress - one can hope...
I hope for all of you this blog has not been boring - I know not one thing I have said - seriously it's been a verbal vomit.
I hope you all have a blessed day and that none of you know the first thing about the things I have addressed here today....I hope you cannot relate.
Peace and love and swim meets oh my.
Deb, your honesty rocks!
ReplyDeleteLove from an old friend...Maya Amaele