Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Thursday, May. 08, 2003 - 11:19 p.m.

So, this is BRUTAL, gang.

Watching someone die is a hideous, evil experience, and one I do not recommend. "Not" with a capital N.

As you know, my grandmother is in the hospital. Actually, a home. A "convalescent" home, but she's getting hospice care, which is a nice way of saying there's only one final way out of the place. She has dementia, which I can't remember if I've said or not, so sorry if I have, but that's a lot like Alzheimer's, except that the blood vessels in the brain are atrophying, so her cells aren't getting blood and are dying, so parts of her brain are slowly shutting down. Which affects short-term memory first, and then some bodily functions and motor skills, and then speech, and so on. So as you know, Gramma's not much of a talker these days. But I go every weekend and sit and talk to her anyway. She can say yes and no and stuff like that, and even short sentences, but you can't get really complicated in your syntax, or she gets confused. Sometimes I read to her, because frankly, my own conversational skills seem utterly deficient and lacking when confronted with someone with very little or nothing to say back. Amazing, considering I can rant on for hours about really stupid stuff, but I guess all that crap just seems pathetically inane and idiotic when you're talking to someone who's dying. Do you really want the last thing you say to someone to be about the cute little blouse you found for a steal at Ross last Tuesday or how the idiot on the freeway cut you off and nearly forced you into a guardrail? Uh, no. So you sit in that cramped little space looking at someone you love who is hooked up to a damned IV, lying on a diaper, catheter running out of her, who can't move her arms or feed herself, who indeed eats pureed everything, even though she hates it, and she is fighting to keep her eyes focussed on you, and you try like hell to come up with something not too taxing but at least mildly interesting or amusing, that might matter even a tiny bit to her. And the whole time, every time there's an awkward silence where you struggle for something to say and realize what a relentlessly boring creature you are, every time you leave the room, every time you start for home, you have to fight back tears, because all you can think of is that she is the only friggin' bit of happiness there was in your entire rotten, misbegotten childhood, the only person in the family who has always told you what a great job you were doing living your life and that it was okay not to have it all figured out and a map of your future drawn up and carved in stone before you were 25. You think of Beaver Cleaver waterglasses and aluminum Christmas trees with blue glass balls and a constantly changing wash of colored light you thought was magic until you were 5 or 6 and discovered it was a pinwheel projector, and of Gramma down on her hands and knees with you in the den of her house when you were 3, carrying you on her back and making elephant noises because you were fascinated by elephants and then suggesting you might want to try being a giraffe yourself. You think about how loud her laugh has always been and the time it embarrassed your friend when she took you both to Disneyland, but that you didn't care it was so loud, and now you laugh loud yourself. You think about how she taught you to bodysurf and boogieboard when you were in 7th grade and came out to stay with her for a whole month over the summer, and how great that was, and that when the judge asked who you wanted to live with when your parents got divorced, you said "my gramma" without even blinking. You think of the special gifts you always got for your birthday and the time she suddenly gave you a Lenox vase for no apparent reason, and when you opened it up, there was a card from the Lenox people about how this vase was a focal point for the home, and how you teased her about how that's what was lacking in your life, a focal point, but now you had one, so everything had suddenly fallen into place.

And it sucks. It sucks to leave the room and go out to your car in the setting sun and know that that might be the last time you ever see her, and she doesn't understand how much she was and is and how you are losing all the best parts of your childhood and yourself because she won't be there anymore to ride in the car with while you listen to her talk about the Kiwanis and the people at her Friends meeting and joke around that getting old sucks, and go share potato skins with at Mimi's Cafe. And all you can think about is how much you didn't appreciate those moments as they happened, didn't realize how fleeting they were, and that one day they'd come to a stop, but not the abruptly screeching halt of death, but the lingering half-life of a soul that has not yet spent itself but is no longer what it was and never will be again. And even though she's still here, you can't tell her, because she does not want to be reminded of it all any more than you do. And the soundtrack to all of it is Big Yellow Taxi, only it isn't the cool Joni Mitchell version, it's that gawd awful remake by the Counting Crows.

No. I don't recommend it at all.

Peace out,
Katie

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