Grandma in After OD

I’m currently sitting in my grandmother’s chair as she is curled up in her bed and slipping away from this world. The last month has gone fast and brought an unexpected deterioration, with the past few days going even faster.

She is just shy of her 93rd birthday and has lived a beautiful life. She wed her childhood sweetheart at the age of 20 and raised 4 children during their 56 years of marriage. She was a nurse and a school teacher. A lover of the beach, and books, crosswords and playing cards. Always physically active, swimming and walking until she just couldn’t anymore.

Grandma is the reason I can read and write well. She made me spend the summer between first and second grade making sure of that. “No swimming until you work on your reading,” she’d say. So we’d sit on the “davenport” and I’d read off the list of vocabulary words as she’d point. I hated it. I love her so much for making me do it.

As I was sitting here I noticed a journal on the window ledge. I took a peek. Just 2 entries. I had to laugh at the first because she wrote of an argument she had with my grandfather that became infamous among family lore.

The pussywillow incident. It was July of 1991. My grandparents had a swing in the backyard with a canopy of greenery and a hedge of pussywillows surrounding it. It kept you cool when the hot summer sun would beat down. Grandma wanted to keep it that way. Grandpa however, in attempt to please the neighbor next door who complained about it encroaching on his yard, cut the hedges down to the ground. Gram was furious and wouldn’t speak to Gramps for a week. Her account in the journal entry really expressed her fury. How could he have no respect for her and ignore her wishes? What was he thinking? She’d never understand it and wasn’t sure she could forgive him this time for this heinous error! Truthfully, my grandparents are the best example I had of a near perfect marriage and I still admire them and strive for mine to be half as loving and amazing as theirs. Somewhere grandma found the peace to forgive him, obviously, but the story lives on and is remembered as that time gramps really pissed grandma off.

The second entry? Four months later, a sleepless night as my grandfather was in the hospital about to have surgery to remove a brain tumor they had recently discovered. Grandma wrote how terrible she felt for writing that first entry, and that she wouldn’t know how she’d manage if he didn’t make it through. This is why I aspire to be like them. True love. Thankfully, Gramps did make it through, but not without her strength and patience.

When gramps passed away 11 years later, Gram moved south to Florida and spent 12 lovely years living seaside like she’d always dreamed. Then three years ago she fell and broke her wrist. She came back home to us and we’ve been so lucky to have this time with her to celebrate holidays, and birthdays, and just enjoy life with her.

Now we’re struggling as it’s time to say goodbye. She’s asleep most of the time, and yet even so she can get quite restless. I’ve been here at her bedside more than 3 hours and have shed a lot of tears. I held her hand, kissed her head, kneeled beside her and prayed for her easy departure. God, I’m going to miss her.