Something Swift this way comes…

I’ve been silent for a while now. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say, or not had a few sparing moments here and there to say the things that I have. It’s just that I’ve been so distracted lately that I didn’t want to shortchange myself in posting something that isn’t true to me. In doing so, you’ve been without me for a while now, but that’s okay. I come to think more and more that I do this for me, and not for anyone else, and that’s the way it should be. My days have been full….filled with adapting to the oddities of a new job, studying to stay ahead in my classes and dealing with other things in day to day life that seem to loom so huge on the horizon at times that it seems as if they’re insurmountable. Until you’re over and past them, you realize that they were just small hills afterall. Somethings are big though, and that’s as it should be I suppose.

Something happened this week, that I don’t suppose it’s really hit me yet, but it will…it always does. My mother’s mother passed away on Wednesday, February 1st, 2005 at 2pm est. This is something that I knew I would have to deal with this year, the lady was over 92 years old, and in poor health, but I find that dealing with death as an adult is very different than dealing with it as a child. As a child your world completely falls apart. You think you’re just starting to get a good handle on things and then wham…the bomb drops and you are completely and utterly destroyed. As an adult, you have too much more perspective…you see things (you think) too clearly. It is this way with me:

My grandmother has been in very poor health for many years – longer than I can remember. For the longest time she was wheelchair bound and completely unable to move under her own motivation when standing unless she used crutches, and even then it was an excrutiatingly slow and painful process to behold. She’s been this way since I was very young. In the last few years, she has been completely bed bound – unable to carry herself to the restroom, unable to do anything for herself. Don’t get the image of a frail old woman…she wasn’t all that frail – having clawed her way to 92 years of age with very little education to speak of, but enough determination, hard-bitten will, and a stony faith that most pastors envy. She always was a hard woman – hard to please, hard to love, and hard to be raised by, and loved by. But she was a strong woman…stronger than most will ever know.

The facts – She went into the hospital a couple of weeks ago, because she was sinking, her kidneys were failing, she had a heart attack,a nd the doctors found some sort of bacteria in her bloodstream – completely incurable – and they diagnosed her with alzheimer’s disease. After long discussion the daughters realized that there was nothing else that could be done for her. Her body was in too bad shape to take dialysis, and the doctors couldn’t do anything else for her. The lead doctor gave her a day to live. That was last friday. She hung on for 6 more days, taking the morphine they were injecting her with for pain, unable to speak, unable to see…unable to communicate the horror of pain she was suffering through as her body began to swell with the pressure of unfiltered blood. As the toxin levels began to rise in the body, it caused severe bloating, and near the end began causing some fluids to leak from the body, primarily at the eyes. At the end, she simply took a breath, exhaled it, and failed to breathe in once more….giving up the fight after almost a century of fighting. She went, unable to tell the daughter that was with her (my mother) how much she loved her..how proud of her she was, how happy all her children had made her in life…she left this world in silence, and pain.

That was the first person my mother had ever seen die. The absolute horror of having to sit and watch your own mother painfully shoved off the skin of the world is incomprehensible to me…perhaps because I realize that I too, will one day have to endure that pain. I can’t help but pray that when it is time for my loved ones to go that they are able to speak with me one last time, and that they are taken quickly and painlessly. Death is claimed to be a natural part of life, but some deaths are unneccesarily painful, and thereby difficult to cope with…I pray for my sanity that I don’t have to watch either of my parents slide off the face of life clawing and screaming…I don’t know that I could handle it.

If you’re waiting for some great revelation, or some cosmic ‘I get it!’, there is none…this is simply the thoughts of one man trying to be a support for his mother during one of the hardest things she’s ever had to deal with. I don’t have any answers, but I do know that I’m happiest about the fact that my mother and her sisters don’t have to torture themselves any longer with the act of having to sit and watch their mother dying, horribly, painfully, slowly. That’s one blessing in this thing, though they did have to endure her pain as much as she did, and the knowledge that there wasn’t a thing they could do to ease her suffering.

So, if you’ve wondered where I’ve been. That’s where I was. The funeral’s on monday, and I’ll end up being one of the pallbearers. Sometimes you do the things you have to, even when you don’t want to, because those are the things, the ceremonies, the traditions, the ideals that keep us sane as a people…even when you don’t want to be sane.

More Later,

S