Death is hard, but my family has the most fantastic way of dealing with it.
Really. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of things my family doesn’t do right, but few people in the world have the bedside manner of the women in my family- my grandmother being the fore-runner. She had 14 siblings growing up and all but one is dead. Every time one of them fell ill, she was right there, sleeping at the hospital, taking them home, laying them to rest. Always strong, always a calm, peaceful sorrow about her. The older I have gotten the more I have realized that this is a rare gift- being able to sit in pain and in death with someone. It’s really beautiful and I hope to carry it on.
I went to go see my grandmother yesterday at her nursing home in Marion, Alabama. On the way down, I got the status report: not good. It seems that over the past three weeks she has declined rapidly into a state of merely waiting. Sometimes my family can over exaggerate, but I knew as soon as I walked into her room that they had exaggerated nothing. One of the nurses who has spent a lot of time with her lately came in and sat with us during our visit. She said the decline had been rapid since last Friday. She had been seeing things that weren’t there. At one point that morning, my grandmother had been so convinced that there were chickens under her bed, she had crumbled her biscuit into bits and thrown it on the floor for them. The nurse said that sometimes at night that she would talk to my grandfather, Lester, who passed away almost 4 years ago. They had been married over 50 years. My grandmother, whom the last time I saw her was as tenacious and regal as the day is long, had been reduced to a saddening state. I walked over to her, took her hand-covered in the same emollient cream she’s used for years and said hello. Immediately she began talking to me in slurred, half whisper. I couldn’t decipher most of what she was saying. I was about to start crying, when my aunt Terri leaned over her bed, and in the most obnoxious voice began saying “Huh? What? I can’t hear you Mom, you’re going to have to speak up!” Well then I started laughing. I looked at my grandmother’s face and she had pursed her lips like she always did when she was irritated. It turns out that if you get my grandmother good and mad, that a little bit of that Wolfe family fire returns along with a slightly improved whisper. We sat her up, combed her hair, put some lipstick on her (she’s never been anywhere without lipstick in her whole life), and listened as she mumbled softly about her dreams of late. Most of them were nightmares of different sorts, and at the end of every one, my mom would look at her and say, “Mom, you know that’s not real? All of those dreams aren’t real.” Every time my grandmother would lose her sense of reality, my mom or her sister would ever so calmly bring her back. We quizzed her. “Mom, what’s my birthday?” my aunt asked. When she answered incorrectly, my aunt just asked again and again, dropping small clues until she got it right. By the end of our visit, she seemed to have brightened at least a little.
Everyone in my family has done the same thing when the end came: they all said their apologies, told everyone they loved them, and they all had visions of people coming to get them. They knew they were dying and were at peace with that knowledge. We asked my grandmother before we left when she thought she would die and she replied, without trepidation, “the middle of next week”.
There was something about this visit that will stick with me forever. While my aunt was combing my grandmother’s hair, my grandmother looked at her and said, “Madge called”. Madge was one of her many sisters who passed away years ago. “Madge is dead, Mom”, replied my aunt. “I know, but she called. She said I had to get ready for the party. Do I have to go to the party?”
Really. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of things my family doesn’t do right, but few people in the world have the bedside manner of the women in my family- my grandmother being the fore-runner. She had 14 siblings growing up and all but one is dead. Every time one of them fell ill, she was right there, sleeping at the hospital, taking them home, laying them to rest. Always strong, always a calm, peaceful sorrow about her. The older I have gotten the more I have realized that this is a rare gift- being able to sit in pain and in death with someone. It’s really beautiful and I hope to carry it on.
I went to go see my grandmother yesterday at her nursing home in Marion, Alabama. On the way down, I got the status report: not good. It seems that over the past three weeks she has declined rapidly into a state of merely waiting. Sometimes my family can over exaggerate, but I knew as soon as I walked into her room that they had exaggerated nothing. One of the nurses who has spent a lot of time with her lately came in and sat with us during our visit. She said the decline had been rapid since last Friday. She had been seeing things that weren’t there. At one point that morning, my grandmother had been so convinced that there were chickens under her bed, she had crumbled her biscuit into bits and thrown it on the floor for them. The nurse said that sometimes at night that she would talk to my grandfather, Lester, who passed away almost 4 years ago. They had been married over 50 years. My grandmother, whom the last time I saw her was as tenacious and regal as the day is long, had been reduced to a saddening state. I walked over to her, took her hand-covered in the same emollient cream she’s used for years and said hello. Immediately she began talking to me in slurred, half whisper. I couldn’t decipher most of what she was saying. I was about to start crying, when my aunt Terri leaned over her bed, and in the most obnoxious voice began saying “Huh? What? I can’t hear you Mom, you’re going to have to speak up!” Well then I started laughing. I looked at my grandmother’s face and she had pursed her lips like she always did when she was irritated. It turns out that if you get my grandmother good and mad, that a little bit of that Wolfe family fire returns along with a slightly improved whisper. We sat her up, combed her hair, put some lipstick on her (she’s never been anywhere without lipstick in her whole life), and listened as she mumbled softly about her dreams of late. Most of them were nightmares of different sorts, and at the end of every one, my mom would look at her and say, “Mom, you know that’s not real? All of those dreams aren’t real.” Every time my grandmother would lose her sense of reality, my mom or her sister would ever so calmly bring her back. We quizzed her. “Mom, what’s my birthday?” my aunt asked. When she answered incorrectly, my aunt just asked again and again, dropping small clues until she got it right. By the end of our visit, she seemed to have brightened at least a little.
Everyone in my family has done the same thing when the end came: they all said their apologies, told everyone they loved them, and they all had visions of people coming to get them. They knew they were dying and were at peace with that knowledge. We asked my grandmother before we left when she thought she would die and she replied, without trepidation, “the middle of next week”.
There was something about this visit that will stick with me forever. While my aunt was combing my grandmother’s hair, my grandmother looked at her and said, “Madge called”. Madge was one of her many sisters who passed away years ago. “Madge is dead, Mom”, replied my aunt. “I know, but she called. She said I had to get ready for the party. Do I have to go to the party?”
The more people I know and love that die, the more I start to wonder if there’s some kind of crossover at the end of your life. It makes me wonder if she really can see her sister and my grandfather, and they’re helping her through this process of letting go. I realize that this sounds crazy, and that to everyone else it’s obvious that she’s suffering from some sort of delusional psychosis, but I’m just not as sure as I once was that the death process is black and white (in theological terms). Maybe nobody ever really dies alone. I would like that.
But until it's my time and I know for sure what really happens in the end, all I know is: I'd like to be there as she has been there for the people I love.
