Two Weeks Before 102
In two weeks, my grandmother will turn 102 years old. I don’t think she’ll make it. She’s dying right now.
He face is a swirling drape of skin all sloping down to a drain that has replaced her mouth. It lies open always, a puttering vacuum that shakes with each attempt at suction. I could hear the morphine in her body, that thick low breath that comes with the stupor. I’ve heard it before, and I expect I’ll hear it again. As I neared the side of her bed, I picked up the sound of her mucus, bouncing around in her chest like globby pinballs.
Inout…………..Inout…………..Inout…………….
That’s the best I can do to visually describe to you this style of breathing, if you haven’t had the opportunity to hear it in the past.
The staff at the home that cares for her had called my mother yesterday at lunchtime.
“Come now,” they said. “Just come right now.”
My mother went right over. I showed up a few hours later, driving from near Sacramento to near San Francisco to get there. We were it. She’s two weeks from 102, after all. There aren’t many people left who know who she is.
I spent the night at my mother’s house. We had seven and sevens, talked about Grandma, joked about how tough she is, what a fighter she’d always been, how she’d probably be sitting up waiting for breakfast in the morning.
She wasn’t.
Inout…………..Inout…………..Inout…………….
She can’t be more than 80 pounds now, her skin just a hair thinner than the muscles that it covers. She has a thin brown pony-tail tied on the top of her head even though the wild eruptions of hair on her temples are as gray as ash. I can see more than just a vein or two behind the skin on her face.
She has achieved translucence.
After an early morning visit, breakfast in Burlingame, and another visit, my mother and I part ways in the parking lot to return to our respective jobs, the nurses ready to call should anything change in her condition. That was 9:30 AM. It’s 8:30 PM and no such call has come.
She’s still there, still here, still breathing. Amazing.
I was standing a moment ago in front of the kitchen window, looking out on our street, watching some leaves tumble by. I imagine her standing in front of the kitchen windows of her own long, varied life. So many people she’s known, so many friends and family and lovers. She’s outlived them all, watched the world go by, come back around the bend and go by again and again. Almost 102, after all.
I thought about pouring myself a seven and seven tonight, stirring the cocktail with my finger and lifting it in honor of her. But I couldn’t seem to move, couldn’t take my eyes off of the empty street in front of my house. Hayden’s asleep. Heidi’s out for a little while. It was just me in the quiet, watching out of the window, my body almost frozen, trying to freeze.
A dog barked faintly in the distance. A siren traversed nearby Gibson Road. The wind stopped troubling the leaves. I checked my jeans to make sure my phone was with me. I didn’t cry. Maybe I will in a little while.
Is that just the world moving by, Grandma?
posted this on Oct 29, 2009, at 6:54 PM
That was lovely Dave. I never really got to know my grandparents beyond the time spent with them as a toddler. My mother’s father died of black lung when she was a little girl and her mother died when I was a preteen. I was much closer to my father’s parents, even though my father’s father unsuccessfully tried to kill me on several occasions. My father’s mother died shortly before my grandfather took his own life. I guess what I’m trying to say is, you have a much better family than I.