Once my grandfather retired, well into his eighties, he would hold court from a green chair in my grandparents’s living room. Near the end of his life he was pretty much living in the living room. I remember helping him to the bathroom and then helping him get up off the toilet. At the very the end he was just lying in a bed in the middle of the living room, groaning in pain. I asked my mother, “Isn’t there anything they can do to help him?” She said, “He’s dying” and she said it a way that struck me as “He’s dying, you idiot.” My mom was hard core. And she made it clear that dying at home was the way to go. She said she hoped she would be able to do the same thing.
Well, you are hardly ever as lucid as my mom was when you get to the late stage. Today, she asked point blank. “Paul, what is going to happen to me?” I laughed and said “No one knows what’s going to happen to anyone. We could leave here on our bikes and get run over. No one knows what’s going to happen to them.” Sort of a cop-out on my part and not exactly what she wanted to hear but the best I could do on the spot.
She is not happy now. Her legs bother her. She sleeps to escape her uncomfortableness and she told me she feels as though this is happening because of something that she did. She says “I feel as though I did something wrong.”
I told her she did nothing wrong. “This is what happens in old age. People don’t live forever.” There was a picture of my grandparents, her parents, near where we were sitting and I handed it to her. She studied it for a bit and I said, “Your mom and dad are gone. They died. No one lives forever. That’s life.”
She worries about everything and the best I can do is to. say, “Just don’t worry about it.” I wish I was as hard core as my mom.
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