I reluctantly walk into the building before me. I hate the place. It smells of over-sterilization and fading urine. Bodies twitch uncontrollably and mouths make incidental groans. Withered faces and hollow stares greet me. Seeing but not recognizing, watching but not comprehending. Artifacts in storage waiting to die. I am loath to go there, which I know means all the more reason I should go, to the nursing home.
She's dying. Has been for sometime, but now she really is. She has entered that last downward spiral and she knows it. We all do. I can't do much for her. Coffee and ice cream are perennial favorites, so I bring those with me. It's the least I can do. She looks like a wraith, rickety and gaunt. The image of God reduced to a fragile nothing. Flesh and blood scraped bare. I feel so helpless.
We were never very close. How could we be? But when I see her sitting there, lost in the fantasies of her mind, hands quivering from illness, pain plaguing her body, I am filled with emotion. She can't hear anymore and she can hardly talk at all. I am still reluctant to go. All I can really do is sit with her, but when I walk in and she sees me, her face lights up in a rare and genuine smile and a bit of life returns to those eyes, if only for a second, and in that moment I know I did the right thing. She is, after all, my grandmother.
More to come.
