My grandmother is dying. I realize that's not so unusual, because we all die eventually. I also realize she's had a good life, at least in terms of how many years she has lived. She is 83 or 85 - we're a little uncertain because she lied about her age on some official form early on, and now no one knows for sure.
She married too young to a hard-drinking man, had five little stair-step babies during the depression when no one had the proverbial pot to piss in. The oldest daughter went blind early; the second-oldest daughter, my mother, became the de facto mother for the remaining three. My uncle was born next, followed by an aunt who was so premature that she shouldn't have lived but somehow managed to, and then another aunt, who, true to baby-of-the-family expectations, has been wild most of her life. They were all wild, really, with the exception of my mother, who somehow rose above all the chaos to be the only one to graduate from high school.
My grandmother is beautiful despite being in her eighties. She has a head of pure white silken hair, and I swear her skin looks better than mine and I'm less than half her age. It's stretched thin across her skull - almost no wrinkles, and pure white like porcelain. When I saw her a few weeks ago, her eyes still had a spark, a fire... the women in our family are tough. She's survived heart attacks, bladder cancer - she outlived two husbands and had to deal with the anguish of burying her only son - but I think this will be the end. She beat the odds to survive emergency surgery to resection her bowel, not once but twice, had septicemia and seemed to have beaten it down, repeated infections with the catheterization - for five months she's lived when no one thought it possible. But pneumonia is a terrible foe for a woman her age who used to smoke, and the staph infection on top of it may do it. She's been brave, and I am proud of her.
It won't be long now, a few days, maybe a week, before I'll be holding up my mother, standing before the casket of this woman who was never perfect, but who still stands as an inspiration to me. I've made my peace with letting her go, but I'll still weep. I'll still weep....
She married too young to a hard-drinking man, had five little stair-step babies during the depression when no one had the proverbial pot to piss in. The oldest daughter went blind early; the second-oldest daughter, my mother, became the de facto mother for the remaining three. My uncle was born next, followed by an aunt who was so premature that she shouldn't have lived but somehow managed to, and then another aunt, who, true to baby-of-the-family expectations, has been wild most of her life. They were all wild, really, with the exception of my mother, who somehow rose above all the chaos to be the only one to graduate from high school.
My grandmother is beautiful despite being in her eighties. She has a head of pure white silken hair, and I swear her skin looks better than mine and I'm less than half her age. It's stretched thin across her skull - almost no wrinkles, and pure white like porcelain. When I saw her a few weeks ago, her eyes still had a spark, a fire... the women in our family are tough. She's survived heart attacks, bladder cancer - she outlived two husbands and had to deal with the anguish of burying her only son - but I think this will be the end. She beat the odds to survive emergency surgery to resection her bowel, not once but twice, had septicemia and seemed to have beaten it down, repeated infections with the catheterization - for five months she's lived when no one thought it possible. But pneumonia is a terrible foe for a woman her age who used to smoke, and the staph infection on top of it may do it. She's been brave, and I am proud of her.
It won't be long now, a few days, maybe a week, before I'll be holding up my mother, standing before the casket of this woman who was never perfect, but who still stands as an inspiration to me. I've made my peace with letting her go, but I'll still weep. I'll still weep....
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