It’s windy, windy and weird here tonight. I had to hunt down the garbage can when I finally got home, then heard something thudding alongside the house, and had to go out and retrieve the lid. Again.
Cold and rainy and windy. Miserable weather, the kind of cold wet that the wind drives into your bones. My husband’s still at the hospital tonight, because his grandmother is very ill. She’s 95, and hasn’t been in good health for a long, long time. She might die tonight. This is the only place I can probably say–write–that I hope she does. She is very sick and very old and her body is worn out and her life is very, very limited, painful and not very happy. My husband has been visiting her daily in her nursing home, something no one else, including her own son or other grandson, has bothered to do. But the stress of being having her power of attorney and running around between clients to buy things for her and do things for her has been very difficult on him. She wants things from the stores that they haven’t carried in twenty, thirty years, and no matter what he gets, it’s usually wrong. But he tries, even if he has to go to six different stores for her in a day that he’s already got his work too. He’s been exhausting himself trying to cater to her whims and wishes as those little things and his visits are really the only things she has left in her life. I really think that he has done so much more than duty would demand of him, and yet the stress of it has been taking an awful toll on him. He already works six days a week, then goes to visit her for an hour every day, and he’ll go after work if he can’t during the day, so he’s not getting home until after 8 at night or later sometimes. Day after day.
No one else visits her, except to take her to dialysis from the nursing home, which is split up between my husband, his cousin, and her son. My husband is the only one who goes and just visits her, and brings her things she asks for.
She’s a loony old bat, and can be very, very difficult. And demanding. And ungrateful. And wacky-religious (to the point where she’s alienated her granddaughter-in-law who was caring for her in their home and went far, far above and beyond the call of duty for her). Anyway, calling someone who’s cleaning up your shit and making your meals and being your nurse-slave, a “devil” and saying that she is “evil”… I’m off track. Sorry.
Anyway, I hope that she slips away in her sleep tonight with a minimum of further pain. She’s 95, almost totally deaf, almost blind, wheel-chair-bound, and has survived cancer and the loss of her daughter and her husband. She has dialysis three times a week on top of all the other medical issues you have at 95, and dialysis especially has become excruciating for her. Her life is nothing but pain and ordeal now. It’s time to go to her rest, and give my husband his, too.
God, that sounds terrible. But I really think her body’s worn out and it’s time to go. I hope she dies easily.
