“Where are we going?” Asks my five year old. It’s the day before Christmas 2004.
“To visit your Great Grandmother.”
“Why is she great?”
“It just means that she’s Grandma’s mother.”
“Oh… Why is that great?”
“Well…” Hmmmm. How do I explain this? "Your Mom, is just "Ma. “Grand” means “big,” so Grandma means “Big Ma.” “Great” is just another word for “big.” Great Grandma is bigger than Grandma but Grangranma, sounds funny so they use “Great Grandma.”
My daughter absorbs this with some degree of skepticism. “Is she fat, then?”
“No. She isn’t fat big. She’s big in terms of how old she is… Like lots and lots of years. It just means she’s really old.”
“How old?”
“94. or 95.”
“Oh, so where are we going to see Great Grandma?”
Here I pause. To date, the conversation is a fairly typical one. I try to be honest even if I know she’s not going to understand. Sometimes it works out better when she doesn’t understand. If I tell the truth though, she will understand. “We are going to the worst place in the whole world.” There, I spit it out.
“Really?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. It’s very bad. You will hate it. Tomorrow is Christmas though and we have to visit Great Grandma, and it’s very important that you smile and pretend to be happy. Because it’s hard to be Great Grandma and we should try to make her happy.”
“Why is it so bad?”
“Don’t worry. It’s not scary bad. It’s just bad like Liverwurst. You just won’t like it. You will really hate it, but you have to pretend you like it. Ok?”
“OK.” She’s still skeptical.
There’s something terrible about nursing homes, particularly the skilled care wards. This is where people go to die. Great Grandma has been dying for two long years. From stem to stern, top to bottom, her body is failing. She is completely bedridden. Her mind is… or was… still razor sharp. I say “was” because two years in bed in a nursing home will literally drive you somewhat insane.
We visit and it is every bit as bad as I warned my daughter. When you walk in, you can smell that old person smell, the medication. You can see the breathing masks, the wrinkled wasted forms, hear the moans of those in pain or who’s minds have left them. Worst is the feeling. As I walk in, I feel the sucking. Old and dying people suck your energy out of you. They can’t help it. Their dying creates a life vaccuum and when vital life comes in on the hoof, the energy naturally gets sucked out. That doesn’t make any sense, but the phenomenom is real. It’s worse than running a marathon.
Anyway my daughter does good. We visit and leave and have Christmas.
Driving to the service on Friday my daughter quizzes me again.
“What happened to Great Grandma?” She knows were going to a service but she doesn’t really know why.
“She ate the green weenie,” I reply.
“Ewww, that’s usskusting.”
“Yes, it is kiddo,” trying to keep it light.
“Is she ok?”
“Yes, honey she is ok. She’s ok the only she can be. “Eating the green weenie,” is just a funny way of saying she’s dead. When we visited her she was very sick. She couldn’t get better so that she could run and play. She was very very very old. The only way she could get better was to die. She’s been waiting to die for a long time, and she was ready, and she wanted to.” I’m not lying either. I know this for a fact. She told me so. She had tried to die… It just turns out that it’s not easy.
“OH,”
At the service they have brought my Grandfather in. Grandpa is an ex-chief of Narcotics of New York City. He was Serpico’s control. In his book Serpico calls him “The big dumb polack.” Once he told me that he used to break down the door when they made a bust. It showed his men how he led. One time the door was weak and the weight of the battering ram pulled him through. He fell, and a perpetrator pushed a gun into his skull and pulled the trigger. It was an automatic and the pressure against the barrel from Grandpa’s skull jammed the mechanism. After that he stopped using the battering ram. He just put his head down and ran through the door. He told me, deadpan serious, that this would cut open his head and blood would flow, and that it impressed his men and scared the perps. This earned him the nickname “Rocky,” but I have the feeling it wasn’t necessarily a compliment. He’s a horrible bigot. As a child he beat me so bad with a belt buckle and a hard shoe that I still have scars. He’s a terrible and mean and angry man, but also brave and good and I love and hate him.
He is the only huge very old man I’ve seen. He used to be six-four. Now he’s about six-two. Before his mind went completely a year ago, he used to run and lift weights. In his mid nineties his body is better than most people in their fifties. But his mind has gone. What is left is his instincts, and his basic nature unchecked.
He shouts out “YO!” and “Please Shutup!” during the service and is removed back to his cage. My daughter grins at me thinking it’s some kind of joke. I grin back.
Grandma was a good card player. A merciless card player. She taught me how to play “bloody knuckles,” which IMO is the all time greatest card game, since the name is not euphemistic but literal.
When I was thirteen she gave me $50 secretly. She told me she was old and probably wouldn’t live to see my high school graduation so she wanted me to have this money. That was twenty five years ago.
She died like this:
I mentioned that she had tried to die. She did this by refusing food and water and medication. She would go unconscious, they would start an IV, she would hydrate and wake up, pissed.
Why did we start the IV? Well, my Mom did that. Why would my Mom do that if she knew Grandma wanted to die? ::Sigh:: It’s complicated. The short answer is that she started the IV, because Grandma didn’t tell her not to.
“Why would she do that?” you ask. “You just said she wanted to die?”
Well… Yes… but she didn’t want to be killed and she didn’t want to die and leave my mother thinking that she could have done something to save her. Telling my mother not to start the IV, would have left my mother feeling guilty, like she could have done something to save her. Grandma didn’t want to leave her with the guilt of not starting the IV.
She was very sick and weak last weak. She hadn’t been drinking or eating much at all for several days and it was weakening her further. This may have been deliberate. On Friday she refused all meds, food, and water. Friday night, she went unconscious and had some kind of event, probably a stroke. They put her on oxygen and tried to start an IV but she was so dehydrated they got no return. Her BP was that low. Her body refused to give up though, and she went into rapid breathing “Cheyne Stokes” they call it, I think. They gave her morphine to make her breathing more normal though a Dr. friend of mine told me they really don’t do this for the patient, but for the loved ones, so she looks like she’s at peace."
Her tounge went in and out. She was wasted and… not there.
I saw her by myself, and I didn’t feel like she was there. I joked with her: “Go into the light, Grandma.” Then seriously. “Don’t come back. Rest now. You’ve done good. Go gentle.” Then I left.
Two days later, she gave out.
She died hard.
We don’t do death well in this country. In any compassionate society she would have been allowed to die years ago.
For all his terror and evil, my grandfather is not an evil man. I think he is a great man. But, like all great men, his failings are also great. He had a dignity that the shell that he is no longer shares. He’s like a shadow.
But, he’s not unhappy. He’s simply not aware of anything beyond a visceral level.
He “guards” the Alzheimer’s unit. He patrols it, looking for perpetrators (read “black people.”) He’s an object of derision, but they don’t know that he was a man among men. Great and terrible. A person truly to be reckoned with.
Now, while he “guards” the unit, he has a tendency to play with himself.
I once remarked to my brother that the kindest thing we could do would be to take him deep in the woods until we found a grizzly bear.
“Look Grandpa,” we’d say, “That bear is going to attack us. Save us!” My grandfather would surely shuffle straight to the bear and take it on, and he would die happy fighting the bear.
My brother thought about this for a second, before agreeing.
“What if he kills the bear?” he asked, not entirely rhetorically.