Spontaneous Musings

My Granny passed away this morning at the age of 91. I had been meaning to write a post about her for quite some time, entitled the Bead Lady. Complete with pictures, I thought I had saved onto my computer - but when I went to look I found they were gone, mysteriously erased. And now, I find myself looking at the screen, and I am not sure I even have the words.

I look at the blanket I had begun knitting her, a marroon and gold, with threads of purple, a not even half woven place mate to go over her lap...and while I could, I suppose finish it to give to someone else, I find myself wanting to leave it, unfinished.

What should I tell you?

That she learned to bead necklaces from a Papago Woman, as well as the Navajo, then in later years taught their children when they visited with her in Y, Arizona, and Uma, where she traveled first with her husband then with her daughter every winter for about fifteen years. Or that the desert was her second home, she loved it there, the dry air that didn't make her hurt, and arid vegetation. And the Western novels from Louis L'Amour to Tony Hillerman that sat in stacks around her chair.

Or, that she read voraciously, finishing a book each day. She read Gone With the Wind in less than thirteen hours, a deft feat, considering its length.

Or that she was a budding artist, not to mention, untrained architect, having drawn the blueprints for a dock. She designed her own beaded necklaces, necklaces that go for thousands of dollars in New York, but a mere $600 in the West. One necklace was a little bag with two Indians on horseback riding against a brilliant red and orange sunset, all beaded with tiny white, black, blue, purple, orange, red, and yellow beds. She'd done it with arithitis bending crooking her fingers and swelling her toes.

Or that when my parents went to Australia for a year and a half after I graduated from undergrad, and my friends scattered, we, my Granny and I, comforted each other. Her husband dead and buried. Her eldest sister, Gwen, gone as well. Each weekend I drove the hour and forty minutes to her house in Liberty, Missouri, and we would rent movies, eat at Applebee's and pick up a French Silk pie.

One night I remember calling her, it must have been past midnight, but I knew she'd be up, she always was back then, frightened of a monster spider in my bathroom. She calmed me down.
Or when I took her to the doctor, saw the arthritis scattered across her back and shoulders, and legs, then to cheer ourselves up we went to Dances With Wolves - and had a ball.

Between 1991-1994, I called my Granny almost every day. After 9/11, that Friday, when I finally fell apart, a crying, sobbing heap, she was the only person I could get a hold of, and she calmed me down. My parents were a world and a half away in Greece at the time.

Then, later, in 2006, when I got robbed, I called her. Numerous times. She calmed me down. Much as she had with the spider.

Or should I tell you how she helped a family come together? Find one another after years apart, discover their roots, and obtain an in heritance that enabled them to afford a seeing eyed dog for their brother? That story sits in the back of my brain, screaming to be written, but for some reason I simply can't find the words.

Like tonight. After months, of meaning to write an ode to my granny, all I seem to find are broken sentences and jumbled thoughts, a babble.

She had a high tolerance for pain. And when she was in her right mind, before the Alztheimers or dementia took over, she never whined, rarely complained. She hated asking for help, and did not want to impose. When I passed the bar exam - she was the first person I told, just as she was the first I'd told when I got into law school. And she used to give the greatest hugs, I'll always remember those hugs.

50 years older than me. She had over time become much more than just my Granny, she had become one of my best friends, and I've been missing her for quite some time now. I knew, somehow, this past Xmas, when I saw her - that it would be the last time. And it was. She died in her sleep, with no pain, or so I'm told. Her heart finally gave out.

For the last year and a half she has been asking to go home. That was all she wanted. And now, finally, she has gone home. Home to her husband, her daughter, her sisters, and her parents. Home.

And I realize the person I am grieving is not the woman who died today, but the woman who I lost more than a year ago. I know that. Yet, as much as I am relieved she has passed...finally passed, I feel her loss all the more. My Granny. My Granny. I loved her so.
And now...she's gone away home, where I can't see or talk to her no more.

I didn't plan on spending much time online tonight...have about an hour left before I have to go to bed. It takes me about an hour and a half to wind down and sleep...so. But, I want to write about my grandmother, or my granny, Granny..

Not really sure where to start. Writing about her should come easily, but lately every time I try, it feels like pulling something out of my gut. I find myself inadvertently drifting to something else, much like one might inside a dream. It's painful. Maybe because if I put into words what is going on, it becomes real, and I'll have to look at it, see what is happening, and not just push it back to the recesses of my mind as I've been doing, trying not to worry.

The past few days have felt as if someone threw a smelly wet towel over my head. The air stinking of stale sweat, soiled underwear, and rotting fruit. So, I've been a bit irritable, until today that is, in which we had a rollicking good rain that washed it all away, at least for a little while. As a result, I feel better equipped to write.

My Granny...where to start. How to explain how I feel about her, more important, why. Not everyone has been lucky enough to have a close relationship with their grandmother. And until my parents moved to Australia, leaving me to fend for myself in Prairie Village, Ks, with no close friends near by and no steady work...I didn't have much of a relationship with my grandmother either. Oh, I'd visited her as a teenager off and on. Spent most of my time in the attic room of their small two bedroom house, rummaging through the millions of old books they had. I think I read every book they owned, which were mostly genre novels - romances, westerns, old science fiction (courtesy of an aunt), and mysteries. Books such as Shepard of the Hills, Laura, a lot of Georgette Heyer, Rosemary Rodgers, Louis L'Amour, Tarzan, and a couple of Andre Nortons. Through most of my adolescence, my grandparents were busy traveling about the West, living in Why, Arizona and Yuma, in RV parks.

No, it wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties and my granny was widowed and in her early 70's, that we got really close. That I got in the habit of driving up to visit her every weekend. Even in law school, even after my parents returned, I'd visit her at least once or twice a month. An hour drive from where I lived, two from law school, depending on traffic and how closely I followed the speed limit. We'd rent videos, watch soap operas, go to the local restaurants and eat out, picking up French Silk Pies, bead indian jewelry, cook, bake cookies, do laundry, read, and talk. We got along. When I had to go to the airport to visit my parents, I'd drop my car off at her place and she'd drop me off at the airport. I remember, once, taking her to Prairie Village, to see her Doctor, and the film Dances with Wolves - which she loved. Best movie ever. And when I had a spider the size of my fist in my bathroom, I called her half-hysterical, and she'd reassure me, even though it was way past midnight. That was the thing about my Granny - I could call her any time, day or night. She usually wasn't asleep until one anyhow.

On 9/11 - she's the first person I called. I called her a lot that week. My parents were overseas and unreachable. My brother equally so, off in Pennsylania, where he'd taken off to with his wife shortly after it happened. And...after I was robbed, I called her. She made me feel safe and loved.

My Granny was never a thin woman. If I had to describe her, I'd say she was a bit like a big soft teddy bear, warm and soft, and easy to hug. Barely 5'8, now barely 4'5 due to severe osteoporsis. She's also much thinner, shrunken. Pinched. All bones. Not soft or huggable at all. Almost unrecognizable. A shrunken doll. The woman I remember, was quickwitted, stubborn, and incredibly kind. Her philosophy was simple: live and let live. When I found out that I passed the Kansas Bar - I called my Granny. And she used to call me. Whenever my parents were overseas. Whenever anything crazy happened. We had become more than just "family", we'd become close friends.

I remember during one of our many conversations - that her worste nightmare was to lose her mental capacity, to become dependent on one of her children as her own mother had become dependent on her. A fear that I could identify with - since the loss of mental capacity scares me more than anything else. She lived in fear of inconviencing or hurting anyone. She didn't like leaning on others and was in some ways fiercely independent. I remember her telling my mother over and over again that she did not want my mother to take care of her, that she did not want my mother giving up any part of her life for her. I think she feared more than anything else becoming her daughter's child. In some ways, of her three daughters, my mother is the most like her... her oldest daughter, my Aunt Audrey, died over six years ago. My Granny, at the age of 90, has outlived her favorite sisters, she's one of four, the one remaining - she can barely stand the sight of and never talks to, her husband (my grandfather who died several years back), and her eldest daughter (who in some ways she was the closest to, she's told me on more than one occassion that I remind her of her eldest daughter - the writer/story teller). She's also lived to see her worst nightmare come true. To become the very thing she dreaded, to become what her own mother had become. Her heart is working fine by the way. She's confined to a wheelchair, has brittle bones, and her mind is slipping into dementia. Some days she's clear as a bell and others...filled with paranoia and half-crazy, not able to remember her own name let alone who my mother is.

The Assisted Care Living Facility in Hilton Head...Carolina House...has become a nightmare as well. A prison, that my grandmother rails against daily. My mother is determined to move my granny to another facility by the end of next week. The last straw was when the nurses at Carolina House gave my grandmother the wrong dosage of her medication - not once, but for several weeks. They were over-dosing her. There was a mix-up with the pharmacy and the nursing staff. The pharmacy didn't update it's records, because Carolina House did not send them the new perscription from the Doctor that my mother gave them, or they did, but it got lost, and Carolina House never checked to make sure it was recieved or accurate. And when the pharmacy sent the pills, Carolina House ignored what the Doctor had written and what my mother told them and followed the pharmacy's data. ( My mother reported Carolina House to the government agency, Vendex, I believe, and they are conducting an investigation and may impose a fine.) As a result, my Granny was taking a higher dosage of anti-depressant and pain meds than she should have been. To give you an idea of the difference, she should have been taking 50 milligrams four times a day, instead they were giving her 200 milligrams four times a day. That was the last straw. Prior to this, Granny was complaining about how much she hated the place. That the food was spoiled. That she'd stopped taking her meds, because she didn't trust the people there. And, well, all sorts of conspiracy theories about how she was a prisoner in the Carolina House, a slave, who'd always worked there and would never be able to leave.

In the past few weeks, my mother has checked out numerous other facilities on Hilton Head Island. She's narrowed it down to two, Hawthorn Inn and Palmetto. She's chosen Palmetto, partly because their manager has a degree in elder psychology and an extensive background in elder care, as well as a good relationship with my Grandmother's primary care doctor and his nurse. It's more expensive than the place they are currently in, but she'd have to live to 120 to run out of money. Money is not the issue here, her care is. It's all we care about.

My heart breaks for her. There's nothing I can do, but listen to my mother and support my mother. Last night and today, I dreamed of helping my mother find a new facility for her - maybe do an analysis or something. But I'd have to go down there and I've got no time. Tonight when I came home and saw a message on my machine, my first thought was that it was my mother calling to tell me that my grandmother had died and I felt an odd panic. Odd, because part of me wishes she would, the woman I knew is mostly gone, but there are times, I see her there still. And I love her. A type of love that is difficult I think to describe. I've been planning for quite some time now to write a book about her, but I'm unable to find the words. They stick in my throat. Clogged. Constipated. Hard to push out. And when I do write...it comes out much as this post has, I'm afraid, in scattershot style, babble. Making little sense. There are some things that one just can't quite write about or not very well, because they hurt too much. The words just stick in my gut and heart like barbs that the more I budge and pick at them, the more they tear, and the deeper it burns.