I just did one of the hardest things I’ve done in a very long time. This evening, I called my grandma. That’s usually already pretty hard, but the reason this time was so hard was because at about 1:30 this afternoon her mother, my great grandmother, passed away. It wasn’t long after she answered the phone that she began to choke up and cry. She just started rambling a little bit about her mother (affectionately known as Grammer to our family) and then she asked if I wanted to hear what was really sweet about the whole situation. I said of course, and this is the story she told me. I decided to share it because it really is very sweet.
As told by my grandma:
“Well, I really wasn’t sure when Grammer would go, but the doctor said on saturday that he didn’t expect her to make it through the night. Everyone, oh there must have been about 20 people in the room, everyone was there that night. Finally, around 3:40 in the morning the last person had left, but Mother just kept on breathing. Well she just kept breathing all through sunday and finally we took her off of the nutrients she was on because her kidneys had failed and she wasn’t absorbing them anymore. I was talking to one of the nurses that day and she said that maybe she was waiting to see someone close to her. The only person close to her that hadn’t come to see her that I could think of was of course Katy (Grammer’s sister). So this morning I called Katy and asked her if she wanted to come see my mother, and she said that it was so cold. I told her that it had warmed up a lot from the other day so it wasn’t that cold anymore and she said she would let me know if she wanted to go soon. About 30 minutes later Katy called me and said she wanted to go, that she was dressed and wanted to go see her. (My aunt Katy had not been to see her because Grammer said she didn’t want Katy to see her like that). Then later she even called again to see if i was on my way, see she felt a sense of urgency and so did I. Well I got Katy and we went back to the hospital. It was about lunch time and they brought a meal to Mother’s room because her whatever she has covers a meal and they have to bring it even though she can’t eat it, and it was a diabetic meal because with everything that happened to her she just at the end of her life became a diabetic. So, I told Katy ‘why don’t you eat mother’s meal’ (Katy has been diabetic most of her life) and Joe and I went downstairs to get something to eat, and mostly I did that because I wanted her and Katy to get some alone time together. Well, when I got back to the room I went over to look at my mother, and right under her left eye there were two little tears, just though two, and I told Katy ‘there’s two tears under mothers eye’ and I wiped them up. Then I said I was going to wet mothers lips because they looked really dry, and when I did I looked at her and I told her how pretty she was and that I loved her, and then I noticed that the bubbles on her oxygen thing had stopped. I ran to the nurses station and told them ‘I don’t think my mother’s breathing’ and so a guy came in and he checked her and he said ‘I think she’s gone, but we have to have a doctor’, so the doctor came in and checked her and said that she was gone. But it was just so sweet because she wanted to see Katy.”
I really will miss her. She was just wonderful.
