My Grandma, Sep.23, 1919--Dec.24, 2007
I wrote this for myself, but I'm posting it just in case anyone wants to read it as there are a few who were aware of what was happening while it was going on and I guess I felt like I wanted to make it available. My grandmother, whom I love dearly and was very close to left this world on December 24, 2007. I needed to write it all down while it was fresh, but it took a little while since it was also very raw. What I ended up with here is a bit more detail on what happened and possibly less of how I felt/still feel about it all, but I'm sure that part will be with me for longer. So this may well be the first of a series of posts about this amazing woman that I will miss so much. I guess I should warn that if you choose to read this, it is long and a discussion of my grandmother's dying process, so please be aware of that.
On December 21, my father called to tell me that my grandmother, whose health had been rapidly deteriorating since she broke her hip recently, was extremely sick again and the doctors were estimating that she had perhaps only a day or two left to live. They had admitted her to the hospital already with a severe infection. She had stopped eating days prior and was drinking very little and no longer investing any real effort into communicating with people. She told my aunt several days earlier that she didn’t understand why it was taking so long to die.
The afternoon of December 22, my mother called and said that my grandma’s kidneys had shut down and that the doctors were planning to stop all medication shortly and she suggested that I leave to come up there as soon as possible instead of waiting until later in the evening after my husband got home from work. I did and made the 8-hour drive to Chico, arriving after 11:00PM. Although the hospital was letting us in to visit anytime since she had so little time left, we decided to get some sleep and go early in the morning since she had been awake and communicating with my mother, father, aunt and cousin earlier in the evening for several hours and had expressed a need to sleep herself.
Around 7:30 the morning of December 23--my husband’s 32nd birthday-we arrived at the hospital. With the exception of the previous evening, my grandma had not been recognizing people often and had been sometimes confused about where and when she was, so I had braced myself for the very real possibility that she would have no recollection of who I was. She did know me though. It took great effort for her to focus on me and to form coherent speech, but she did acknowledge that her granddaughter was there with her.
The woman in that hospital bed so little resembled the vibrant, warm, talkative woman that I had grown up with that it was difficult to look at her and see that she was the same person. It didn’t really matter though; it felt like her. Worn out as her old body was, and despite the fact that she was disconnecting from this world, she still felt like my grandma. I really think we rely on so much more than the tangible to recognize people, but we just don’t notice it until we encounter a situation where the familiar has changed in some physical way, yet still we know it for what it is on levels other than the intellectual.
I spent the next few hours responding to her as she wandered between our world and someplace else, sometimes making sense and clearly with us and other times clearly elsewhere.
They had already stopped administering her heart medication and by noon removed the IV antibiotics as well and ordered a transfer upstairs to a comfort care room where she would have the privacy to die in peace without medical intervention and with her loved ones around her. When she started feeling pain, we made the decision to give her morphine. Roberta, her nurse gave her a shot of morphine and my grandma relaxed and proceeded to alternate between attempting (with her limited function) to sing a random combination of songs and speaking about things that were not part of our reality. She sounded like she was enjoying wherever she was though, and we were reassured that whatever she was dreaming/hallucinating was pleasant.
The comfort care room was more spacious and, as they had removed all IV meds and fluids, we were mostly left alone by the hospital staff. There was no longer any need to check her vitals, her blood sugar, or any of that, but they did periodically check in on us to offer to get us coffee or water and to see if we felt that she needed anything else to keep her comfortable in her last hours. The hospital staff was wonderful, and we are so grateful to them for being so kind and compassionate and respectful of her and us and the last hours we all had together.
About four hours after her first shot of morphine, she started feeling pain again and the nurse came in and administered another shot. We could tell Grandma was slipping a little further away as her ramblings became less frequently about what was actually going on around her. My mother asked her once if she knew here she was and she managed to chuckle like it was a silly question and say, “Yeah. Enloe.” (The name of the hospital she was in.) But when asked if she knew who was there with her, she was quiet a moment and then said, “Not really.” Her speech was very slurred and hard to understand and that was probably one of the last things she said regarding what was going on around her. Occasionally she would say things like “It’s beautiful” or “It’s so lovely” or “Here I go” and we wondered what she was seeing. Other times she sang songs we thought my grandfather had sung to her or church hymns or quoted bits from poetry. At one point she said “To heaven” and then said “I don’t know” as if she were talking to someone and said something later about “a gift from God.” I was very comforted by the fact that her strong faith in God and heaven helped to mostly alleviate her fear of passing. She knew she would miss us all, she had said some days earlier, but she also knew that she was going to be with her husband whom she loved dearly and missed terribly and the rest of her family and friends that had gone before her.
Throughout all of this, I mostly stood by her, stroking her forehead and her hair and holding her hand and trying to respond in some way to the things she was saying, trying to determine if they were addressed to us or someone only she could see. When she said she was hot, we put a damp washcloth to her forehead; when she looked like she was tying to push her glasses up on her nose more, we pushed them up for her; when her legs hurt, we shifted her body for her; when she sang, we sang with her. She always sang around the house. Everything she did seemed to inspire a song in her and it was only fitting that dying should also.
That second shot of pain killer didn’t ever seem to effectively eliminate her discomfort and two hours later, she was beginning to groan a bit and move her leg restlessly. She became increasingly more agitated and more verbal about her discomfort as the moments passed and I went quickly to find her nurse while my parents tried to soothe her. Our primary goal was to ensure her as comfortable a passing as we could, and for a few long minutes there, we had to watch this woman we loved so deeply, who had spent so much of her life caring for others, be in such obvious pain and discomfort. It was heart-breaking, and I was crying as I told her “The nurse is giving you something to help with the pain. It will be okay in a minute, grandma. It will pass.”
The shot didn’t help enough, and she was still so agitated; the nurse came back soon and gave her a shot of Ativan to calm her. Within minutes, Grandma was asleep and we all breathed deeply in the knowledge that she was not in pain anymore. At some point during this, my aunt, my grandmother’s daughter, had to excuse herself; she needed to go check on her husband, but also, it was clear that it was just too much to witness her beloved mother suffering. It really was the most difficult part of the whole process.
From her comfortable sleep, my grandma slipped into the comatose state we had been warned to expect, becoming unresponsive within hours. My mother, my father and I sat by her side for hours holding her hand, whispering to her that we loved her and that it was okay to let go, we had everything here under control, and that Grandpa was waiting for her over there. Sometime through this all, December 23 had slipped into December 24 and we all laughed quietly as other family members had predicted Grandma would wait until Christmas Eve or Christmas to go. She was always one to do things right, make an impression, make it special. It seemed fitting that if she had to go, she would do it on a holiday.
I can’t explain how sad, but somehow comforting, this whole process was. I was filled with sorrow for us and our loss--the loss of an incredible, amazing woman--but still knew how terribly she had missed my grandpa, the love of her life, and how she longed to be with him again. She had grown frustrated with her old body--this body that through her life had helped her to be a great swimmer and softball player, to birth five babies and care for five children, ten grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, to travel around the world, to live a full and fruitful life-but now could no longer even support her to walk or care for her most basic needs independently. She never wanted to have to depend on someone else for those basic needs. She had absolute faith that after she left this body, she would find herself without those needs in a beautiful heaven with her God and his son and her loved ones. That thought gave us all comfort.
As I sat in that hospital room, by her bed, clasping her hand, I was struck by how surreal the whole scene was. Around two in the morning of Christmas Eve, we sat in this room, in the dark but with the curtains open to the world outside and the door enough ajar that we could hear people walking by the door discussing their plans for Christmas. They were planning to visit family, open gifts, feast; we knew she wouldn’t live that long and were planning to be grieving for our loss on Christmas day. The heavy, sleepy darkness on the other side of the hospital window was disrupted by the lights and sounds of a helicopter landing close enough that the room flashed with light as the helicopter landed and the patient was unloaded. We were alone in our little microcosm, at once aware of the world going on around us but untouched by it, and as we watched my grandmother work to take in and expel each breath, chest rising and falling with such effort, we wondered which breath would be the last.
We sang to her. We sang to her as she sang to us and to herself and to no-one in particular. The three of us gathered around her: me directly beside her, still holding her hand, and my mother beside me, my father on the other side of my grandmother. My father had the laptop open in his lap with the verses to church hymns we only remembered parts of pulled up on the screen and we sang them to her, the songs she loved to sing while she was able: Just As I Am, On Eagle’s Wings, Amazing Grace. The three of us sang them to her, our tears flowing, the helicopter lights flashing, her uneven breaths working in and out. So surreal, yet so very much a part of human experience. All night we sat there as her breathing and her heartbeat became less steady, but still went on. We waited. We assured her it was okay to go, but she hung on.
Every time we got together for one of her wonderful meals-hundreds over the years--she would say “Get your drinks! Get your drinks everyone!” to let us know that the food was ready and it was time to eat. Only after everyone else had sat down, would she ever sit, despite our pleadings for her to sit and our assurances that if there was something else we needed, we could get it. She always wanted to take care of us all. We told her that night in the hospital that it was okay for her to rest; we all had our drinks. She could do what she needed to do.
I was afraid to leave the room even to go to the bathroom, afraid that she’d stop breathing while I was gone. I wanted so desperately to be there for her as she was always there for me if ever I needed her. It was so hard to watch her keep breathing with such effort, but at some point we realized that it really felt like she was no longer with us despite the fact that her body kept going. It was an odd feeling.
I had to leave that morning. My children needed me to be there for them on Christmas Eve and I knew that I had to go be with them. I was torn. It was by far one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do-walking away from my grandmother, knowing it was the last time I’d see her, knowing how badly I wanted to be there for her and my parents when she passed, but also knowing how much my children wanted me to be there with them at Christmas, and knowing my grandmother would completely understand a mother’s need to care for her children first. I left the hospital and Chico around 8:00 in the morning on Christmas Eve, kissing my grandmother on the forehead, squeezing her hand gently and telling her how very much we all loved her, how special she was and how grateful and fortunate we were to have been loved and cared for by her.
The drive home was painful and difficult. I went directly to my sister’s home where my husband met me with our children. We were all there together when my father called around 5:30 in the evening to let us know that Grandma had finally taken her last breath a short while before. She was at peace. It was her turn to take it easy.
We had a lovely funeral service for her several days later, to which family flew in to honor her and share stories and memories of her. Memories of her generosity, her caring and accepting nature, her seemingly effortlessly produced meals, her faith in God. She touched more people than we will ever know, was much loved and will be sorely missed. We buried my grandmother in a grave shared with my grandfather, the great love of her life, the person with whom she shared her great adventure for more than five decades. The stone is marked with the words they proved true time and again: “Love never fails.”
On December 21, my father called to tell me that my grandmother, whose health had been rapidly deteriorating since she broke her hip recently, was extremely sick again and the doctors were estimating that she had perhaps only a day or two left to live. They had admitted her to the hospital already with a severe infection. She had stopped eating days prior and was drinking very little and no longer investing any real effort into communicating with people. She told my aunt several days earlier that she didn’t understand why it was taking so long to die.
The afternoon of December 22, my mother called and said that my grandma’s kidneys had shut down and that the doctors were planning to stop all medication shortly and she suggested that I leave to come up there as soon as possible instead of waiting until later in the evening after my husband got home from work. I did and made the 8-hour drive to Chico, arriving after 11:00PM. Although the hospital was letting us in to visit anytime since she had so little time left, we decided to get some sleep and go early in the morning since she had been awake and communicating with my mother, father, aunt and cousin earlier in the evening for several hours and had expressed a need to sleep herself.
Around 7:30 the morning of December 23--my husband’s 32nd birthday-we arrived at the hospital. With the exception of the previous evening, my grandma had not been recognizing people often and had been sometimes confused about where and when she was, so I had braced myself for the very real possibility that she would have no recollection of who I was. She did know me though. It took great effort for her to focus on me and to form coherent speech, but she did acknowledge that her granddaughter was there with her.
The woman in that hospital bed so little resembled the vibrant, warm, talkative woman that I had grown up with that it was difficult to look at her and see that she was the same person. It didn’t really matter though; it felt like her. Worn out as her old body was, and despite the fact that she was disconnecting from this world, she still felt like my grandma. I really think we rely on so much more than the tangible to recognize people, but we just don’t notice it until we encounter a situation where the familiar has changed in some physical way, yet still we know it for what it is on levels other than the intellectual.
I spent the next few hours responding to her as she wandered between our world and someplace else, sometimes making sense and clearly with us and other times clearly elsewhere.
They had already stopped administering her heart medication and by noon removed the IV antibiotics as well and ordered a transfer upstairs to a comfort care room where she would have the privacy to die in peace without medical intervention and with her loved ones around her. When she started feeling pain, we made the decision to give her morphine. Roberta, her nurse gave her a shot of morphine and my grandma relaxed and proceeded to alternate between attempting (with her limited function) to sing a random combination of songs and speaking about things that were not part of our reality. She sounded like she was enjoying wherever she was though, and we were reassured that whatever she was dreaming/hallucinating was pleasant.
The comfort care room was more spacious and, as they had removed all IV meds and fluids, we were mostly left alone by the hospital staff. There was no longer any need to check her vitals, her blood sugar, or any of that, but they did periodically check in on us to offer to get us coffee or water and to see if we felt that she needed anything else to keep her comfortable in her last hours. The hospital staff was wonderful, and we are so grateful to them for being so kind and compassionate and respectful of her and us and the last hours we all had together.
About four hours after her first shot of morphine, she started feeling pain again and the nurse came in and administered another shot. We could tell Grandma was slipping a little further away as her ramblings became less frequently about what was actually going on around her. My mother asked her once if she knew here she was and she managed to chuckle like it was a silly question and say, “Yeah. Enloe.” (The name of the hospital she was in.) But when asked if she knew who was there with her, she was quiet a moment and then said, “Not really.” Her speech was very slurred and hard to understand and that was probably one of the last things she said regarding what was going on around her. Occasionally she would say things like “It’s beautiful” or “It’s so lovely” or “Here I go” and we wondered what she was seeing. Other times she sang songs we thought my grandfather had sung to her or church hymns or quoted bits from poetry. At one point she said “To heaven” and then said “I don’t know” as if she were talking to someone and said something later about “a gift from God.” I was very comforted by the fact that her strong faith in God and heaven helped to mostly alleviate her fear of passing. She knew she would miss us all, she had said some days earlier, but she also knew that she was going to be with her husband whom she loved dearly and missed terribly and the rest of her family and friends that had gone before her.
Throughout all of this, I mostly stood by her, stroking her forehead and her hair and holding her hand and trying to respond in some way to the things she was saying, trying to determine if they were addressed to us or someone only she could see. When she said she was hot, we put a damp washcloth to her forehead; when she looked like she was tying to push her glasses up on her nose more, we pushed them up for her; when her legs hurt, we shifted her body for her; when she sang, we sang with her. She always sang around the house. Everything she did seemed to inspire a song in her and it was only fitting that dying should also.
That second shot of pain killer didn’t ever seem to effectively eliminate her discomfort and two hours later, she was beginning to groan a bit and move her leg restlessly. She became increasingly more agitated and more verbal about her discomfort as the moments passed and I went quickly to find her nurse while my parents tried to soothe her. Our primary goal was to ensure her as comfortable a passing as we could, and for a few long minutes there, we had to watch this woman we loved so deeply, who had spent so much of her life caring for others, be in such obvious pain and discomfort. It was heart-breaking, and I was crying as I told her “The nurse is giving you something to help with the pain. It will be okay in a minute, grandma. It will pass.”
The shot didn’t help enough, and she was still so agitated; the nurse came back soon and gave her a shot of Ativan to calm her. Within minutes, Grandma was asleep and we all breathed deeply in the knowledge that she was not in pain anymore. At some point during this, my aunt, my grandmother’s daughter, had to excuse herself; she needed to go check on her husband, but also, it was clear that it was just too much to witness her beloved mother suffering. It really was the most difficult part of the whole process.
From her comfortable sleep, my grandma slipped into the comatose state we had been warned to expect, becoming unresponsive within hours. My mother, my father and I sat by her side for hours holding her hand, whispering to her that we loved her and that it was okay to let go, we had everything here under control, and that Grandpa was waiting for her over there. Sometime through this all, December 23 had slipped into December 24 and we all laughed quietly as other family members had predicted Grandma would wait until Christmas Eve or Christmas to go. She was always one to do things right, make an impression, make it special. It seemed fitting that if she had to go, she would do it on a holiday.
I can’t explain how sad, but somehow comforting, this whole process was. I was filled with sorrow for us and our loss--the loss of an incredible, amazing woman--but still knew how terribly she had missed my grandpa, the love of her life, and how she longed to be with him again. She had grown frustrated with her old body--this body that through her life had helped her to be a great swimmer and softball player, to birth five babies and care for five children, ten grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, to travel around the world, to live a full and fruitful life-but now could no longer even support her to walk or care for her most basic needs independently. She never wanted to have to depend on someone else for those basic needs. She had absolute faith that after she left this body, she would find herself without those needs in a beautiful heaven with her God and his son and her loved ones. That thought gave us all comfort.
As I sat in that hospital room, by her bed, clasping her hand, I was struck by how surreal the whole scene was. Around two in the morning of Christmas Eve, we sat in this room, in the dark but with the curtains open to the world outside and the door enough ajar that we could hear people walking by the door discussing their plans for Christmas. They were planning to visit family, open gifts, feast; we knew she wouldn’t live that long and were planning to be grieving for our loss on Christmas day. The heavy, sleepy darkness on the other side of the hospital window was disrupted by the lights and sounds of a helicopter landing close enough that the room flashed with light as the helicopter landed and the patient was unloaded. We were alone in our little microcosm, at once aware of the world going on around us but untouched by it, and as we watched my grandmother work to take in and expel each breath, chest rising and falling with such effort, we wondered which breath would be the last.
We sang to her. We sang to her as she sang to us and to herself and to no-one in particular. The three of us gathered around her: me directly beside her, still holding her hand, and my mother beside me, my father on the other side of my grandmother. My father had the laptop open in his lap with the verses to church hymns we only remembered parts of pulled up on the screen and we sang them to her, the songs she loved to sing while she was able: Just As I Am, On Eagle’s Wings, Amazing Grace. The three of us sang them to her, our tears flowing, the helicopter lights flashing, her uneven breaths working in and out. So surreal, yet so very much a part of human experience. All night we sat there as her breathing and her heartbeat became less steady, but still went on. We waited. We assured her it was okay to go, but she hung on.
Every time we got together for one of her wonderful meals-hundreds over the years--she would say “Get your drinks! Get your drinks everyone!” to let us know that the food was ready and it was time to eat. Only after everyone else had sat down, would she ever sit, despite our pleadings for her to sit and our assurances that if there was something else we needed, we could get it. She always wanted to take care of us all. We told her that night in the hospital that it was okay for her to rest; we all had our drinks. She could do what she needed to do.
I was afraid to leave the room even to go to the bathroom, afraid that she’d stop breathing while I was gone. I wanted so desperately to be there for her as she was always there for me if ever I needed her. It was so hard to watch her keep breathing with such effort, but at some point we realized that it really felt like she was no longer with us despite the fact that her body kept going. It was an odd feeling.
I had to leave that morning. My children needed me to be there for them on Christmas Eve and I knew that I had to go be with them. I was torn. It was by far one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do-walking away from my grandmother, knowing it was the last time I’d see her, knowing how badly I wanted to be there for her and my parents when she passed, but also knowing how much my children wanted me to be there with them at Christmas, and knowing my grandmother would completely understand a mother’s need to care for her children first. I left the hospital and Chico around 8:00 in the morning on Christmas Eve, kissing my grandmother on the forehead, squeezing her hand gently and telling her how very much we all loved her, how special she was and how grateful and fortunate we were to have been loved and cared for by her.
The drive home was painful and difficult. I went directly to my sister’s home where my husband met me with our children. We were all there together when my father called around 5:30 in the evening to let us know that Grandma had finally taken her last breath a short while before. She was at peace. It was her turn to take it easy.
We had a lovely funeral service for her several days later, to which family flew in to honor her and share stories and memories of her. Memories of her generosity, her caring and accepting nature, her seemingly effortlessly produced meals, her faith in God. She touched more people than we will ever know, was much loved and will be sorely missed. We buried my grandmother in a grave shared with my grandfather, the great love of her life, the person with whom she shared her great adventure for more than five decades. The stone is marked with the words they proved true time and again: “Love never fails.”