Musings on smells, and my dying grandpa
I don’t have a very good sense of smell. Sometimes, this comes in real handy, such as in road kill, or passing dairy farms and the like. Sometimes its annoying, like when everyone else around me is obviously relishing in a well-cooked meal in the making. It comes and goes; some days I smell as well as anyone else, some days I got nothin’. Most of the time, it’s at about half of the average person’s.
Today I came to the conclusion that what smells I can perceive thus take a pretty high level of importance in my mind. For instance, I don’t like small fireworks. Years ago, in high school, I assisted for three years straight in the running of a fireworks stand for our church youth group. My mom ran it, and I co-ran it. We never got that much support from the church, and never got as many volunteers as we hoped. So for the two and a half weeks before the fourth, we would cram into a small wooden box on hot days with all of those fireworks and try to sell ‘em. To this day, smelling that flash powder and such makes me think of boredom and annoyance.
The reason this came up is that my grandfather is dying in the hospital. He’s in his late eighties, and he’s been in and out of the hospital this last year. Now, his kidneys are shutting down. He’ll probably go, sometime between tonight and tomorrow night. Just in time for my brother’s birthday. Happy Birthday.
Now, I’m not too close to my dad’s dad. I love him, and I love my grandma. She married my grandpa about twenty years ago, so she’s the only grandma I’ve known on that side of the family. We don’t care about blood; she’s family.
I’m going to miss him, and I’ll grieve, but it won’t be that hard on me. It will on my grandma, and definitely on my dad, and also on my mom. Since her dad died about twenty years ago, and her mom died about four years ago, she really bonded with my dad’s dad and step-mom. So I’ve been taking the whole thing better than most, and been trying to help out whenever I can.
Today, we visited him in the hospital. I’ve been in that wing a bunch of times over the past year. The room’s are all the same. But today, there was a smell to that place, an under-current of feces, urine, sickly-sweet disinfectant, and a few others that I couldn’t place. It smelled of sickness, and vulnerability, and maybe death. I hated it.
All while sitting in that room, I could look at him, and I could listen to him whimper in pain before he got some more painkillers, and I was fine. I prayed for comfort, I hugged my mom, I read a novel while folks talked, since I’m not usually in those conversations.
But that smell bothered me. And I couldn’t get away from it. Even while we were driving away, it seemed I could still smell it every minute or so, just when I wasn’t paying attention. As soon as I got home, I had to light a scented candle in my room just to get a strong smell that would block out the other.
Not going anywhere in particular here, you all know most of my stories don’t actually have endings. Going to leave here in a minute with my mom to go take my grandma out to dinner. If you want to say a prayer, say one for comfort and peace, as those are what’s needed now. Later.