Fine. I'm fine.
Asking how I am is such a loaded question. Usually, I’m okay. Stable, to a point. Or at least highly functioning, which is my forte. That’s usually. That’s except on Wednesdays and Sundays. Those are the days I go to visit my grandmother in the nursing home. (For the record, when my papa was in a nursing home, while I was a child, I didn’t visit. Or actually, there reached a time when I just couldn’t handle it anymore. He couldn’t talk, or walk, or much of anything - but he’d smile when he saw me: and it all scared me. Terrified me into sitting in those tall backed, plastic chairs in the front lobby.)
We visit grandma twice a week: there are times when she knows my name, there are times when she thinks I’m one of the women who work there. There are days when she talks a blue-streak and you can piece together what she’s trying to tell you, and days when you have no clue. Sometimes she smiled and kisses you; elated that you’re there, others where she screams and curses and throws a fit. There were times when she’d see faces and birds on empty walls: now she just stares off blankly. She can’t see you unless you touch her. And the right side of her mouth hangs limply, numb. The strokes don’t stop coming. Now I have to spoon feed her. Her hands are a little too weak, and she misses her mouth more than she gets the spoon in. Holding her own coffee is nearly out of the question now.
This is the woman who would scream and yell and belittle me. The one who would disown me and cast me out. The one who would call the rest of the family and tell them how horrible of a human being I was. And now, I feed her as if she’s my child. I push her around in the wheelchair. I clean her face and slip her nails. I change her clothes. I do her laundry - dirty with things you don’t want to know about. I ring for the nurses and report strokes - two she’s had while I was alone with her.
Obviously, that doesn’t stay there when I leave. That stays with me.
So when people ask me how I am, I can’t really answer. I don’t know the answer, and I can’t even think of where to begin.
And through all this I’m still trying to maintain something that resembles a personal life for myself - without much success as I juggle this, my current job, trying to find a new job, my mom starting school. And I’m waiting for some ultrasound and X-ray results to come back. (all very precautionary…but pain has to come from something…)