I was doing really good for a stretch of time, I was really starting to feel like my life was coming back together I guess.  Its mother's day today and I went to visit my grandma in a nursing home with my family.  My grandma won't get dressed, she won't leave her room.  She has a mental illness and that's why she is dying.  She can't remember past maybe thirty minutes of short-term memory.  I try to tell myself that its not her that I'm talking to; that a piece of her is already in heaven looking over me.  We were really close and I know that I wouldn't be the same woman I am today without her.

The horrible thing is that depression runs in my family through the blood of the women.  My mom doesn't really experience it.  I'm really smart, too smart for my own good sometime and so I try to look at what I have as a disease; something that I can cure if I work hard enough.  With Grandma, I look at it as another disease, something she can't come out of.  She says things like "I don't feel like anybody understands me, I don't feel like anyone cares about me…I don't know why I'm still here…I feel trapped."  It stings somewhere deep inside because even though there is over half a centry of years between us I understand exactly what she's talking about.  I want to help her escape, I want to take it away but I can't.  I just feel helpless and hopless, lost in this battle with her all over again.  I try to detatch myself and I feel heartless, a selfish sinner and then I try to get myself involved and it brings me down because I'm just too fragile for the situation.  Everyone experiences loss and pain and I'm trying to come to grips with that and not take it all in.

If my grandma were in her right mind right now, she wouldn't want me to be sad she wouldn't want me to feel this pain along with her and I'm trying not to.  She'd want me to be everything that I want to be, she'd want me to go back to learning and soaking up the world around me, be that girl who has the entire world and her future in front of her.

I entitled this Live Like We're Dying because if the music function on my internet connection was not so dinosauringly slow, Kris Allen would be the soundtrack for my day.  It is never so true until I'm faced with death right in front of me.  I don't want to waste any more time being sad I want to run away, I want to soak up life, just like she'd want me too…back at the psychiatrist again "Do you see mystic beings?…Do you believe you have superpowers?…Do you believe you are a God or have some form of control over your environment and the other creatures around you?…"

No.  Its going to be a long journey.

1 Comment
  1. thistle 14 years ago

     

    hi, as a volunteer in nursing homes,etc., i see many people like your grandmother who have no family that visits them–or visits them rarely.That makes a sad story even sadder. You are a good person for being there for her .Yeah, it's tough seeing her in that state.But that is when family should show up and love and support one another.Not just when everything is fine and rosy. Good luck     —ed

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