“She’s totally incoherent, in pain, and unresponsive,” said the email, now two and a half hours old. “We’re taking her to her doctor’s and then to the hospital. He’ll get her admitted and it will be less traumatic than the emergency room.”
Something of a followup to this where my Mom talks about her Mom, who in essence has been in The Long Descent for years now.
My Mom has no cellphone, and my Dad and sister do not appear to be home, so I have no idea what’s happening since 10:00 AM and that email.
It’s been no secret, amongst friends anyway, that I’ve long since wished that my Grandmother had reached the point where the “awareness switch” had been thrown and she never had any conception that something was off, that she was losing the age fight, that various bits of her were going.
I had a telephone conversation with her a couple months back where at times it seemed maybe that switch finally had flipped over. And then came the moments where she realized something about her end of the conversation had not been going quite right.
That awareness drives me crazy, because it seems so annoyingly unfair to her. I have no idea what it’s been like since then.
As my Mom points out in the linked post above, my Grandfather (her Dad) died the day after Christmas twenty-five years ago. This is the only grandparent I have left, never having known my Dad’s parents.
I am 3,000 miles away and can do nothing, not that there’s much I could do even if I were there. So, I write this.
