insights into the world of caffeinated monkeys
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| javamonkey insights into the world of caffeinated monkeys |
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Tuesday, February 11, 2003 Inquiring Minds Want To Know My grandparents on my dad's side died on Saturday. My grandfather died Saturday afternoon around 1 pm. Grandma died late Saturday night/early Sunday morning at 1:30 am. I really don't know how I feel about things right now...I'm just sort of numb. I'm sure things will hit me during the funeral. My grandmother was a wonderful woman. I remember her being very strong. And a good cook. She had 10 kids, which she raised on a farm. Her first husband died in the 1960's. All of her kids graduated from high school, a major accomplishment for the times, and especially for the rural area. Grandma could always stand up to my mother, and tell her to her face that she was full of shit. She actually banned my mother from her house for several years, until mom could be civil and keep her religion to herself. That amazed me. She had asthma very bad, and back in 2000 got very sick. She lost a lot of lung tissue and had to move out of the house where her and my grandfather (and he's actually a step-grandfather, but he's the only person I knew as a grandfather) lived. She died because she suffocated to death. She just couldn't breathe anymore, despite the oxygen that she was on. She was also on a very heavy morphine trip when she died. She had started to recover from a bout of pneumonia from a few weeks prior, but she got a bladder infection that spread to her kidneys and shut them down. She travelled up until the last 2 months before she died. When I went to visit her, I went with mom. Mom said some pretty nasty things--things like "Just believe what I told you to and you'll go to heaven" and "Jesus will never leave you, if you believe in him." Things that she should have kept to herself. Grandma tried to wake up from her morphine trip, tried to get up and beat my mother. But she was too weak. When Dad called to give me the news, I could hear her in the background saying "Well, you know she's burning in hell now." She also called me to tell me that it was a sign to get married and come back to church. Things that Granny would have broken her jaw for. Grandma and grandpa didn't live together before they passed on--they had gotten divorced, but I think they still loved each other. Grandpa didn't want to leave the farm; it was the only life that he knew. He didn't know how to take care of himself, and when she got sick, he didn't know how to use the phone to call for help. Grandma didn't want to have to pay his medical bills if they were living in different places. Grandpa never really said much to me. He died of bladder cancer. He just always sat in a dark corner of the living room, chewing Redman tobacco, spitting into a brass spittoon and muttering at people. The only time he said anything to me was when Grandma got sick the first time, in 2000. I was taking meals out to him so that he wouldn't starve to death and he told me that he knew I was a good person because my actions showed it. I was amazed that he paid attention. But we didn't really talk or anything. He was just in the background. He had kids of his own, that lived on the edge of his farm. They were waiting for him to die so that they could get the land from him. None of his kids ever checked on him when grandma was sick--they just assumed that he was okay and came to yell at us for taking care of him and yelling at Grandma for being so selfish for being sick and in the hospital and for not taking care of him. His kids aren't good people, I don't think. They won't let any of us go to the funeral. It's a private service, by invitation only. If you've got time to create invitations and deliver them for a funeral just to exclude certain people from paying their respects, then you aren't a nice person. I'm amazed to think of how many people one person touches in a lifetime. Andy's funeral really made me think about that. And it isn't right to not let someone say goodbye. Because you never know how much that one person could have meant to someone else. And yeah, I probably wasn't a great grandkid, because I was quiet and didn't talk to my grandparents a lot, but I know that they were proud of me and that they loved me. Despite all of the mean things that my overbearingly psychotically religious mother says, and that grandpa's kids say about the other side of the family, I hope that in their death that some little part of their spirit gets absorbed into me, and that I'll be a better person for it. If not, I hope I at least get grandma's slippery pot pie recipe. posted by jaime | 10:20 PM 0 comments |
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