As I write this, I’m on a plane 40,000 feet in the air, watching
the sun rise somewhere between Florida and Atlanta. The windows on one side of
the plane are glowing with colors of a new morning, while out the other side of
the plane, the world is still blanketed in a dusky darkness. I’m on my way to
see my grandma one more time before she finally goes to sleep.
We’ve known she was fading for a while now. I think if we’re being honest, we all knew this was coming for a lot longer than we were ready to admit. But I think that regardless of how far off you can see it coming, goodbye isn’t any easier once it’s staring you in the face. The road to here hasn’t been pretty… a road through extremely quick Alzheimer’s and dementia never is. But I find myself sitting here and thinking
not about these last few months, last few years, really. Instead, I find myself thinking
about everything that came before this. I guess it's true what they say... when you find yourself at the end, you end up thinking a lot about the beginning.
You remember all the sleepovers at Grandma & Grandpa’s
house as a kid… When you’d get powdered donuts and Lucky Charms for breakfast,
which you never got to have at your own house. How she’d take you
shopping every year for your birthday, an outing you looked forward
to all summer long. You remember so many Friday nights with your siblings and
your cousins, when you’d all hide under Grandma’s robe when you heard Grandpa
coming back from picking up the pizza... when you'd try not to giggle too loud when
Grandma told him that we’d all gone home. We'd always come tumbling out from under her once Grandpa decided he'd just have to eat it all himself.
You remember how soft her legs were, and the way the scent of lotion and cigarettes always lingered on her skin. You think about all the
times you’d sit next to her on the couch, when she’d softly run her fingers up
and down your forearm until you could barely keep your eyes open; even once you
were a grown up, you’d still give her your arm when you stopped by for a visit.
In a lot of ways, she has been the only grandma I
ever had… at least in the ways that matter the most. She was soft and kind and always
laughed at the stories I’d tell. She listened intently when I called her for
advice, and she made me feel safe and loved when things got hard. She was my
friend... which I think is a pretty special thing to have in a grandmother. To
never feel like you need to hide parts of yourself out of fear of it getting
lost in the generational translation. To know that no matter what you had to
say or where you were calling from, you were seen and loved anyway.
We have been so lucky… to have been loved by and to have
known Grandma Esther. We’ve been lucky to have the chance to take our time with
this goodbye, though watching someone slip away into the abyss of dementia is
never what you’d hope for either. No goodbye is ever easy, and it's not supposed to be. But I’ll still take the
heartache that comes with it over the absence of who she has been to us every single time. And I hope that when I get there and squeeze her hand, she'll still know all of that.
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