A post in which I make a visit

This morning, of course, there were things to do.

The house looked a little worse in the light. I knew Lisa would have a fit if she saw it the way it was, so I swept out some of the dead bugs in the floor, made my bed, and tried to make it look a bit more presentable. Then I cleaned out the bathroom a bit and got ready for the day. By the time I had done all that it was seriously time for some breakfast.

I stopped at a little diner called the Coffee House, where kind young women brought me Waffle-House-esque food. I ran to the grocery store to pick up a few groceries for the house so there was something there to eat. I figured Lisa would have enough on her hands. Travelling with my three-year-old niece is a bit like moving Hannibal’s army across the Alps.

That done, the next thing was to go see Grandma. She and Granny were in the same nursing home. Since Grandma gets around pretty well in her chair and is usually on top of everything, she knew all that had happened, knew the family would be coming in, and would be waiting for me. I hate to make her wait, but she’s up and ready to roll (literally) at about 6am, and I just can’t keep up with that.

I found her at Bingo and joined her. We chatted a bit as she played a couple of rounds. The woman on the other side of me wanted help with her card though, and began to get a bit insistent. Grandma wasn’t too fond of that. She likes for my focus to be on her. So eventually she decided she had already won twice, and that we should just go back to her room, which we did. Grandma is very hard of hearing, but doesn’t always ask for her hearing aid. She was very proud of how well she was doing without it today, but in the interest of a better visit I called the nurse and got it for her.

I hardly ever bring Grandma anything. She fusses that cut flowers are wasteful, and that she can’t keep them because the nurses kill them with cold water. My dad and uncle keep her well-stocked with anything she needs, and anything they can think of that she might want, and of course she needs less now in the way of stuff than she used to. She catches me up on the latest tribulations with her roommate, who is apparently wearing her socks. She’s pretty unhappy about that, but overall, she is content enough.

At 90 now, she’s still impatient with being in a wheelchair, and on every visit tells me again that her biggest prayer is to get up and walk again. It’s good that she is still herself, and that she knows me and we can visit, but there are only so many things I can tell her about my life. Many parts of it would upset her, and they’re things she doesn’t need to know. But we still know each other, and we still can feel the bond between us. It is at once comforting and disturbing. She’s so trapped in an increasingly painful and non-functioning body. I tell her the things I can, and the things I can get her to hear, in a fairly short amount of time. She doesn’t want me to go, I can tell, and she tries to think up other things to talk to me about. I like it best when she tells me stories about her life and things she did when she was younger, but she doesn’t do that today. Today she’s anchored in the day, and the goings on, and seeing my mother and her sisters coming and going when Granny passed. Eventually, I walk beside her as she heads in to lunch, talking a bit on my way out. I give her some hugs and kisses in the hall. She tells me she won’t follow me to the door because “It upsets your daddy when I do that.”

When I get back to Granny’s they aren’t back from the funeral home yet. They were making the arrangements today. I lean the seat back in the car and doze for a bit, glad enough to have a moment to myself, but before long they’re back. Lunch is on the agenda, and we head out to another little local watering hole to eat. I’m glad not to go to a chain. As we walk in, we can see a display of locally home-made cakes and pies. The coconut cake was really good.

We went back to the house for planning, and because people would be coming in. Granny’s sister-in-law brought in one of her famous homemade strawberry cakes (which I adore, and she knows it), and visited. But I was feeling bad. My Epstein-Barr was acting up and I felt worse and worse. Eventually I had to excuse myself. I went upstairs, found an as-yet unoccupied bedroom and lay down for a while.

When I woke I felt better, but felt guilty for abandoning Mom to an afternoon of receiving. I was supposed to be here to support her, but thus far all I’ve done is eat meals with her. I apologized, and rand to Grandma’s house for a quick refresher and a change of shirts before supper.

Supper tonight was more intimate. Mom is doing better. There is no way to prepare for your mother dying, but she had a little distance from it at this point, and was getting used to it. Aunt Donna had run home for the night, so it was just my mother’s older sister and her husband tonight. We went to Applebee’s and had a nice meal and talked more about more current things. Afterwards it was back to Grandma’s by myself, but it was OK. I switched some light bulbs out and go the fixture in the bedroom working (I forgot to buy light bulbs), and try to read for a while. Tomorrow there is stuff to do. Again.