I've known she was dying since September. I've had months to prepare as I've watched her go from sitting up in bed cracking jokes, to squeezing my hand and smiling from her pillow as I told her stories about my week, to opening her eyes just long enough to whisper I love you and then fall back to sleep.
Sitting in the hospital with my mom and her mom, who for most of my life have been too busy creating masterpieces of flowers or flours to sit much at all, was a gift. I felt connected, a third link on a beautiful chain of varied coloured gems.
Now her pain is so great and her breathing so irregular that the doctors are planning to sedate her. She may not wake up again on this side of heaven.
It is like the last of the walls sheltering my inner life has been knocked down, exposing me to the harsh wind. My grandparents were all deeply spiritual, fiercely loving (and hopelessly flawed) men and women that surrounded me with prayers, fudgicles, birthday money, and whisker rubs. (My Opa had the whiskers not Grandma!) One by one over the past 12 years I've said goodbye with a final kiss on the cheek and a tear-stained tribute.
My kids weren't here for the first 2 goodbyes and they don't remember the last one. G. was a baby and K. was only 3 when my Opa, my dad's dad passed away. I fear for K., who although his diagnosis lists "delays in nonverbal communication", has a heart language with his Granny that is all their own. He has never flinched or even seemed to notice the way the way she has grown small and faded or the medical tubes that make her one with the hospital bed.
He walks straight to her bedside, smiles and holds her hand and remains there for most of the visit. Because she is still his Granny.
But only for a few more days.
