lucyoncolorado

In which I find out that my grandmother isn't really dead...

I'm at my dad's cabin and we are drinking beer and sitting on his bunk beds. He accidentally tells me that my grandmother is still alive. I don't believe him at first and remind him that I went to her funeral. He points out that there was no coffin- just an urn- so how do I know that it was really full of ashes from her body? I'm shocked.

He explains that she actually had some brain damage and now lives in a nursing home. I start to cry about this. Guilt rolls over me. I'm thinking of her sitting there alone for a decade in a nursing home. My dad explains that she wouldn't know me anyway and that the reason he staged the funeral was to spare us the hurt of trying to help her when she wouldn't even recognize us. I tell him that I'm sure she'd know me, but he says this is emotional thinking. He says that everyone thinks their loved one will recognize them, and then they are doubly hurt when they don't. He explains that it's not personal, it's biological, and that there is no way my grandmother knows who we are. She can't even remember who she is.

Well this relieves my guilt a little bit because it means that at least she isn't sitting around wondering why I've forsaken her. But then a new horror upsets me. That means she's been sitting in this nursing home for ten years in a frightened and confused state. She doesn't know who she is or where she is and she can't remember anything about her life. Can you imagine how horrible that might be? I start to cry and I tell my dad that he shouldn't have left her all alone. Maybe the people aren't nice to her. Maybe we could at least make her less afraid or less lonely even if she didn't know us. We would have more patience and try harder to make her more comfortable.

I'm really upset and full of regret. It's such a horrible feeling that I wake up slightly. In reality, I'm actually in a hotel room, but I don't wake up enough to realize that. I wake up and I still think I'm in the bunk in dad's cabin. I'm in bed still upset, determined that in the morning I'm going to jump a flight to Houston to see what I can do about my grandmother's situation. But then slowly it dawns on me that she really is dead. She died of cancer and I wasn't there at the end because I was young and busy and going about my life. The end came fast, and she'd been surrounded by the people she loved, except for me. I hadn't wanted to face it, so I never even talked to her about it in the last few months. So on the one hand I'm relieved that the dream isn't real, but on the other hand I stiill feel guilty about the truth. It was a horrible night.