Just 4 days before, my father called me on the day after Christmas, to tell me the news- my grandmother had cancer, discovered in very advanced stages, no hope of cure and only dim chances of palliation. It took only minutes for me to decide that I would not allow my profession to rob me of this rare chance to say goodbye, and I called my program director and told him I had to take three days off for this trip. My purpose was clear and single-minded; I wanted my grandmother to meet my daughter, to see what all her love had wrought.
We made travel arrangements hastily, and headed off to Laramie, WY, to the hospital where my grandmother was being treated. We arrived the next morning at my grandparents' house, and I inspected it fervently, like a watchdog, looking for signs that had been missed, clues to my grandmother's sudden fall from her state of health. I didn't have to look hard- there was hardly anything in the refrigerator- odd for a woman who spent her life cooking exotic delicacies of the different countries in which she had lived. There were countless perscription bottles with ominous lables that belied what was probably a slow demise- Alprazolam, hydrocodone- these are medicines I hardly ever perscribe to patients without acute injury. A slow rise of indignation formed- her doctors (my own profession!) were to blame- instead of investigating her causes of pain and anxiety, they had just treated it with narcotics and sedatives.
And then, I walked into the bedroom, and I was shocked. At the foot of the bed were two oxygen tanks- both of my grandparents had been using oxygen at night. Now the reality began to emerge- my family was aging, and with that process normal losses of independence and mobility were occurring. I began to feel an urgent need to head directly to the hospital. My grandmother's latest knitting project lay on the sofa, as if she would be home that afternoon to work on it. The surgeon inside me wanted to charge off, with the same response time demanded of me when I am on trauma call.
I was not a good visitor to the hospital. I didn't want to stay out of the nurses station and I wanted to see what the physicians were writing in my grandmother's chart. I was even clinically detached as her doctor scrolled through the CT scan that spelled my grandmother's doom. It was one of the worst I had ever seen. Later, after the oncologist left our family meeting and went to the nurses station, I could hear him talk as I have talked about other families- "They're coming to understand", "They are begininng to see the light".
Having nothing else to do or say, I turned to my original intention, to help my grandmother visit and meet her great-granddaughter, Catriona. I placed Catriona on her lap, and hovered with a smile on my face, hoping that Catriona would not pull out an IV or trip on the oxygen tubing. I could see that although my grandmother seemed to feel well that even after a few minutes my daughter was too much. So we commenced to watch her crawl around on the hospital floor.
I still don't know how well my grandmother, or how accurately rather, she perceived her situation to be. She did express the same anger I had- it is supposed to take months/years to succumb to cancer- not days. I wrote her a letter and knit her a hat. The hat was purple of organic merino wool and she wore it until the end, I think. The letter stated simply what I could not bring myself to say in her presence because I would have become too emotional to finish. I constructed picture albums of Catriona and made 8X10 pictures for her to keep in her room. I was angry that I was the first person to act as though my grandmother had a right to some of the familiarities of her home in the hospital. But she is ever stoic, and it was funny how the night before I was to return to Richmond, my whole family was watching football in her hospital room. And even that had been at my insistence.
In the end, that night, after everyone had left, I hugged my grandmother goodbye, silently. And it was an embrace the like of which I have never had. I could feel her reluctance to let me go, or perhaps her reluctance to let life go. I cried into her shoulder but would not let her see. All the days spent learning how to knit, sew, paint, cook, talking about boys, mothers, sons, life, flowers, flashed between us. And though we did not speak, I know we were communicating. It was the best goodbye.
But it was not enough. I came back the next morning, on the way to the airport, and I was happy because overnight my father told me that she would be coming to Morgantown the next weekend to stay and get hospice. I was overjoyed, because I know that Morgantown is within driving distance of Richmond. All of a sudden, I felt hopeful that I had not had my last goodbye. There would be a few more family suppers, a few more stories, a few more chances for her to see Catriona.
I was wrong, of course. Her final goodbye to me was the "Take care of each other" she admonished to me and my husband. Even though she had agreed to leave Wyoming, I think she knew she would not make it. I called a couple of days later and spoke to her on the phone to make sure she was comfortable. She seemed so.
Monday, the week after I left, my grandmother died. She became acultely unresponsive and spent one day in a state of nonverbal-ness, and then succumbed. It was just 48 hours after my parents had left.
