FFP#25 – Five Years Ago

Five years ago this week, my grandfather passed away. I wasn’t there when he died, but I did see him about a month beforehand, around Mother’s Day. He had already been dying for years it seemed: bladder and kidney cancer, heart attacks, emphysema, lung capacity shrinking from 25% to 14% to 7%. When I saw him, he was in bed, attended to by my aunts and uncles and grandmother, hospice caregivers and nurses. Various grandchildren, family friends, and old coworkers came and went, taking turns sitting with him, watching him watch TV, watching him sleep, watching him take his medication. I don’t think he was ever alone.

In the kitchen, on my grandmother’s dining table, was a notebook listing all his medications, the times and dates when they were to be administered, the names and contact information of the doctors and nurses who prescribed and changed dosages. These were meticulously kept notes that told a story about pain and discomfort, anxiety and deterioration. I wonder if anyone kept that notebook, that record of medicated life, that muted period between two worlds, or if it was tossed away. I hope it was thrown away.

There was only one time I gave my grandfather a pill: he started to shake and said he was feeling anxious. Someone said to give him .5 mg of lorazepam – I think it was a nurse, my aunts were out for the afternoon, taking a much needed break, and my uncle and I were left alone, along with the nurse and my grandfather. I think my uncle and I both felt lost, in a way, not knowing what to do or how to help. My grandfather, dressed in freshly pressed pajamas, his hair and mustache groomed, his skin soft and practically wrinkle free, seemed nervous and small. So when the nurse said to give him his medication, I was only too ready to help.

“Grandpa,” I said. “Grandpa, open your mouth.”

I pressed the tiny pill onto his tongue so it would stick and in doing so I touched his tongue with the tip of my finger. It was hot and damp, and it didn’t feel like the tongue of a dying man. At least, it’s not what I imagined a dying person’s tongue would feel like. I was expecting dryness, a white or colorless tongue, a tongue that was curling in on itself like an injured insect. But my grandfather’s felt strong and alive. And for a moment, I forgot everything I had ever thought I knew about life and death and the conversion between the two.

I helped my grandfather sip some water to wash down the pill. The nurse asked him on a scale of one to ten how much pain he was in. “A four,” he said. A four! – Even though it pained him to speak and he winced with every word, he only considered his discomfort a four. Was he being brave? Macho? Or had he experienced worse? At the time, I was sick myself – not yet diagnosed with lupus – but wasting away at 100 pounds, dealing with my own constant and frustrating pain. For me, every day was pain or more pain, so it wasn’t until my diagnosis and treatment a year later that I experienced a day without pain. That day I felt like something was missing, I felt unweighted and free. But before then, my body was weak and heavy and seeing my grandfather in bed, I realized that the pain could always get worse. And I think my grandfather knew this, when he said “Four.” He knew it could get worse.

How alone we all are, I thought to myself. Even with all the family and friends and visitors surrounding my grandfather, all the people surrounding me in my own life, even with all that love and support, the truth is that we die and suffer alone. No one can inhabit this body with me. And as awful as it sounds, it isn’t really that terrible. We enter the world just as alone, just as ignorant of life as we are of death, and somehow we survive.