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| All that mooporn is depressing me. Here is a different depressing story about ol by Zsenitan 07/15/2008, 12:36am PDT | ||||
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| d people.
In December I suddenly had to take a trip from a business trip: my grandmother had fallen and bashed her head pretty well. She was already excessively frail and almost totally insane, so I was ordered to come at once in case It Was The Last Time I Would Have A Chance To See Her. I'll tilt my cards forward here and indicate that not only did she live, but she's better now than she was before, and she refuses to die or be any less crazy. She is horribly old and yet. Back to the story: by the time I got there, she was out of the hospital proper and lodged in a very nice nursing facility. My mother was there, pale, anxious, ready to be the voice of reason and responsibility vis a vis my utterly bonkers and domineering aunt, who had primary charge of the situation. So they have been their whole lives. Grandma looked awful; she is a lich and she looks it. 96 and recovering from a head injury, good lord. We stayed the whole day at the facility, wheeling Grandma in and out of physical therapy sessions, spooning peaches into her toothless maw, prompting her to try a little harder and rest a little more as appropriate. Mostly I was bored. The whole thing was going on very slowly. But aside from boredom I was petrified of the oldness walling me on all sides, boding ill for the future, and at the present, spitting fetid semi-chewed fruit in my face. Mom was a champ, though. She was in perfect costume for the occasion: patient, unhappy, grave. There was an awful moment with the toilet in which wiping was involved. To wipe one's own elderly mother's ass. It's unthinkable. A withered ass at that. What's toilet paper and what's mess. All uninvolved parties were, to their great relief, shut out of the room for this adventure. Eventually I got sulky. Consequently I got sent on the sort of errand one gives to responsible adolescents: go fetch lunch. When I came back, Grandma had fallen asleep. It was a very late lunch, and winter's early twilight gathered as Mom and I ate. My dreadful stepfather (along, but semi-flagellate and useless, hence mostly couch ballast) went back to watching TV in the guest room. Mom and I watched Grandma sleep. She was fitful and partially naked. My own grandmother, who made me white toast with butter and brown sugar, and vegetables boiled for too long, and who had the most beautiful set of nut cups once. She liked some funny faux-French perfume which smelled strongly of lemon and baby powder, and it came in yellow bottles, which sat on a yellow cupboard in her yellow bathroom in the condo she and Grandpa lived in until Grandpa died. There she was in an adult diaper, dry shriveled lips peeled back over mostly empty gums. She still had, and has, a rather full head of silvery hair (she told me proudly that she had never been much for washing hair, so that's why she still had all of hers) and like everyone else on both sides of the family, perfectly unblemished skin. She had supported her whole family for years and years as her useless artist husband made beautiful art and drank half of her paychecks away. In her youth she had been confident, even brassy, but now she was scared of, and yelled at, everything. Mom was taking the opportunity to get some work done. In the dimming quiet room, the only sounds were Grandma's muttering and Mom's soft tapping on a laptop keyboard. I was not the only one who had been pulled away from critical business. But psh she's always got stuff to do. It's totally normal for Mom to take care of everything at work and still be a mom and all that, isn't it. I thought something like that a little smugly as I lay back on the second bed, thinking about my exceedingly important deployment project for a big important client that I was missing. So after all, what's the harm in letting mom take a little more responsibility. But I still felt guilty as I fell asleep. Of all the potential lasts on this trip, the only one that actually happened, I think, was to have a Last Time to sleep under my mother's watchful care. Too soon it will be the other way around. |
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