I am living with almost dead grandmothers. Well, not literally living with them.
One is in Colorado. She has not responded to stimulus in three days. Her fingers are blue. Her breath gurgles. She is not dying quickly, her lifelong good health is keeping her body alive even as her mind is gone.
One is in Kentucky. She is on a scooter inside her house that she never leaves. Her unhealthy lifestyle has crippled her body but her mind is uneven and ravenous. She calls her only son every day. She called me on my birthday at 3am last year, and 3 days afterwards this year. Her mind is driving her body to stay alive.
As I was writing this, my grandmother died. I went to my mother and brought her coffee and bagels and wrote the obit and set up the website and scanned the pictures and warned her of the scammers and arranged the memorial. My uncle will find a plot next to my grandmother’s sister, who is probably the person she loved the most.
Maybe my grandmother was never motherly because all she wanted was for her sister to be alive. She didn’t want husbands or children or grand children or great grandchildren. She wanted to be with her sister.
Their parents died when they were young. They didn’t die before they forced my grandmother to marry the man that knocked her up but maybe they died after he left her with my uncle. She survived because she had a sister. She got married again, had my mother, and then divorced again, and then married a man who hated children (she had two) and pets (they had three).
Her sister was there for it all, had her own two children, and then suddenly died. Grandma gave up on God after that. No sister, no God. I hope she’s with her sister now.
What about your grandmothers Gabby? Did you ever truly know them?
