Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Waiting for God - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
VANCOUVER – Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon at my Grandmother's bedside at the hospital. A week ago she suffered a bad fall, whereby she dislocated a bunch of stuff and hurt herself pretty bad. I sat with her last Monday, and though sore and in pain, she was loaded up with morphine to deal with the egregious pain. We had a good afternoon, she was lucid and she went on incessantly about all the things that she could think of – dull gossip, stories about the past, about the neighbours, about the war in Iraq. She loved to laugh and did last Monday, she had me in stiches as well.
What a difference a week makes. Yesterday, she was writhing in pain, and her usually bright and with-it mind, was cloudy and awfully muddled. This was not my Grandmother. She's 91 and it is expected that the ailments of life eventually catch up with you. However, even in her most ill of moments – countless days and nights holed up in a hospital bed over the years – she remained sharp as a tack, even declaring at one exam to a startled doctor, "I'm not comatose yet."
In a past lifetime, as a volunteer at a nursing home, I have had to deal with patients suffering from Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. In a further past lifetime, I've had to deal with an alcoholic. I can get by on my own. I know all the tricks. One is not dealing with a rational person, one is dealing with a declining person who has no semblance or comprehension of reality. They can be abusive or rude, but even though you have a certain affection for them, it doesn't affect you. You stiffen up the upper lip and move on. You insulate yourself with something, something that can't be touched, so you don't take the slightest out-of-hand comment too damned personally. So with that experience, as well as the ongoing dealings I have with boorish, ill-mannered and ill-tempered morons who come to get their towed cars back from me, you would think this unsettling behaviour of my Grandmother wouldn't affect me. Alas, the afflictions of the heart what they are, it does.
My Grandmother isn't abusive or anything like that; never was and certainly isn't now. Her mind is just befogged by her accident, the subsequent pain and the medication. All afternoon, and into her supper hour (when she didn't even eat), she was beckoning to me to offer my hand to somehow help her up. She wanted to go home. She wanted to rest.
She happens to be deaf too, so it wouldn't help explaining to her that she's on the mend, and that she can't go home, and that she's in the hospital and she needs to stay there. No, she can't comprehend that. Yesterday afternoon, much like life, was a series of peaks and troughs. She will yell and call for help. She'll ask for her son or me, to hold her and help her up, out of bed. Then she'll get tired for a minute and sigh, impatiently mustering up the energy to want to call out for help, to get her out of bed, to take her home, all again.
It taxes one's patience, but she has no idea what she's doing. Were she lucid and comprehending, she would know it was silly of her to want to go home – she being in no condition to even move. You do feel sorry for her, you do feel the pain that she feels, yet she does not understand. There is no comfort. There is no peace. I was with her for at least four hours yesterday, and the whole time she was unbelievably restless and devoid of any comfort, devoid of peace. I know she's tired, but she is incapable of rest. It's a waiting game. We're waiting for her to tire, so that she can catch some quiet moments to sleep. We're waiting for God, I guess.
My Grandmother has been ill for a number of years. She's always had a heart condition and in recent years she hasn't been so well. She was given nine months to live. That was nearly 24 months ago. She's been ill in the interim, but she's bounced back. Sometimes even stronger than before. She always has. This time, one cannot feel but life catching up on all of us. Age is a bitch, Cindy Adams said of her husband Joey's declining health.
New York Post Columnist, Cindy Adams: It's "worse than a mugger in a dark alley, because age brings a slow death. Minute by minute, inch by inch, here a little, there a little, year by year by year. Age robs you of your dignity, ability, agility, memory, self-respect. It forces once-powerful somebodies to beg favours from nobodies. It humiliates. It debilitates. It assassinates."
My Aunt, my Grandmother's only daughter, remarked to me, "Miracles can still happen." A single spinster is she, and realising that my Grandmother is all she has in life – it's enough to break your heart. And even if my Grandmother bounces back, as she has always done in the past, it will not be the same. I have never seen my Grandmother so vulnerable, so weak, so restless, so helpless. I realise as the Boston Red Sox are 13 and 7, my Grandmother hasn't watched her beloved boys of summer swat balls out of the park this spring yet And I bet she hasn't had the time to recite even a decade of the rosary in days. My Grandmother was always far more religious than I. As she tossed and turned and pleaded with my uncle and I to grab her hand and get her out of bed, bellowing so, Jeremiah, Chapter 6, verse 14 kept yapping away in my head: "Peace, peace; when there is no peace."
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An archive of Joseph Planta's previous columns can be found by clicking HERE .