Revised Update

So I was wrong in my last update, but I didn't know it. In spite of early improvements my grandmother seems to now be regressing. They are moving her from the rehab unit of the hospital to a nursing home in the next few days, but my mom is saying that really, she doesn't think she'll be there very long.

Nan won't eat, has a hard time swallowing and sort of seems to have given up. She's said since my grandfather died (over 10 years ago), that whenever it was her time she'd be ready to go. My mother says that Nan is not in any pain, but that she mostly wants to sleep and be left alone. She is very opposed to a feeding tube. My aunt Eva Pearl followed a similar course last year, when she got sick she declared that she'd had a better offer and wasn't particularly interested in continuing in a life where the quality had diminished so much.

I'm very frustrated in this. There aren't a great number of things that I feel passionately about, but a person's right to die is one of them. This belief is in strong conflict with my (selfish) desire for my grandmother to keep fighting and get better no matter how inconvenient it is for her. I feel like I haven't had enough time with her. There are too many things that I don't know and now, she's still with us, but it's too late to find any of those things out.

I am so sad.

1 comment:

Terroni said...

I'm sending you a big hug, sweetie. I know what it's like to lose a grandma, and I am so sorry you're going through this.