The Circle of Life

My Grandma is dying. We call her Nanny. She chose the name, we didn't. Sounds a little formal, don't you think? Anyway...she's one of the main reasons we moved here from Oklahoma 3 years ago. It's amazing what can happen to a person in 3 years. I've grown and changed in so many ways. So has my Nanny...if you can grow in reverse, so she's not so much grown as she has deteriorated.

Wow, this is actually really hard to write about...

...As I sit here at the desk in the back room with the ping-pong table next to me and my dogs curled up underneath it, my mom and dad are at Nanny's house. They got a call from the neighbor a couple hours ago saying that Nanny had been yelling at her husband, didn't recognize him, had bit him and was trying to break his glasses. This is at least the third incident like this that we know of. She's got Alzheimer's disease as well as cancer that's been spreading throughout her body. Her stomach is now distended and she's got a large tumor outside her body under her arm. I don't want to go into a million details, but to make a long story short, we've done all that we can and we're just trying to make her comfortable until she makes it to the end.

As a granddaughter who hasn't been particularly close to this grandmother (she and her hubby have really pushed people out of their lives) I can say without too much guilt :/  that I haven't been a huge part of taking care of her. That job has fallen on the amazing shoulders of my mom and dad. They've done so much and it's really starting to wear on them. This week they've been over there every single day. It's now gotten to the point where we need to get them into an assisted living home, but believe me, everything's complicated.

I guess I'm writing this for one, to get it out, (writing's therapeutic for me) but also to say that I recognize now why those of the older generation are so looking forward to Heaven. You see, my Nanny can hardly formulate a sentence. She often doesn't know what she's saying. Her face will squinch up and her eyes will kind of glaze over and she'll say "I don't know...I... I just don't know. I don't know how to say this" and you'll have to guess what she's trying to talk about and then she might be able to form her thoughts audibly. The other day though, I read to her from my Bible and her face lit up. She still had a hard time concentrating, I could tell, but she loved to listen to the words. We read from James 1-2, from many Psalms and from Isaiah 52 and 53. Afterward she talked about how great it will be to see Jesus face to face.  With tears in her eyes, she said, "You know if He hadn't [died for our sins] we'd just be, we'd just be..." "Helpless?", I said. "We'd just be soooo helpless."

And it's true. Without Christ spiritually, I'm as helpless as she is physically.

(More to come on this topic later.)