nanny
23.04.24 | 8:01 pm
it started about nine weeks ago. they decided that my aunt marla should start taking care of larry, nanny's brother who has some kind of problems (is it schizophrenia? i can't even remember). nanny had been taking care of him for a long time, him living in her house. i imagine that this cut into her a bit, even though it seemed like it had started to get too much for her.
then caleb, my cousin (her grandson), had a massive seizure right in front of her. (what caused it? we don't know, but my very uninformed guess is something to do with drugs. he's fine now, barely looked at me at the funeral home.) and it seems that this, understandably, traumatized her.
she went downhill fast.
for the first month of so, when my mom would come home from stopping by or staying the night to take her of her, she made it sound like she was just being ornery. like she just wanted attention. and then, like she'd just given up.
and after the first month... it really started rolling. she stopped walking. her hands curled into c's. they moved the bed into the living room for her so she could sit with pappy.
when i finally got around to see her, because again -- we didn't think it was that serious at first -- she was incoherent. just sleeping, while pappy cried on the recliner. i sat there with my mom, my aunt carol sue, and three of my brothers, and we looked at old pictures and hoped she'd wake up enough to talk to us.
i went home and wrote in my planner to visit again the same day next week.
she died the next day.
--
i have so many complicated feelings about this.
first, i am incredibly lucky that, at 34 years old, this is the first grandparent -- hell, basically the first person i've even been remotely close to -- to pass away.
but with that said, i wasn't that close with her, was i?
am i really that close with any of my grandparents?
maybe when i lived down in cub run as a kid, until we moved when i was 12, sure. and yeah, me and ryan seth were the ones who would still make it a point to go down on holidays when possible. and i would even stop by once in a while on my own.
but i don't suppose any of that was really enough.
--
i still haven't cried. it feels like for some reason i don't have any right to.
but i almost have, several times. especially when, at the funeral, they invited the kids and pallbearers up to view her body for the last time. especially every single time i saw my pappy dissolve into tears, thinking what must it be like to be with someone for sixty long years? especially when i thought about my mom, who kept saying it's okay, who kept it all together, but who i know is... not all right.
i got upset at seth because i told him i'd like him to go to visitation but he didn't have to go to the funeral, and he didn't immediately say that he would be there for me, too.
and he was there for me. and he had been planning on it the whole time, he says.
he held my hand the whole time. let me talk when i wanted and didn't make me talk when i didn't. he listened to so many of my relatives ask him why we weren't married or when we were getting married and it didn't seem to phase him (in a good way, i suppose).
but i guess he didn't say he'd go fast enough for me.
(my hurt with this dissolved pretty quickly, i'll say. but that's what it was: it hurt my feelings. especially after i took off of work to come up to his uncle's funeral a few weeks ago -- i guess i just expected that same certainness that i approached that with: that this is what you do, no questions about it.)
--
everyone always says that the deceased look so nice and peaceful in their coffins, but no they don't -- they look weird and unnatural and i don't like it.
what did look lovely were the fresh flowers they had for the casket. my nanny loved her flowers, obsessed over them, so that felt right. and my mom was the one who put that into motion.
more than anything, i am just worried about my mom, and the repercussions of her complicated relationship with her own mother. with her own father, for that matter -- who, it seems, may or may not last much longer without her. i don't know.
--
i don't know much of anything, really.
she was 82 years old.