4:00 p.m. - 2017-09-01
The Grandparents.
I have discovered that grief is possibly one of the worst things that can happen to someone with my mental state. I have BPD and a bipolar disorder. I've been told that neither of these things are real but more on that later.
Back when I started this diary, I was 13, I've mentioned that millions and millions of times. I'm 27 now, I'll be 28 in two months so it's been well over ten years. I was living with my grandparents at the time because my mom seemed completely incapable of taking care of my sister and I on her own. She was jobless. We had nowhere else to go. My grandparents were a second set of parents to me and that's important to note because I have a hard time with the fact that I am grieving so hard over their deaths when most people bounce back from it fairly quickly. Well, faster than I have anyway. I have to keep telling myself that I'm not a stable person, that I have abandonment issues and things like death happening will aggravate it. The problem is death is a part of life. I can't afford to fall to pieces every time someone dies. My parents are going to die eventually and I will have to deal with that. Maybe my experience with my grandparents will help. I don't know.
It was around 2014, I started noticing something wasn't quite right with Grandma. I worried that maybe she was getting Alzheimer's or some other elderly ailment. I thought she was relatively healthy other than blood pressure issues and osteoporosis. But she was a lot more...I don't know how to describe it exactly. She was always sort of an airhead and I mean that in the best way possible. She was gentle natured but forgetful but it just got worse. I would speak to her and she would just look at me like she didn't quite understand me at all. Her affect was flat, she didn't show any emotion at all.
Skip ahead to 2015.
She had an episode, I guess, one day. They thought that maybe she was having a stroke. So someone called her an ambulance but she refused and Mom showed up over there and the paramedic begged her to take her to the hospital so she did.
It wasn't a fucking stroke and goddamn it I'm in tears just writing about this. I knew something was wrong and I should've said something sooner. But by that point, it was pretty well too late. The cancer had already metastasized to her brain. Breast cancer is a monster. I can't even begin to describe. My dad's mom also died of it back in the 70's, well before I was born.
Grandma did radiation for a while, and it took care of the tumors but for every tumor it killed, more just popped up in their place. It was very aggressive. So she opted to just stop treatment and enter hospice care. My aunt Lea all but moved in with them to take care of her. My Grandpa, Pops, went fucking nuts. I can't describe. He tried to leave her one day and I know that sounds terrible but he loved her. He was worried. He didn't want to lose her. I could never hate him for it. He's human.
Grandma deteriorated very quickly. She wasn't in her right mind for the most part. Lea and to go back to the town she lived in for the night so Mom and I went over and took over Grandma. It was a nightmare. She acted like a two year old. She threw fits about going to bed, she didn't want me to change her diaper. She was talking gibberish. She would spit out her meds. She had absolutely no awareness of what was going on around her. Lea came back and it was the same story so she called the hospice nurse. The hospice nurse took one look at Grandma in her agitated state and said, it's time. She needs to be in the facility, so they transported her. She was awake for a little while, but then she went to sleep.
She never woke up again. She died on a Wednesday at 7 o clock in the morning. Pops and Lea was with her. I picked out the clothes she was to be buried in. We had her funeral the following Monday. I sat next to my Pops during. We buried her in her in the same cemetery as her parents.
For a while, Pops couldn't talk about her without breaking down into tears. He'd had a stroke early in 2015. It took away part of his speech. It took some effort to understand what he was saying. He grumped and groused in the hospital the whole time, like the crotchety old man that he was. Said something like, "I wish I would die already I'm tired of doing this." (He'd had a couple of strokes before as well). Grandma told him to shut up and that she was going to die before he was. She was completely right.
But Pops slowly got better. He hated retirement, he liked to keep extremely busy, he was always working on some project and Hank and I would come over, Hank would help him because he couldn't do much. I can still hear him say, "C'mere a minute. I need your help." He loved Riley. Riley was his first and only grandson, albeit a great grandson. Riley loved him back, just like I did when I was little.
Pops was my world when I was a wee thing. I wasn't content unless I was with him, my mom tells me. No one would do but my Pawpaw.
Pops lasted a year and four months after Grandma died. I wish I could say I was surprised but I wasn't, really. Mom called me one cold day in January. There had been a bad ice storm that day. Said Pops had a stroke and that he was on life support at the hospital. That he'd never walk again, that he'd never talk again. He was completely immobile. His kids made the choice to take him off life support. He lasted nearly two weeks in hospice and honestly, he was all there, all the time, but unable to communicate. I held his hand for hours at a time and cried and told him he was the best father a girl could ever ask for. He was the only stable male figure in my life, before my husband came along. My uncle Shane, his youngest son, came in from Italy, and Shane was by his side when he went, which is how Pops would've wanted it. He was very fond of Shane, though I'm sure he was upset that Shane couldn't bring his infant daughter, Mariana (named for my grandma), who was born exactly 9 months after Grandma passed away. Pops never got to meet her and desperately wanted to. Mariana never got to meet either of her grandparents on her Dad's side.
Pops died on a Wednesday. We had his funeral the following Monday. We buried him next to Grandma.
I'm not going to lie. It fucked me up in a big way. I shut down completely. I only got out of bed to get Riley to school and to get him home. I did this for about two months. I wanted nothing more than to be with my grandparents.
I can't say I'm better now, but I'm being proactive in managing my mental health. I need to be here for my son but I know there are times that I'm not going to be able to.
I had a conversation with Riley not too long ago. We were discussing my father.
Riley: Your dad is dead.
Me: No he isn't. He lives in Lubbock. You just don't see him often because he's a jack ass.
Riley:But remember? We went to his funeral!
Me: Pops' funeral?
Riley: Yeah. Isn't he your Dad?
Me: Yeah, Riley. He was. He is.
The whole thing just breaks my heart. Grief is a son of a bitch.
