Survival

I spent the afternoon with my grandparents, eating food that solidified my arteries (to which they did not protest...much) and listening to the stories of when they were children and my father was growing up.  I ate up their life experiences as hastily as I devoured the delicious strawberry cake my grandmother baked, straight from her mother's recipe.  May your taste buds be envious of that heavenly dessert.  God would eat it willingly....and ask for a second serving.

My grandmother, Nana, is one of eleven siblings...and I thought my brother and I were a tumultuous duo...had there been nine duplications of him, I'm sure I'd have pleaded with my mother to simply remain celibate for the remainder of her days.  At present, my grandmother's sister, Melba (Aunt Meb to the rest of us), is on hospice care, suffering through the end stages of Lymphoma.  When Meb breathes her last, Nana will be the sole survivor of her family.  I'm not certain I could withstand that...watching my entire family die, one by one...and being the last to leave this place.  I dearly hope time is favorable and I get to keep Nana for many more years.

Nana told me that when my dad was nine months old and she was married to her first husband, their house was completely destroyed by a tornado, as they watched from the inside of a store in town.  All they had were the baby supplies in the diaper bag.  The store owner felt sorry for the sudden and violent loss of their home and gave them clothes to wear while they rebuilt their life.  The tornado ate their entire house off of the foundation and yet it did not move the doghouse with their puppies huddling inside, just feet away.  Had they been home during the storm...well...we all know what the outcome would have been.

My grandfather, Papa, did most of the story telling over lunch.  He is a very wise man, I'm surprised I never noticed it before.  I suppose my fondest memory of him was when he would lie to me and say he could understand everything being said on the Spanish television network.  He would make up sentences to whatever appeared to be the context of conversation.  In my defense, I was only about 5 years old.  Papa watched his father die right in front of him when he was 9 years old from a massive coronary.  He watched his mother die several years later, same cause, just a drawn out version.  Unlike Nana's family, who nearly all perished well into their 80's and 90's, Papa's family has, for the most part, died rather prematurely.  Papa will likely not outlive his remaining siblings, as his heart weakens by the day.

Papa told me what he felt when he nearly died last year.  I was outside the hospital room when he coded from a heart attack.  He has a signed DNR order on file and if not for the timely intervention of Nana, he'd be vapor and we'd be playing harps right now.  I've never coded but last year, when my abdomen was shattering from the death of my baby, I felt like my life was slipping away along with it...that level of physical pain will take your spirit places and typically, they're not filled with pearly gates or chubby, naked angels.  It's terrifying and often excruciating...and you don't want witnesses and you don't want to be completely abandoned.

I think of the decades of labor my grandparents have toiled through...planting and harvesting their own vegetable garden...even in their 80's, though Papa's failing health puts much of the responsibility on Nana...who then cans and stores the fruit of their efforts to sustain her and the family.  They have a wild mother cat who comes to their house to gather food and take it to her young, hidden in the brush behind the neighbor's house.  Every day she walks the same path across the garden to the porch, locates the food set out for her, and carries the entire amount to her kittens...returning about 15 minutes later to feed herself.  Nana is much like the mother cat.  For the whole of my life, her husband, children, and grandchildren have always come before herself.

The hardest part of visiting my grandparents is saying goodbye... I get lost in the pleading of their eyes as they will me to stay longer, just five more minutes...  I realize the frailty of the human condition...we can survive emotional loss for decades...but the toll of the journey we travel can swiftly remove our functionality.  Then what?  I often wonder if the pain lies in knowing others shall outlast you or that you alone are the remaining survivor...