Just a personal story about what happened this week with my grandma that I loved dearly, and what we experienced with her loss. She was absolutely the sweetest woman I've ever known in my life, and she grew up dirt poor and didn't have a pot to piss in when they were young, and she didn't finish high school but got her GED later in life, and she instilled in me a love of books from a young age, and I will miss her. She was a life long Democrat and thought that George Bush stole the election and shouldn't have been President, and this is just my ode to my grandma that I loved so much. If others have been through similar experiences thoughts welcomed and this is just part of my way of saying goodbye to her.
Grandma was a bit of a rebel, and when she was young she actually made the paper in her small town in Arkansas for heaven forbid....wearing shorts!! The mayor was mad and that was actually a news story for the day and was the headline in the newspaper of her small town in AK that she lived in.
She wasn't a highly educated woman due to the poverty she grew up in (she was born in 1920), but she was a smart woman who loved to read. When we were kids we would go to the library with her and my mom and they would check out stacks of books and so would we and she was one of the main reasons I always had a love of books and reading from a young age.
She was a giving person and even though she didn't have much at all in the way of financial means for most of her life, she was always the first to give even when she couldn't afford it. She knew when someone was full of it, and when they were sincere and she loved her family probably more than her own life.
She took a turn for the worse with her health with a bleeding ulcer that almost killed her since she lost so much blood about two months ago and just never recovered from that. She also showed signs of a stroke and congestive heart failure. She never came back completely after the incident in the hospital and we got forced to put her into a nursing home as much as we hated to. This past week, she just finally didn't wake up and was non-responsive, and we had to let her pass. On Thursday she passed away surrounded by those that loved her and peacefully.
I've got a whole new appreciation for what Michael Schiavo went through with his wife after what my family went through with my grandma. I cannot imagine how screwed up that family had to be to want to force someone who is breathing but not living to have to stay alive any more. I've never experienced watching someone actually die in front of me until this last week with gram passing. We don't know if she knew we were there for her or not, but we wanted to be there in case she did. We all would have felt a lot worse if we weren't there for her in case she did know. How any human thinks it's more humane to keep someone breathing when they're not living is beyond me.
We'll all miss grandma, but we'll not miss seeing her suffer. There are some things that are more cruel than death, and that's breathing when you have no life. I hope that I can give my grandma some respect with the work I do in promoting the values she believed in, and thanks to anyone who stopped by and took the time to read the diary. If any of you have similar stories to share that would be welcomed.