Talk Cancer

Question:

A dear friend went into a nursing home a few years ago to die from a brain infection.  By the time she got into the nursing home she was semi-conscious and very hard to communicate with.  She was 48.  We brought in lots of pictures of Marge as she was…full of life and laughter, dressed up, taking care of herself and other people.  We just wanted the staff to see that she once was a very vital person.  I don’t know if it made any difference to the staff or not, but as we took turns sitting with her we had those pictures to remind us who the Marge in that bed really was.  Anne, I wish you peace as you go through this difficult process.  May your father know how loved he is. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – …Thought of you over the weekend…how are you doing, and how is your grandfather? Robin Robin: You’re so nice! Thanks…. It’s my dad, not my grandfather. He has settled into the rehab/nursing facility pretty well. We have had some incredibly frustrating and infuriating run-ins with the doctors who supposedly were treating him (he hasn’t seen his neurologist since he fell into his bathtub on Nov. 22 and was taken to the ER for an entire day, and from there went into an intensive rehab hospital and then to this nursing home). The next step was supposed to be a craniatomy (open up a section of his skull) to biopsy his brain tumor, but my brother and I are not too keen on causing Dad any physical suffering. (Dad is nearly 82.) So, Dad is mentally half-gone, incontinent, no memory… but is being cared for pretty well. I will be going down to see him again this Wed., and then all of us (me, hubby, 3 kids) will visit this Sunday (12/24) to bring him some Christmas cheer. My brother and I are waiting (and waiting, and waiting) to get one last explanation from the neurology team here in Providence at the gamma- knife facility before we give them a final decision about "to cut, or not to cut" Dad’s head. (These doctors never seem to call you back, or maybe it’s just that they don’t feel any urgency with an old man who has a tumor; it has been quite an education for me these last few months. Bah.) My dad was a brilliant man, a mathematician/engineer, and I find myself dreaming a lot about him in the "old days" when he had all his marbles. I also dreamed the other night that I walked into the nursing home and found Dad taking line-dancing lessons with a bunch of old ladies, and really shaking his booty and having a ball!  :-)   Having been thru my mom’s death from cancer 2 years ago, I am quite familiar with these wishful-thinking, magical sorts of dreams about dying and dead parents. It’s a very poignant phenomenon. I guess our subconscious goes right on wanting and hoping and dreaming even when our conscious intellects have accepted cold reality. xxoo Anne —

– Jeannie "On the other hand….you have different fingers."

Response:

I have the things that I had given my grandfather as gifts when I was a child (you know those awful statuettes that say WORLDS GREATEST GRANDPA) and they are in a shadow box in the living room.  He also made a log cabin for each of his kids and grandkids.  I have mine in my bedroom.  The great grandkids got a dollhouse for the girls and a barn for the boys.  Since I had no kids, he gave me the first dollhouse he made which was three or four times the size of the kids so that when I had kids of my own, they would have something.  I treasure EVERY single memory of them.  I think of them every day.  The thing that made my grandmother’s passing easier on us was knowing she didn’t go through a long period of pain.  It was discovered in November and she passed away the end of December.  It also helped to remember that my grandparents had never been apart until my grandfather’s death, so she was looking forward to being with him and he was probably up there wondering what was taking her so long! I am thankful every day that I had them.  I wrote a poem right after her death…in fact the night I found out she had passed away.  I have posted it here before when Don was dealing with his own father’s death and I will post it again for you.  It is the way I remember them and every member of the family related to it the same way. Our King and Queen As I sit remembering all of those years I fight to hold back a river of tears. To each of us they were like a King and a Queen Not one of us doubted how much they would mean. They were always prepared for visits, it seemed With a jug of lemonade or a pie made of cream And fishing trips seemed to spring out of thin air Or simply sitting and reading in grandma