Real Life Sometimes Sucks

My granny is 92 years old. She has been my friend, my shelter, my strength, my encourager...A rock, is what my brother calls her. She's always been a vital and strong woman. We have always been proud of her strength and wisdom, sharing her freely with our friends, with other family members, with strangers, because of who and what she has been to us.

Saturday evening Granny fell. She was outdoors and managed to pull herself inside her house but spent about 18 hours on the floor, doors wide open, until my brother found her when he went up to mow her lawn. At her urging, he got her up into a chair, called for my cousins to come help clean her up, and then with their help he put her to bed where she promptly fell asleep and slept, as she said, "Like a baby." She denied any pain, scoffed at their urging her to let them call an ambulance.

I didn't hear about her accident until late Sunday evening. I asked Mama if I should go up, but not knowing if she was still abed, concerned that my going to visit so late in the evening would cause her to rise from her bed and perhaps stumble trying to get to the door, discouraged me. I waited until Monday morning, and after dropping Kay off at the bus stop headed to Granny's. There I found my brother had spent the night though he had since gone home. His wife was with her, so that he could go home and rest.

I asked about hospital/doctor. No, no Granny said, we'd just wait. If she could just lie still she'd be better soon. Later, she had a spell of incontinence. I told her I'd clean things up and reached out and lightly touched her thigh. She yelped. I gently lifted her gown and saw the swollen thigh. "I think," I said to my sister in law, "that she's broken her hip or femur...and she's got to go to the hospital, regardless of what she says." I explained to Granny that the bone was likely broken and my brother called the ambulance.

I returned home after Granny was on her way to the hospital to call Mama and let her know I'd pick her up on my way through town and take her to the hospital. And at that moment it hit. I recalled my husband's remark a few months ago when Mama fell breaking her ankle in three places..."I thought we'd be looking after grandkids by now...Instead it's been parents and family members." This certainly was beginning to look like a season of caring for parents and grandparents. And I too had dreamed it would be grandchildren at this stage of our lives.

Granny was admitted and today went through surgery to repair the hip God gave her. But there's more. An increasing tendency to drift in her thoughts, odd remarks, forgetfulness...This is not the strong woman I grew up knowing. This woman is frail and pitiful, plucking at her bedcovers, and looking a little confused at the babble of voices around her. The woman I knew is still there. More there than not, mind you. But there's this old woman who has crept in, too.

I watched my mother as she used her walker to move around the hospital hallways. She looks fragile, too, in a way that she didn't four months ago. Who are these two women? Who are these people who need me to be stronger and more outspoken and call upon my strength and my humor and my knowledge to keep them going?

It's been hard. There's no lying about it. To care for the parents and grandparents who cared for us; to comfort, coddle, encourage and struggle with those who did so much for us once upon a time, to reverse our roles and become the child/parent, struggling to keep the division of lines, being respectful and at the same time firm and commanding as needed, is truly difficult. And there is a whole new meaning, a poignancy to the phrase "This too shall pass," because that is an inevitable moment looming ahead of us as well.

I know there are moments in all our lives when we must do things we'd rather not do; when we wonder how on earth we can possibly go forward; when we think we'd like to be anywhere but where we are at that given time. As the commercial says, "I'm there." In that spot. In that place.