My grandma’s health was declining and we knew that her time was nearing its end, so we went to see her in Naples, Florida this weekend. Mom and Dad plus Andrew and Caitlin’s families arrived on Thursday and had early-bird dinner with her on Friday, but we got in around 1:30 that night and missed what turned out to be her last meal. She died that night and I never saw her.
I loved visiting her in Florida growing up (great candy dish) and she would make the trip up to Boston or Cape Cod in the Summer regularly until a few years ago. Every time I saw her, I learned a little more about her history and was always amazed to hear snippets of her life from before I was born and even before my mom was born. She always seemed so incredibly old to me but she never acted like it. She had been through so many different phases in her life and described everything with a vigor of experience that I can only now begin to understand with the birth of my own children. She was witty, clever, friendly and loving; in short, a perfect grandma.
Over the past few years, I am told, she began to lose touch with reality and suffered from classic elderly dementia, forgetting names, faces, places, and her own sense of self. It was a sad and lonely period in her life and one that scares me deeply. This phase of her life and subsequent end is a haunting reminder that consciousness is our greatest gift and one that is absolutely, temporally limited. My memories of her stretch back as far as I can remember, to the earliest days of my awareness, and one day they, too, will cease to exist. All I can hope for is that someone (Ivy’s and Miles’ kids!) remembers me as sweetly as I remember her.
With eternal love, goodbye grandma.