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I’ve only ever known one grandparent, Bubbie – my father’s mother – and she isn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with. She’s kind, and loving, and in many ways wonderful. The kicker is how she plays the victim. If you don’t hug her as soon as you come in it’s, “What, no hug and kiss for your Bubbie? Don’t I matter?” Never mind that your hands are full of luggage or that her hands are covered with grease or something like that. The important thing is that she’s been injured by your not immediately showing her the proper loving greeting.
Or, maybe she’ll spend half an hour kibitzing about your driving or about your cooking, and you’ve patiently born it all along, with the occasional, “I’ve got it under control,” thrown in to try and hint to her that her input isn’t needed at this time, and when you finally break down and ask her to quit her kibitzing, you’ve really done her a great injustice, after all, she was only trying to help.
I saw Bubbie a few months ago. She seemed pretty hale. Sure, she had the same shortness of breath that she’d always had, a shortness of breath that the doctors told her was attributable to a very mild case of emphysema. Long after the diagnosis came, she was still surprised to have emphysema. After all, she quit smoking decades ago.
Shortly after that visit the diagnosis changed. Bubbie went into the Emergency Room because of respiratory distress, and they told her cancer. Late-stages lung cancer. And then they told her that it had metastasized to various other parts of her body. Given the state of the cancer, there was really no way to fight it. It was only a matter of time. Prognosis, death, no one can really say when; eleven months maybe.
When I talked to her on the phone on the day I heard, while she was still in the hospital, she sounded more cheerful than I could remember her ever having sounded. “Oh, well, you know. I’m an old lady. I’ve had a very full life. Everyone’s got to go sometime; I wasn’t expecting to go quite yet, but….” I was surprised and amazed and pleased and very grateful that such was her attitude. It was with considerable trepidation that I had made the call in the first place. I don’t like the feeling of talking to someone when there’s darkness between you and nothing that can be done really to dispel that darkness. (Not that I expect I’m unusual in that respect.) So I hung up after our conversation feeling lighter for having spoken to her and found her cheery in the face of death.
In the weeks to follow, I had a few conversations with her. In each of them, she seemed to be in progressively fouler spirits. Complaining not only about the difficulty in breathing, but also about how her caretakers (my family) were displeased with her grumpiness and anger. “I’m learning how to be docile,” she said with a cynical chuckle.
I had decided to go and visit her soon, while there was still a trace of my Bubbie left in my grandmother’s body. From my father’s reports, I learned that her life and the traces of her character were fading fast. He urged me to come as soon as possible. I set the date, two weeks out and bought the ticket.
I saw her first through the glass of the screen door, deflated and sunken into the sofa. As I entered the room, she looked up at the sound, but there was emptiness in her eyes. “Someone’s come,” my father told her, “three thousand miles just to see you, Ma.” As he talked, and I neared, recognition crept into her eyes like wine, slowly filling twin goblets and giving them color and life. As I knelt on the floor in front of her, she lifted her arms to take me in a hug. We held each other in silence for quite a long while. I pulled back gently a few times while she clung to me, but she was not ready to break the embrace. Joy met grief, and sorrow and pain and bled together, their borders indiscrete in both our hearts. Her eyes welled with tears and rivulets ran down her cheeks. That is the only time I have ever seen my grandmother cry. “I’m glad to see you, Bubbie. I’ve come to be here with you.”
She couldn’t stand by herself. Couldn’t eat by herself. Needed help for just about everything, but wanted help for nothing. Recognized her need for help for some things, and not for others. Sometimes she tried to take off the apparatus that delivered her oxygen. Sometimes she refused to take the medicines that helped her to breath. Most of the time she sat staring blankly at nothing, curled into a horrible crumpled shape in her seat.
Sometimes, though, she’d find a bit of life. Music would come on and she’d dance, bouncing or swaying slightly from her curled, doubled-over position, a child-like playful grin on her face. The same grin showed through once as I sat on the floor in front of her, my head only slightly lower than hers. She looked down at me, our eyes inches apart, and then bumped her head gently into mine.
On one night during my few days’ stay, it fell to me to take a night shift. I chose to take a night shift. I was able to opt out, but it seemed important that I give the rest of the family a respite – and it seemed important that I give to Bubbie deeply of myself before I retreated from her infirmity back to California. Nighttime, I had heard, is a particularly tough time with Bubbie. She doesn’t sleep, and the dementia gets worse. Luckily, by eleven, she was asleep or at least resting quietly with her eyes closed.
I tried to sleep on a mattress on the floor in Bubbie’s room. I didn’t sleep much at all. Bubbie would move and I would start awake. The oxygen apparatus was loud and gurgled clinically in the corner.
I had told myself that if I was awake at four in the morning, when a major meteor shower was going to begin in earnest, that I would go outside for a while and watch the show. I woke my brother and we walked up to the little road above the driveway and lay on our backs in the gravel next to Dad who’d also lain awake. It was astounding. Bright shooting stars tearing across the sky, all over the sky, sometimes four at a time. It was magical. It seemed all the life that had ebbed from my once gregarious grandmother was darting around in the stratosphere. I wanted to stay forever watching the magnificent display, but I had to get back to Bubbie.
I’d not been back in her room long when she decided to get up. She slowly swung her legs over the rail on her bed and began to push her weight forward. (Considering her weakened state, I was repeatedly surprised during my visit at the strength she was sometimes able to tap into and to sustain in order to achieve some great feat.) I saw at this time that her strength was going to allow her to get over the rail on her bed, but that her balance would not allow her to stand.
I went to her and asked, “Where you going, Bubbie?” Her reply, “What are you doing here?” I told her I was there to take care of her, to help her with anything she needed, “What do you need?” She told me, “I need this down,” indicating the bed rail that was an impediment to her getting out of bed. I put it down and took her hands, with which she held me tight to keep her balance. Still grasping my hands, she said, “Ok. Go now.” I was still needed to prevent her falling, “I can’t, Bubbie, I need to help you.” She looked me in the face for the first time in this exchange. “Who are you?” “I’m Aaron, your grandson, Andy’s son.” She slid off the bed onto her feet. She told me to, “Back up. Back up. Back up.” I told her, “I need to keep holding you up, Bubbie.” She continued saying, “Back up, back up. Back up! Back up!” She took one of her hands away from mine and with it took up her catheter bag. Repeating “back up” relentlessly, she began to hit me with the bag. “Please don’t hit me with that, Bubbie. I’m trying to help you.” Her reply was, “I’m not. I won’t hit you.” After a few more hits, I persuaded her to put down the bag. She backed me up a few steps, all the while following me both to see me out of her room, and to use my arms to maintain her balance. She again freed one of her hands from mine and took up her cane, which I thought she would use to support herself. Instead, she began hitting me with the cane. “Please don’t hit me with that, Bubbie. You’ll hurt me.” “Ok. I won’t. I won’t hit you.” She kept hitting me.
She backed me all the way to the door of the room and stopped there, telling me to continue to back up. I explained that if I let go of her she would fall over. She seemed to see the truth in that, so began pounding on the floor and walls with her cane. I tried to stop her doing that, but she’d stop only for a moment before starting up again. The house was roused. First my uncle, who had been sleeping directly below, came to find out what was up. He woke my father and my stepmother. It was only April who was able to calm her and to get her to go back to bed.
In the morning when everyone was once again astir and the sun was up, Bubbie complained that a strange man had been in her room again the night before, claiming to be her grandson, calling her “Bubbie” and saying he wanted to help her. “I made him leave. I was very frightened.” She saw me, and in an accusatory voice that meant, “Why didn’t you come to help me when I was in danger?” she said, “Where were you last night?” I told her, “I was in your room, trying to help you.” She looked at me blankly. “Remember the guy who was in your room claiming to be your grandson? That was me.” She looked very hurt, said something about how you shouldn’t joke about such things. “One of us is very confused,” she said, “and it’s not me.” For the rest of the day, she seemed to be very angry with me.
As Bubbie got into bed that evening, I realized that my last chance at salvaging my last day with her had arrived. I would be leaving early the following morning. I went into her room. “I came to say goodnight Bubbie.” We held hands, exchanged “I love yous”, and came to our first peace of the day. Traded squeezes. After our goodnight, I talked to my uncle. “I kind of feel like I should say goodbye, since I’ll likely not see her in the morning, but I have a good deal of ambivalence. We just had such a nice goodnight. It seems like maybe that’s a good place to leave it.” I was dreading some turn to the upset place of the night before as my last ever Bubbie time. Uncle Ed said, “Ask your heart what you want to do about the goodbye.” So I did. “I guess in part, I’m just worried about upsetting her by saying goodbye.” My uncle nodded. “If she gets upset, it’ll be a good upset.”
I decided to say goodbye. I went back into her room where she was in bed and I said, “I’m going to be leaving early in the morning, so I wanted to say goodbye.” I knelt next to her bed. “Bye, Bubbie.” She blinked and weakly said, “Bye.” I smiled and said, “I’m so sorry that you’re going through all this…. You’re my Bubbie.” She said, feebly, “I know.” “You’re my only Bubbie.” “I know.” “You’re my best Bubbie.” “I know.” Then she said, pausing between words, “I’ve only got just a few grandsons.” I told her, “I know… and I’m the best one, right?” She looked at me, jokingly, as though I’d committed a grievous sin. Laughing through my tears, I said, “Joking, Bubbie. Joking.” I took her hand. “I’m really going to miss you.” She pursed her lips. “Goodbye, Bubbie.”
On my way out of the room, I turned and saw her move her hand and press it against her chest, over her heart. I turned and went back to her bed. Trying not to break down completely in front of her, I put one of my hands over hers and one over my own heart. “Me too, Bubbie. Me too.”
Then I left my Bubbie’s room, probably for the last time.
In the hall, I cried on my father’s shoulder. My father had cried to me on the phone a week before, but had not cried since. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said, and cried a bit himself.
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