March 24

Poppie’s in the hospital. I stayed with him from Saturday 7p until Sunday at 5a when he was finally admitted: broken ribs, down fifteen pounds thanks to Fiji, stubborn cough going on four months, abnormally fast heart rhythm with PVCs, low blood pressure, chest tube, strong antibiotics, two CT scans, ultrasound to check for blood clots, want to do a lung scrape and biopsy on tumors but can’t until they get his HR lowered and can’t give him meds for that until they raise his BP.

I call at least three times a day. Couldn’t visit Sunday afternoon due to babysitting. Came today right after school and stayed over five hours.

Drink the dirty cow, Poppie. Keep your arm straight or the IV gets mad, Poppie. TV on or off, Poppie? Eat something, Poppie. Call button isn’t working; I’ll get the nurse, Poppie. Okay I’ll call Debbie and Dennis, Poppie. Momma wants to talk to you, Poppie. It’s Mickey and Aunt Greeta, Poppie. Here’s the urinal, Poppie. I’ll wait outside, Poppie. It’s just me, Poppie, Brandy. I’m right here, Poppie.

I make calls. I inform people. I get the name of meds. I write down Advanced Directives and clarify with nurses. I get the aid when he’s soiled himself. He says he’s not in pain. I try to get him to eat but only the chocolate milk goes down. I talk to nurses. I talk to Doctors. I wear the mask because they’re stupidly worried about TB. I help him lay on his side. I tuck him in. I try to make him laugh but he coughs instead. I try to listen when he talks although I want to cut off my ears.

The noises out of my mouth sound like a forty year old’s; my body is nearly twenty-five, but I feel like I am ten. I repeat tales of tumors and possible recurrence of prostate cancer and full codes and intubation and how all he wants is a diagnosis and then to go home until he dies and I go outside while the aid cleans him up and I carry the punch to his pride like an extra appendage so he doesn’t have to and pinch my thigh, my wrist, my inner arm and clench my teeth so I don’t cry and I am glad for the mask when I kiss him goodnight so he can’t see the fears crawl out of my skin like a bad case of worms.

I’m the only one here. The only one who has visited. The only one who can because Mickey’s an ass and everyone else is too far away and

don’tdieonmywatchdon’tdieonmywatchdon’tdieonmywatchdon’tdieonmywatchdon’tdieonmywatchdon’tdieonmywatchdon’tdieonmywatch

I don’t want to be the only one. I don’t want to be the last to see him. Talk to him. Touch him. Kiss him. I don’t want to be the only one with those images in my head; those marks on my skin an indelible stain. I don’t want the responsibility of carrying us all through another loss; another empty space; another missing piece. I’m not strong enough. I never have been.

So now it’s past my bedtime and I’m still thirty minutes away in the hospital parking lot writing in this damn thing because I’m too weighed down to leave. I want to go back to the Narducci’s and cry into Julie’s arms. I want Doc to pat my shoulder because he doesn’t know what else to do. But I won’t. I let them step in when it’s me that’s sick, but they are not my parents. They can’t touch this. I wouldn’t know how to show them the way. Wouldn’t know how to let them in.

But my father’s in Arkansas and my mother’s in South Carolina and they don’t know how either. They can’t, either. The time to build these pathways of connection passed hundreds of thousands of hours and days and months and years and decades ago and the neurons have all wasted away and died by now with no hope of rebirth.

This is the time when my therapist would want me to call. In another life, another time, another girl. But I’m all I have, so I’ll go home and cuddle my cats and pray the demons away because

I’m the only one here.

 

March 24

You know what sucks? That it was Aunt Debbie – a woman in Oklahoma that I have seen for a grand total of two hours and spoken to less than that in the last ten years – who asked me how I was, how I was handling everything, if they could do anything to help me through this. Aunt Debbie, who is not even blood related.

My mother will never get close to those questions.

 

March 25

I am a woman-girl, a girl-woman, the dominate being always changing, always drowning. I am a woman when I demand they fix his call light, when I discuss procedures, when I relay his requests, when I push him to take another bite another sip another swallow, when I stay up late dealing with him and plow through work without telling anyone that my grandfather is in the hospital because that is a weight no one can take off my shoulders (because my mother put it there - but she didn't - but she did - no money, no time off, no one else to do it and 'thank you for taking care of Poppie' like it's something that I will drop and shatter like fine china, like it’s a chore they’re putting on my instead of a family obligation when why the hell wouldn't I take care of my own flesh and blood even when they don't care about me - who do you think I am? - when all I want is for someone to see the child inside and realize what bastards they are for making me do this by myself.)

I am a girl when he needs help to sit up in bed, when he asks for a bed pan, when I slink into the corner shadows so he doesn't know I'm there when they put him in a diaper and I can't move to catch the wisps of his spirit evaporating in the air so instead I watch him waver and bend in the dim hospital lights amidst the constant hum of the special ventilation system and the March Madness game he couldn't see even if he wanted to.

I am a baby when the truth rips apart my chest:

My grandfather is dying.

My grandfather is dying and there is nothing I can do about it.

My grandfather is dying and not only is there nothing I can do about it but also I am the only one here.

Everyone knows he's dying.

Everyone knows he's dying but I am the only one forced to see it.

I am the only one to witness the remnants of a life ticking away its last grains of sand which bore under my eyelids and leave tattoos of brokenness that I will never be able to scrub and burn away even with hospital-grade bleach and I will have to cut off my eyelids just to save myself except that will leave my iris's no protection and I will never be able to stop the imprints of imagery and HRs and BPs and SATs and forty-seven million flashes of things whose cells are dead before my brain can complete the sensory process and that would be a fate worse than death so they might as well kill me too (If only I could slice them all out first...).

I am a girl when I sit in the car writing these entries because I'm too afraid to go home alone only to get the call that the chance for last moments is already over.

I am a woman when I sit in the car writing these entries instead of crying because that's too cliché and my life is no movie. There are no chemicals to release that one perfect droplet from the eye on the camera side and no John Williams to write my score full of bassoon solos and emo ballads of piano and strings and no techs to filter out the color to match the mood of my insides and no writer to tell me what comes next and no director to tell me when it's over and we can all go home to our happy endings of lies.

There's just me, the woman-girl, girl-woman.

Alone.

 

March 26

I am tired. So unexplainably tired. Spending all day at school teaching and then all night at the hospital is too much. I was over it before it even started. At least he’s out of isolation now.

Only Wednesday. How can five days seem so endless?

No, no, no. I’m fine. It’s fine.

Everything’s fine.

I know he’s sick. I know he’s tired. But I want him to treat this like it’s temporary so he can go back to being the Poppie he’s always been. But how do you remind someone when they don’t recognize themselves?

I don’t know whether to rage or to sob.

I don’t want to think about Poppie anymore (even though my dreams are filled with death).

So I will sleep tonight without supper and I will pretend it has nothing to do with rereading Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls and everything to do with wanting a physical reason for the utter emptiness.

 

March 29

I got here at 8:30a. I’m just leaving and it’s after 11p. Seven days, and Mickey still hasn’t called, although he texted me to tell me how sweet I was to visit my grandfather. Sweet? Can you call being a solo caretaker “sweet”? And since when are fifteen hour days “visiting” somewhere?

Nobody has any idea how grueling it is and I don’t know how to tell them without them blaming me or hating me or abandoning me. I won’t abandon him. It’s not fair.

I am twenty-four. He is eighty-three. I am the child masquerading as the adult while he regresses back to infancy instead of the maturity of his own age. It’s not fair.

Life’s not fair, kid. Better get used to it now.

All week he’s refused to get out of bed. He’ll barely eat for me and not at all for anyone else. Sometimes I can’t even force the dirty cow down him. I feel so helpless when I’m here, but even more so when I’m gone.

Today PT finally came by and he walked nearly by himself half way down the unit and back.

Now I don’t know how sick he really is. Don’t know whether to coddle or to cattle prod.

Doctors still haven’t done his biopsy. Too many days of NPO and extra-strong IV antibiotics have wreaked havoc on his bowels. Every time they clean him up, another sliver of my soul drops through the floor. It’s like he’s run out already and mine’s the only bit left – pathetic as it is.

Father, where is Thy peace? Where is Thy Sabbath rest?

 

March 30

I took his one pair of clothes home to wash. I don’t think he cleaned them at all or wore any other pair the whole time he was in Fiji. They reeked.

I threw his shoes away outside and bought him a new pair from Wal-Mart. (“Wally’s World”) I spent my free periods Wednesday and Thursday getting the new Bible and cover he wanted from the ABC – even enduring a phone call to my brother for information – and he won’t even look at them or say thank you. He asked for a little notebook and I gave him my orange Star Wars one that Chris gave me at Milo last year and you know who he wrote to? Moisy and Lina. His Fijian grandkids. The only “family” he cares about.

They’re not his granddaughter. They’re not the one here day in and day out and dealing with all this family drama shit that I didn’t create and has nothing to do with me and is risking a disaster due to lack of sleep and an unclean house. They’re not the ones fighting with Doctors who make stupid orders and drop his BP into the floor while giving him tachycardia and who still can’t get his damn eye drops right when he’s had the same prescriptions for nearly two years. They’re not the ones who call every hour when I’m not here, the ones every staff member knows by name.

I walk around the ward sometimes while he’s sleeping and the terror grips me when I see how much worse he could get. I call Mom and make her promise that if it looks like he won’t get out of here, someone else will come. I can’t be the only one here when he goes. And then I can’t talk for several seconds because I’m crying against my will and the knives have sliced into my throat.

I don’t know how to let her be the parent when the stakes are this high. I feel an incessant need to keep her safe, because I know she won’t handle it, and eventually, someway, somehow, I will figure out a way to work through everything for all of us.

But right now I’m too tired. It’s too much. Bells was more torture than relief.

Come sleep, come.

 

March 31

I asked Jon how he could do this day in and day out as a CNA. I care for newborns and various-aged children all of the time because that is the order of things; that is the way life is meant to be, but this Benjamin Button effect is supposed to be Hollywood imagination, not right here in Colton on a fucking Monday; not with my stubborn I-will-do-everything-myself grandpa.

Nobody puts the truth in movies – not because it hurts too much – but because no one believes it. Everybody puts the truth in books, but no one knows how to read between the lines.

They finally got his biopsy done. Now we find out whether it’s cancer or not. To be honest, I don’t know which would be better. He still won’t get up. He still won’t eat. All of the nurses pacify him. All of the Doctors patronize him even though he practiced for years as an anesthesiologist. All I do is teeter-totter between wanting to scream at him and wanting to smash my head into a concrete wall. So instead I say nothing and just hand him his yanker suction, tuck him in and listen to him pretend to sleep peacefully, like I know I never will.

 

April 1

Jon found out I hadn’t had anything to eat all day because I was too scared to leave the room even to pee, just knowing that the Doctor would come the instant I did. Less than an hour later, there he was with chicken and rice, and better yet, an empathetic ear. The most delightful thing I’ve ever had.

He stayed all evening, just talking to me. We stopped for donuts at this twenty-four hour place with no comparison to Krispy Kreme’s before I dropped him off at home later.

I don’t know how I made it through the last four years without him.

 

April 2

I get here at 7:30a so I can wake him up to eat his breakfast before it gets cold (why haven’t the nurses done this all last week when I couldn’t be here all day?!).  But he doesn’t care. All he wants to do is sleep all day. I bring the computer to be on tumblr and read my books and write a bit when the inspiration strikes, all the while keeping one ear bud out so I can stay attuned to every little blip of machines and any stirring he makes. All the nurses and CNAs and technicians and Doctors from various floors keep asking me if I’m in the medical field. Only the fifteen seasons of ER diploma club. But after a week and a half of being here I can rattle off Latin lingo with a bullshit “look how many fucks I don’t give” face like the best of them. I never knew knowing words like occluded and condom catheter and O2 meter and metoprolol and protonics and yanker suction and lung biopsy and CT scan could provide a person with such an illusion of power.

Poppie keeps saying stupid stuff to get himself in trouble. A social worker came and talked to me about him being homeless. It’s called “lax-housing” Poppie, you ass. And the IRS will find the money you had Aunt Debbie put in Hazel’s account even though I keep telling you that Medicare covers this entire bill. Stop trying to swindle people out of stuff they don’t care about anyway. You’ve always been penny smart and dollar foolish.

Words I will never say.

I waited as long as I could today, but I had to leave around 3:45 to teach lessons and handbell quartet rehearsal. About 4pm they called and said they’d found a nursing home for him. I actually beat him to the nursing home after rehearsal finished. It’s an ok place, got good reviews, but I hope he knows that it’s not permanent, that it’s just to finish out the IV antibiotics and buff him up enough to get back to OK, that I haven’t forgotten how many times he’s begged for no nursing home, that it’s only because I can’t take him back to my apartment, that it’s not that I don’t love him.

I just need him to get better, on so many levels.

 

April 3

I don’t want to talk about you know who anymore. All I want to think about it spending the afternoon/evening with Jon DDRing after getting my butt kicked in bowling and eating pizza and donuts like the college students we never really were and watching HIMYM when all I could really think about was wanting to put my head on his shoulder and just. be. me.

 

April 4

The nursing home is killing him. Killing him.

I’m a horrible granddaughter. How can I let this happen to him? I have to get him out of here.

I came as soon as visiting hours started at 10am. He couldn’t even tell it was morning. He looked so small in that bed. He had nasal oxygen again even though the hospital took him off of it two days ago. His breakfast sat unopened on his bedside tray. I barely got out “Hi Poppie” before he interrupted with this fearful, rippling voice that I’ve never heard before.

“Call your mother. We need a family reunion on Sabbath. I don’t think I’ll make it much longer.” I grabbed his hand to make myself feel better while I dialed Momma up on the phone. I could give her no warning. The words were carbon dioxide and incompatible with life. For all of my fighting, I was finally the child demanding her to be the parent.

But mom couldn’t calm him down so I snagged a nurse and stuck Momma on her to get some answers and demanded a Doctor and wanted to know why they hadn’t called me when my number was all over his charts and posted at the nurses’ desk and did somebody give him the biopsy results when I’d specifically said not to do that and is it O2 toxicity? What meds did you give him? Did he take the Ativan last night to help him sleep? What did you do to him to rip him asunder?!

Turns out they gave him that fucking BP pill that wasn’t even supposed to be on his orders from the hospital and when I got here his BP was seventy-fucking-eight with a HR of one hundred and forty-two and yeah no shit he thought he was dying because you bottomed out his pressure and didn’t even have a fluid bolus in him and when did you give him this pill and why the hell weren’t you monitoring him and stop acting like raising his legs and lowering his head on the bed is going to fix your mistake and get the Doctor on the phone right now to change the damn order!

It takes me hours to calm him down, no matter how many times I explain “It was the medicine, Poppie, and Sunday’s your last day of antibiotics and then Aunt Debbie and Uncle Dennis can bring you back to Oklahoma. It’s okay, Poppie, I’m here. I’m here. It’s okay.”

His roommate, Dean, fills me in on Poppie’s night better than the nurses and once the Doctor changes the parameters to not give the BP med unless his BP is over one hundred and fifty and I get him to eat a tiny bit and put him back to sleep, I have nothing left in me to stay even though I hate myself for leaving. I need just a little time with Jon to be able to make it through orchestra rehearsal, much less another endless night without slicing my veins to be as lifeless as he could be this instant, without me, alone.

 

April 4

I don’t want to do this anymore.

I hate myself for saying it, but I don’t. It’s too hard. The guilt and fear kill me when I’m away from him but the pain of being with him is just as deadly. Lose-lose.

I wish I was allowed to make demands in my family. I wish I could make someone else be the adult so I could go back to being the kid. I wish I could just cut it all away and forget about it.

Why does my self-preservation always come at someone else’s expense?

Why can I never choose me?

It’s too hard. I want to stop.

Lord, help.

 

April 5

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t do it. I’m sorry I can’t fix it. I’m sorry I can’t keep it together. I’m sorry I’m selfish. I’m sorry I’m weak. I’m sorry I’m not everything you needed me to be.

I’m sorry, Poppie.

I was so thankful for the excuse of scouts group tonight but then all it did was remind me that this is exactly where I was two weeks ago when I found out he was in the ER and I didn’t even realize how panicked I’d been until I walked back in thirty minutes later after finally hearing his voice on the other end of the phone and I broke down crying in Carol’s arms.

His voice no longer brings that relief.

I can’t do this anymore. I’m not strong enough to keep him alive and I’m too weak to let him die. I can’t help him. I can’t help any of us.

I WANT TO RUN AWAY!

Lord, help!

 

April 7

Yesterday, I finally got Poppie into his clothes and to take a short walk outside to enjoy the beautiful SoCal day by enticing him with an ice cream cone like a four year old.

Saturday and Sunday I also got him to walk into the day room so I could play the piano for him a little bit and all the other residents loved it but all he could say was that I needed to practice. It was all I could do not to attack his ungrateful sorry little ass and tell him that I hadn’t had time because I’d spent every possible hour of the last two weeks taking care of him for one and for two that the piano was full of stuck keys and out of tune notes and I was doing my best.

 I’m trying anything I can think of to alleviate the sundowning but it just gets worse and worse. He never knows night from day, breakfast from lunch, the bed from the bathroom. At least he still remembers me. Maybe that’s a plus. Maybe that helps a little.

PT says he’s surprisingly strong and able and it hurts because every day it seems like his problems are more and more about him choosing to be helpless rather than actually being sick and I don’t know how to reconcile those two antagonistic realities because this is not the grandfather I remember.

This is not the same grandfather that – when I was nine and too scared to go on the rollercoaster inside the Mall of America – told me to suck it up because he’d already bought the ticket and then physically lifted me into the seat and pulled the bar down with my poor cousin stuck beside me trying to comfort me even though by the time we got off I was crying so hard I couldn’t walk and my aunt had to carry me around like a two year old. This is not the same grandfather that calmly called the family when his wife died a mere three months after his mother died and then went back to work not twelve hours later. No funeral, no memorial, no tears, no talk of memories. This is not the same grandfather who ran all over Australia and Fiji with me for a month without once slowing down or taking a moment or a day to rest even though I was sixteen and he was seventy-four. This is not the same grandfather who called us in the middle of last summer out of the blue to say he would see us in a few hours because he’d been on his recliner bike for the last two weeks biking fifty-seventy miles a day while sleeping on people’s yards and eating cold beans out of his pack just for the hell of it, just to prove he could.

How did that man become this? How do I stop it? How do I get back what he was without denying the experience he’s in right now?

Do I not understand this situation because of my young age or because it can never been understood?

Today I took a half day from work even though it was the first day back from Spring Break and Misty wasn’t there so it meant Mrs. Stewart couldn’t go to her meeting all because Debbie and Dennis finally decided to get their asses over here and I had to pick them up at the airport.

All of this – by the way – after I drove all the way out to Highland yesterday and pushed down my temper around Mickey in order to get Poppie’s stuff as quickly as possible. And had to buy pillows and Kleenexes and adult diapers (all these things I never thought I’d learn) late at night at Wal-Mart even though a woman was kidnapped and raped at gunpoint from my local Wal-Mart a few days ago all so the double D’s didn’t have to be inconvenienced out of a single hour when I’ve spent three hundred and eighty four hours doing all of this shit by myself. But by all means let’s make it easier on them and let them swoop in when the battle’s already won to take all the credit.

But I don’t even truly care because I just want Poppie happy and healthy but I know that won’t happen here in SoCal away from his home and more family members.

I updated them on thing after thing over lunch at Olive Garden and yet almost immediately after arriving, Debbie is flipping out and Dennis is checking out already. I’ve been telling everyone he was this bad since the get-to. What the fuck did they think they were going to find?

In the sinful part of me, I hope they feel guilty for forcing me to do this alone.

In the faithful part of me, I hope that they’ll help him get better in a way that I couldn’t.

I hug him goodbye once they get him in the car and for the first time he says he loves me back. There are tears in his eyes when I look at the pictures Debbie took. I tell myself over and over that I’m not abandoning him, but I’m not sure I believe myself.

Then I drive straight to Jon’s for more HIMYM before swinging all of my doubts away.

 

April 12

Nobody talks to me anymore. They’ve suddenly decided that they want to do this alone or that I don’t deserve any updates on Poppie or that I can’t handle any information. Whatever it is, I give up. It never should’ve been my problem to begin with. I’m the only grandkid who’s actually been with him as a caretaker, much less regularly called or visited. Nobody wants to deal with things when they get hard, but I’m tired of them making me feel guilty when I’ve done more than my fair share.

Momma forced Dennis to talk to her, seeing as they’re siblings and all, since Debbie wants to appear like the martyr in this situation all of a sudden. Then Momma calls me; pretending she’s interested in small talk. Finally, she cries out the words, “Poppie’s decided to give up.”

Instant fury.

Instant sorrow.

Instant everything that can never be explained or expunged.

And I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. She hasn’t seen him. Yeah, she knows more than most due to her RN background and the frequency with which I called or she called, but it’s different. Yet again, the nightmares are in my head, not hers.

At once, I understand where he’s coming from while I simultaneously realize that I will never understand.

But then I think about what Dean and the nurses would always tell me, how Poppie always talked about me, how grateful he was for my help, how proud he was of me, how much he loved me, and yet Poppie never said it to my face minus the one “I love you” before he left. I think about how painful that is when I am a generation away and how much more painful that must be for her, his first daughter.

“He loves you, even when he doesn’t say it to you. He talks about you all the time, how grateful he is for your help, how proud he is of you, how much he loves you. I just wish he’d say it to you instead of me.” And I pretend I’m punching my tears back into my eyes as I listen to her try to control her own crying on the other side of the phone. I pretend that I am not the daughter, holding the pieces of her mother. I pretend that we are both still whole.

 

 

May 6

Poppie died this morning.

I hadn’t talked to him in a few days. He didn’t have anything to say when I did. I’d already done all I could do; not as much as I wanted to; more than I should’ve done.

Daddy called me when I woke up. Momma was too afraid to get on the phone and tell me.

It’s okay.

I wouldn’t want to get on the phone either.

I’ve just been going about my day like normal, a shell pretending to be a wall.I haven’t told anyone yet, not even Jon, who I've been dating for a few days even though it feels like a lifetime of us. Not because I don't want to, or because I don't trust him, it's just, there's nothing for anyone to do. 

After all, there will be no funeral, no memorial, no tears, no talk of memories.

Just like he wanted.

I am twenty-five years old. He was eighty-three.

I wonder how long it will take for me to forget the sound of his voice.

 

“We cross our bridges when we come to them, and burn them behind us with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

Tom Stoffard