How Grandma Used Up One of her 9 Lives
In honor of Mother’s (and soon-be Father’s) Day, this week’s Irreverent Insight is about the absence of parents.
When I originally put together my irreverent resources, I became aware of the huge swath of content dedicated to mother loss. One very active person in that space is Alicia Forenet, the founder and organizer of Caregiving 2021, who created “a virtual event built for people grieving the loss of a caregiver” to support participants from Mother’s Day through Father’s Day. The inspiration came from her own experience, as detailed on her Dead Moms Club site. And so as not to give short shrift to the deceased Dads out there, this fatherly.com article underscores the impact parent loss has on children of any age.
Around here, my own life has lately been imitating art. If you heard the Grandma Cameo at the start of my April podcast, you know I teased my mom about exhibiting some symptoms (high blood pressure and low oxygen levels) that might make her drop dead before she could see her sister-in-law and eldest daughter for the first time in over a year.
Whelp, it appears Grandma’s wellbeing was already rolling down hill then, and we might have inadvertently helped it along by not recalibrating to her osteoporosis and increased frailty since she’d been room-bound during the Covid year. Three round trips from her rest home to our place in one week ended with a trip to the ER and a week-long hospital stay for a collapsed lung, six fractured ribs, and a confirmed fractured hip socket she had been favoring for weeks.
“Did you fall??” was the constant refrain from doctors and staff. Nope, she just had to be “managed” more than before, causing us to learn the hard way that a wheelchair and ramp will be required to get Grandma into our house going forward. (Note to self: I no longer have to tidy up the second floor when she visits). We also set her up with a new hospital-style bed she finds positively decadent for propping up to watch TV.
Lest anyone fears Grandma is on death’s door, most remarkable is that she didn’t experience any pain and was as mobile during her hospital stay as she’d been before. Her immediate family was likewise un-phased, since Mom had a similar bout with fractured ribs a few years back. Her sister-in-law confirmed that a high threshold for pain runs in that side of the family, though this apparently only applies to traumatic injuries vs. the muscle “cricks” Mom experienced during my entire childhood. (Those could only be cured by lying on the couch most days wearing a neck brace.)
Most noteworthy was that when I visited Mom immediately after her admission, she readily agreed with my assessment that dropping dead from all the socializing would have been worth it. All that said, I had forgotten how exhausting the adrenalin rush of emergency elder care can be. You feel like it’s the day after a huge wedding event, but you have nothing good to show for it!
Which reminds me of my all-time favorite accidentally irreverent story, as experienced by a dear friend who used to work as a wedding planner at a super swanky high-end event space.
The venue’s Banquet Manager was responsible for creating an end-of-night document for the sales staff and General Manager, i.e. the lucky ducks who didn’t have to stay to the bitter end of every wedding. One evening they departed generally aware of an organic elder-end-of-life “incident” during the reception that involved the bride’s grandmother. It was so discreetly managed by an ambulance crew called to the site, the revelry went uninterrupted.
The next day the Banquet Manager’s recap read as follows:
Bar bill $12k
Gifts went home with bride + groom
Two guests got drunk / cut off at the bar
Grandma didn’t make it
The buffer is broken
Our Grandma made it (so far). But like the buffer, she’s broken.
I can only hope her own end is as seamlessly integrated into the cycle of life!