What's the worst that could happen?

This is really long, a lot longer than I intended, but I want to talk about my trip and to do that I need to lay out some back story.

My grandparents, my father’s parents, were married for sixty-four years. A sixty-four year love affair. Both of them from worst-case scenario Depression-era broken homes: orphaned, abused, hungry, fostered. They smothered each other and all of us with a love so complete and without compromise that even from inside it we couldn’t help but recognize its rarity. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never even read anything like it. It is profound.

My grandfather died of lung cancer in December of 2006. It hit him quickly, mercifully, but hit the rest of us like quicksand. My grandmother was determined to stay in the house they’d lived in together for fifty years, and she managed better than we all expected. At the beginning of this year a variety of maladies began fighting for top billing, and several weeks ago she was diagnosed with severe chronic anemia, congestive heart failure, and a cancer assumed to be lymphoma. She’s eighty-six years old. She adamantly refuses further injections, biopsies, iron infusions, and Procrit. Her doctor took her off her diabetic diet and sent her home, telling her to eat anything she wants and to enjoy herself.

My father’s only sister lives in Isle of Palms, South Carolina. Since the beginning of this year, she and my dad both have spent weeks in Columbus with their mother, either in the hospital or at the house lining up the requisite in-home care. A month ago, everyone decided that it was time for my grandmother (“MeeMaw” because we’re from the South and that’s what happens) to move into an assisted living facility in Charleston to be closer to my aunt. My mother made plans to fly out and help with the move, but as the trip got closer we all realized she needed to stay in town and focus on her own recovery. Instead I would pinch hit.

The original plan: My aunt and I both fly to Atlanta, drive to Columbus, movers pack the house, MeeMaw rides in the back of her own Lincoln Mercury and we all happily drive to Charleston and into the assisted living facility, an extremely civilized and well-respected place called Sweetgrass.

Several days before I was to leave, however, MeeMaw’s condition began deteriorating faster than anyone could have predicted. My aunt, who had been home in South Carolina a total of forty hours, had to turn around and go right back to Columbus after another unexpected hospital stay. We wouldn’t be meeting in Atlanta because she was already there, right, and there was no way MeeMaw was up for an eight-hour car ride sitting upright in the backseat of a car, either, so the movers were canceled and we went into a holding pattern.

About my aunt: Three years older than my dad, she’s sixty-three. She’s very fashionable, very beautiful, and very rich. She’s also loving and bossy and spiritual and dingy. My dad called her “Sissy” when he was young and “Sis” from then on, and as kids she was “Aunt Sissy” to us and now I just call her “Sis”. Which is weird, probably, but no weirder than a thirty-two year-old woman saying “Aunt Sissy” out loud so I’m calling it a push. Fun family fact: my brother called me “Sissy” when he was a baby and I’m “Aunt Sissy” to his boy, Logan, now. It’s a sissy legacy, I suspect.

So back in Columbus. MeeMaw’s in a hospital bed on oxygen in the living room. It takes two people to help her up to use the potty chair next to the bed. On Sunday I start packing to fly out and what, spend a week doing crossword puzzles, I guess, and generally being ineffective. Just like at home, only sadder and with more sweet tea.

Ultimately Sis realizes that the end goal hasn’t changed—MeeMaw still needs to get from Point A to Point B, and if I’m coming into town, it really needs to happen then, while she has the extra help. She agonizes over it for days. “I think Daddy would want you to go,” she tells her mother.

“Oh, I know he wants me to,” MeeMaw answers. Clear eyed. Ready.

So we’re on.

When Sis picked me up at the shuttle station on Monday she gave me the full update. We were going to fill the Mercury with as many personal effects as possible, clothing, pictures, keepsakes, and I would drive it to South Carolina. The problem of getting MeeMaw there was much more complicated. Ambulance companies had been called, but the cheapest she’d found was still more than five thousand dollars. And that was like “George’s Ambulance”. I don’t even think it was an actual ambulance, I think it was a pickup truck with a camper shell and a CB radio.

“So Terry,” she said, referring to her husband, “is going to drive down on Wednesday in the Suburban with a tempurpedic mattress in the back. The hospice nurse can do a catheter that day, and then we can get them to help load her into the Suburban Thursday morning.”

I looked at Sis. She looked like Lauren Hutton on Lauren Hutton’s best day ever. I, in comparison, looked like I had wrapped myself head to toe in bacon and then stood in the sun for an hour.

“They’re delivering a portable oxygen tank,” she went on, “and we’ll pack coolers and all her medicine and everything. We can give her some Imodium the night before, too. I think it’ll be fine. It has to be fine. What do you think?”

Huh. What do I think about loading my invalid grandmother—the source of all that is loving and true in this family—into the back of a Chevy Suburban with an oxygen tank and a catheter to drive eight hours through deserted northern Georgia? I think it’s potentially the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life, ever.

“I think it’s a great idea,” I said.

“Okay,” she breathed, relieved. “Okay. I’m going to stop at Publix real quick, we need plain yogurt and chardonnay.”

 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, June 24, 2008