Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Palliate

I passed a getting older signpost today. My grandmother is dying and I'm taking to acting like everything is normal: going to work, eating dinner, chit chatting. Adults do this. I'm an adult.

I tried my old standbys: eating too much. I ended up getting sugar free froyo and a Greek salad big enough to wear. I bought a chocolate bar just b/c it was for charity and it sits unopened in my car. My other go to in times of stress is spending money. But I only spent $38 on two dresses and I looked for and used coupons. Not precisely the carefree, careless experience that used to bring me such comfort. I am too old to self-destruct in a frenzy of food and wasted money; I'll likely end up just crumbling apart like gluten free bread. I'm going to try getting drunk but I don't get out of work until 9pm and then I have to drive home which takes about an hour. By the end of my drive, I'll just want to take off my bra and go to sleep so I fully expect that to fail as well.

Prudence dictates I should talk about how I'm feeling but what is there to say? My grandmother is dying after a long illness of fading away right in front of us. There's no way to poeticize that. In the last few weeks, my conversations with my mother and father and grandfather and sister have been a rotating roster of rarely used words, words that taken out of context sound beautiful: hospice, palliate, ease, sleep, alleviate, relieve, let go. Context is everything. When you put them all together, they only mean one thing.

The sun is out and it is warmer than it has been in months. I've assigned a personality to the weather today, the day when we stop giving her medication: oblivious and spiteful and inappropriate. If I were writing this story, the sky would be a heavy handed metaphor to all the insignificance of the characters. They'd feel a damp chill on their skin and a dreaded rumble of thunder in the sky. If I were writing this story, this wouldn't be a plot.

I don't really know what to do with myself. So I'm putting this on the internet.

2 comments:

  1. I'm sorry for what you're going through. We did this with Jeff's grandmother two years ago, and with grandpa now. It's really hard. If you need someone to talk to who's not in your immediate circle, or if you just want to hang out and have some silly fun, you know where to find me.

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