transmothra: (cartoon prayer)
So yesterday, on my way home from work, i get a text message. It's a reminder from my Google Calendar. My grandpa's 87th birthday would have been next week.

I knew it was coming, but the reminder kind of slapped me across the face a little bit.

I've been thinking about him, and about my grandma, almost every single day. The desire to cry and shout and punch things is palpable, but i don't. I carry on. After all, i'm not the one who died. I am living. I have it pretty good. Still, it seems like something should be done on their behalf.

On a far, far lighter (and yet somehow nastier) note, i recently won and received this.

black hole

May. 2nd, 2007 09:56 am
transmothra: (fuzzed)
it's starting to really hit me. the initial shock and numbness is done with. today is somehow different. it was already really bad for me (it's been a deepening pit of hell for 2 1/2 years now, with the absolute worst part of it starting just two weeks ago). but now it seems even harsher somehow. i feel like i'm trying desperately to escape the immense gravity of a black hole.

it's sinking in.

hell, i'm sinking in.

someone i knew and loved, lived with and shared experiences and conversations with for years and years... dead. gone. forever.

no more talking. no more sharing. no more gestures or hugs or ironic smiles. ever.

i should point out that, as a devout agnostic who leans rather heavily towards atheism, i do not believe in an afterdeath of any kind. extraordinary claims, after all, require extraordinary evidence. so this is... difficult. to say the least.

life. gone. over. finished. done. kaput. a fire is snuffed forever.

this may be even worse than when my poor sweet grandmother died in 2001, if only because now, the other shoe has finally dropped. it's like the floor itself has been pulled out from under me, and all that exists is empty space underneath for me to fall through. the bottom, as it were, has dropped out!

i am starting to freak out.

Goodbye

Apr. 29th, 2007 01:13 pm
transmothra: (fuzzed)
Col. Ralph E. Jarratt, USAF, ret.
Col. Ralph Edward Jarratt, USAF, ret.
August 4, 1920 — April 29, 2007
Best Friend & Grandpa
transmothra: (fuzzed)
My grandfather's back home now. We're all, basically, on Death Watch. He's home; home to die. I hope he knows he's home, anyway.

He is now beyond being able to communicate. I remember this part all too well from when my dear sweet Grandma was at death's door. It's the most frustrating thing. You sense that they want something but have no way to determine what and give it to them.

Not only that, but it seems like my grandfather is thinking on an infant level. Maybe not; in a way, though, that would be preferable. I hate the thought of him knowing full well the extent of the damage to his verbal and motor skills. But the oxygen deprivation from last Thursday's terrible ordeal virtually guarantees that he's brain damaged.

It's horrifying, and heart-shattering, and there's not a god damned thing that anybody can do.

The poor guy has been through so much. To think that he's laying there with his ribs all broken, just fading out, piece by piece... I'm completely heartbroken.

Sometimes, when he's awake, he'll just stare and stare at you. No words. No words. I don't know what he's thinking. I don't know if he knows who I am. My bud, my lifelong best friend, my teacher and mentor... is he in there somewhere?

So I'm trying to get on FMLA so I don't lose my job. After giving them 50 hours of every week of my time, I have earned a whopping $0.30 raise, which I do need, since Dayton-area employers seem to think it's completely fair to pay a person with over 10 years of call center experience $9 an hour. Unfortunately, I have to prove that he was my legal guardian.

Much easier said than done.

So I've been digging through countless drawers and boxes of memories. Ever have a moment of terrible happiness? That's seeing a picture of my grandparents, young and sweet and smiling, knowing that one is gone forever, and the other is leaving soon.

My grandparents raised me, so this has been exactly like losing parents to me.

But I cannot prove it.

I think that I am going to lose my job very soon.

What could be worse than that?

I know that I am going to lose my grandpa very soon.
transmothra: (aaiiighhh!!)
Today was another mostly shitty day.

My grandfather was due to be taken to Hospice at around 1pm. Getting up around noon, I didn't want to show up at the hospital just to turn around, pay $2 parking (let's remember that I really have no income right now), and leave again. So I waited around at home for the call to action.

Finally, at 6:30pm, he was moved. I could have been at the hospital the whole time with my family. So that was irritating, and now I feel guilty for something I didn't even cause.

At hospice, he was settled in and Holly and my uncle Kent and I went out to get Subway. We came back and finished our food. I went out to smoke and came back to find Holly sitting in the dining area alone. We went to my grandfather's room and this is what we found:

The door was shut. After knocking lightly, I opened the door and beheld four Hospice staff and my dear uncle standing around in some vague state of chaos. Here's what was going down:

They needed to change the dressing on his wounds (he's got pressure sores - essentially bedsores, having been in bed for pretty much the last 2 1/2 years), and had just given him morphine so they could roll him over to change them without excessive pain. Remember that he's got multiple cracked ribs from chest compressions, when the doctors in the ICU brought him back to life a few days ago.

So the bones in his chest are probably killing him when they do this. They've got to be. I heard him loudly moaning. "Oahh! Ooh! Aaahh! Oooah! Ohh!"

So what's the problem, exactly?

My father and, mostly, my uncle want him to not have morphine. My uncle made no friends in that room tonight. He was aggressive. I do not blame him for that, since many health care workers have failed us terribly in the past. Still...

I'm not at all certain what alternative they want, exactly, because my uncle tonight did not want to elaborate with me on the other side of that coin. He only wanted to emphatically and adamantly defend his position that Grandpa NOT be given morphine.

At the end, after trying to voice my understanding of things, he simply walked off. I told him: "I'm not trying to fight with you or anything, I only want to understand all of this." This he would not hear.

He said that Grandpa made more noise when they were moistening his nose. I remember: "Dad, dad!" It was not as loud. It was not a horrifying sound. Not like when he was being turned over. "Ohh! Aaaah! Ooooh! Aaa-ooh! Ohh!"

He would not hear anything that I had said. It was Know-It-All vs. Know-Nothing. Many times, my voice goes unheard, or, worse, talked over. I am not to be taken seriously in any opinion that I give. This fact has been presented to me in practice many, many times in the past, and in the present. I'm just this perpetual sixteen-year old kid.

I used to wonder why I felt so inconsequential, so ineffectual. I have been treated like this all my life. One thing leads to another, and soon enough everybody else does it, too.

(I am a densely angry thirty-five year old man. I understand more about people, and about the way the universe works, than anybody else I know, including the blow-hards who only claim to know. I understand the great "mysteries" of life. (There is no mystery, only cause and effect. There are only events, in varying orders, at various frequencies. People behave according to their chemicals, steered by their recorded experiences.) I can do any task presented before me, and have proven this many times over. I am tougher than many. The things that I have seen and experienced, other people only emptily brag about. I am far more powerful than I let on - I am only weak because I am not usually brave enough to try.)

So I left, too. I walked right out of that place, and I drove home. I wanted to smash something. Had Holly not been in the car with me, I would have driven fast and crazy and mad. When I got home, I changed into shorts and a tank top and ran as hard as I could. I found an abandoned shopping cart and threw it to the ground: "chank!" I punched a street sign: "smak!" I wanted to beat the holy living hell out of something - to break something, anything into tiny little pieces. I broke nothing, and maybe that means something, or not.

The more I think about it - and why not think about it? What I think doesn't matter! - the more I think this: "So what if he's stoned out of his poor, already-crippled mind for a couple of hours, every other day or so?"

Think about having your ribs broken. Then think about having someone forcibly roll you onto your side. Think about the raw, cracked bone rubbing up against bone, under your meat. Surely bone, muscle, and sinew must all scream with pain!

One good thing: possibly the only coherent sentence my grandfather spoke today was when he looked at me and said, "I love you." That was maybe the sweetest moment of my entire life.

Tides

Apr. 23rd, 2007 06:01 am
transmothra: (fuzzed)

Ralph Jarratt and his pal Matty

Two and a half years ago, my grandfather suddenly took ill. I will never forget the late-night phone call. This was a couple years after his triple bypass. Up to that day, he was a completely normal person, as healthy as you’d imagine an 84 year old ox of a man to be. He’d forget words now and then, but was otherwise just like you or me.

He’d had leukemia for over thirty years, mind you.

After he took ill, he was never the same. Greene Memorial Hospital did everything wrong. Every little thing. They tried to put him in their nursing home (his doctor Taylor has a stake in that facility, FYI) over and over, where he only continued to do worse. They did not allow him the chance to get any better. And he didn’t!

In that system, he has lost his ability to walk and to swallow. Almost 100% of the life on this planet survives largely because of those two underrated skills. But what do I know?

His general health has declined steadily ever since. He became confused. So much that I am not 100% positive that he knows exactly who I am anymore or how we are related. He doesn’t seem to know his general layout in the universe anymore.

Which brings us to now.

Last Sunday night, he was having some trouble with breathing and a very rapid heart beat. We called a squad to take him to the hospital (not Greene Memorial). He had some pneumonia. He stayed in ICU for a few days.

Thursday: I was sitting with him, trying to make some kind of conversation (he’s a man of extraordinarily few words these days, alas), when he said “help me.” I got a nurse and she said that he was “guppy breathing” (exactly, more or less, what you would imagine a guppy breathing like) and he had some crap in his throat they found difficult to suction out.

His blood oxygen level was dipping below normal. When it fell below 85%, a doctor advised that they would have to put him on a ventilator, which itself could be fatal, due to his weakened condition and his low platelet count.

They ushered me out of the room to put the tube down his throat. There was an undeniable sense of emergency to the situation. I called my dad and paced around in the hallway outside of the ICU. About a half hour later, the doctor came out and informed me that they got the tube in him, but that his heart had stopped.

He had died. Died.

CPR was performed, which, par for the course, broke some of his ribs from the compression. He came back and was breathing with the ventilator.

When we went in afterward, his blood oxygen was well below 90%. He was not looking too good. In fact, he looked real bad. His left shoulder, I noticed, was gray. He made no movements or sound.

We all gathered around, my dad and his wife and I, plus nurses and doctors and a clergy woman. We had a terrible time. I cried and grieved and told him how much I loved him and how good he had been, etc. His blood oxygen bottomed out at around 45%. There would most likely be brain damage if he managed to survive at all, which was not likely at all.

He slowly became more responsive, and was eventually looking up and down with his eyes, and moving his arms. He’d take his arms and push them out above him, as if punching the air in slow motion.

I think now that he was saying: “God damn it! Stop talking to me like I was dying! I’m not dying, you bunch of assholes!” I think he was scared and more than a little pissed off.

He recovered from death. Unfortunately, little, if anything, can be done at this point, should his poor sweet old heart give up again.

This Sunday, a few days later, they took him to a room near the ICU, but out of it. His blood oxygen has been ~100% ever since a couple hours after he died. Later today (Monday), we will be taking him to Hospice for a week. After that, assuming he is still with us, he will go back to his home, where he has lived, off and on, for 35 years. He does not know whose house it is, but he will be home, with his poor broken ribs (which he has yet to complain about), where he can die, hopefully peacefully, and in relative comfort among his family.

I am 100% not ready for this. I love this man so much that it’s just killing me. He and my grandmother raised me. The flood of memories that assault me constantly is overwhelming. I drown in them hourly, revive, and drown again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

My poor father, who has been taking care of him for the last two years, is beaten and it’s showing. I worry for him. He has beaten a lot of odds himself, and is a fine, good man. In sheer kindness, my father is second only to his dad - who is lying in a bed, unsure of his world, and dying.

The floor is dropping out of this family. There are no more kings or queens in our domain; only two princes and a minor count. We are haphazard and spent, our empire having fallen to dust.

transmothra: (aaiiighhh!!)
spent something like the last 20 hours in the ICU. grandfather: "help me" - phlegm, breathing rattley; some suction helped little. not oxygenating enough (level should be ~100; under 90 not good, under 85 bad - he was dropping to low 80s). concern raised: due to leukemia problems=platelet count low, trache tube could be fatal if laceration occurs. had to wait outside for several extraordinarily tense minutes. dad on his way. Doctor comes out, says they got the tube in his throat, but his heart stopped. he died. they revived him with CPR, breaking ribs (par). oxygen level bottomed out at 45.

my god how i cried and how i loved.

that fighter, that ox, that superhumanly strong man - his vitals are god damn near normal and have been for several hours. that is exactly like him, too. i hold no great hope, though.

need sleep now will return to hospital later.

you=regret nothing starting now!
transmothra: (wtf ru im re: Willis?)

Today i went over to see my grandfather. He seems confused, as usual, and asking him a question requires waiting around for at least a minute before he figures out how to say the answer, if he remembers what the question was at that time. So that's nice and depressing.

But a really weird thing happened. We were sitting there, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, when suddenly a little toy Douglas C-47 (a metal/plastic replica of the troop carrier my grandfather was in through all four Market Garden missions during WWII; about 3 inches long, something like this one) that was sitting on top of the television set came flying off and crashed onto the carpet about 5 feet away, right at my feet.

...As in, "WTF"!

Itested it to see how far it would bounce if it had just fallen off on its own due to the vibrations of the television. It landed directly in front of the television, bouncing a few inches at the most. That's not five feet, i thought to myself.

My dad and Charlie (sp?), the caretaker for the night, said that this had happened before. She said that she herself hadn't seen it happen, but was extraordinarily nonplussed. She told me that Jennifer, another caretaker, was sitting on the floor in front of the sofa (just about where i was when it happened tonight), when the exact same thing happened.

...As in, "WTF"!?

And then i remembered that my friend Tony once stayed over, not terribly long after my grandmother had died, and had stayed in her room. He reported the next day that he had seen someone in the room with him. I told him at the time that, in the darkness, and in his drunken state, it had probably only been his own reflection in a mirror. He vehemently denied any possibility of that. My friend Tony, who's pretty skeptical about anything even remotely implausible...

So... now what? I'm a skeptic, goddammit! I do not believe in ghosts! How am i supposed to reconcile this event with reason? I mean, there simply MUST be a logical explanation for this, other than that my grandmother is haunting their house.

transmothra: (aaiiighhh!!)
my dad left me a flipped out voicemail today. he was freaking out, probably cracking under pressure. asking me if i was ever going to go see my grandpa again. i admit, i only go over about once every other week these days.

my grandfather is dying, and my family won't hire someone to help out. they want me to drop my life (again; last time was with my grandmother, who i helped voluntarily) and move in and get paid to wipe ass, and do a good bit of wussy crying and probably get back on the bottle and so on.

it was hard taking care of my grandmother. i drank. and when she finally died, i lost my whole life for a little while. i mean my mental and emotional health was fucked up seventeen ways to sunday.

my family doesn't think he's dying, or they think he's not dying all that much. or something. i don't know. i can barely admit it myself. i don't want to believe it, because it all happened so suddenly, back in November of 2004.

so he's wigging out, and taking it out on me via my voicemail, and i just don't know what the fuck to do. i mean, i don't want to just drop my life all over again. i don't want to go through that. i lost a lot of time, and found it a lot harder to find decent work after being unemployed for so long.

but he needs a break. we can NOT shuffle him off to some goddamn lousy nursing home. but they NEED to learn to trust home health care workers again.
transmothra: (Fuck Authority)
my grandpa is always asleep when i call over there. i haven't even been over in a couple of weeks now. it's just too goddamned depressing; i can't bear it at all.

oddly, i'm not drinking it away. just sleeping.

cha-ch-ch-ch-changesFUCK OFF.
transmothra: (fuzzed)
went to see family. while Kent was here we had a candid discussion of my grandfather's mental condition. also, my dad found out that his Reglan may be responsible for his statue-like demeanor and general confusion. also, he shouldn't have been on it for more than 12 weeks. he's been on the shit for something more like a year.

fuck the health care industry.

also, his physical therapy is stopping, because the agency has deemed it useless. they've checked his ass out, and Medicare is, in all likelihood, patting them on the back for doing such a fine job.

fuck the health care industry.

today, now that Grandpa is off of that evil Reglan shit, he's been going through some sort of delusional, paranoid withdrawal. he's trying to escape (chair, bed); my dad found him on the floor after he went outside for a few minutes. he had a phone in his hands and was trying to call the police because he was being held captive. he claimed while i was there that my dad and his "co-instigator" (wife Gerry) had taken him out to a shack last night and locked him in (though he admitted that the door was open) for four, no twelve, hours. he called my dad a bastard numerous times, and said such awful things about the poor sacrificing brokenback man that it was just heartbreaking (esp. after all my dad's done to help him and to get himself all cleaned up and sober and responsible). half the time the only thing that kept me from either cracking up or crying was the ambiguous, contradictory nature of this dual response. i did a little bit of both.

fuck the whole god DAMN health care industry.

speaking of crying, if you've had a rough time of it lately, here's what NOT to do: don't listen to the late, great Jeff Buckley's angelic cover of Leonard Cohen's masterful "Hallelujah" - it always brings me completely down in tears, especially this part:
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
but love is not a victory march
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah....
transmothra: (fuzzed)
i forgot to mention this yesterday. it broke my heart.

apparently, my grandfather had been asking about where his dad was, who died over twenty years ago.

and playing peek-a-boo.

my dad and uncle definitely inherited Grandpa's gift of denial.
transmothra: (fuzzed)
i am finished with that former place where i lived the last two years of my life. i did not say goodbye to anybody or to the ghost of the apartment, and i did not look back when i drove away. my time there is now officially over.

and thus endeth a long, tortured chapter of my life. mostly bittersweet and sometimes fairly tormented were my life and times there.

the place is empty, and no one lives there anymore. the shell of a hell of a place and time is now good enough to be dead in my heart.

it's nearly 3pm now, and i must go to work at 8 tonight. i still work with my former lover, but i do not see her there. we do not talk at all any more. we are less than friends; less than enemies.

well... i AM sad about things. but not like you might think.

(tonight, Holly: if i get drunk and cry... it will not be because i miss her, but because she took two years from my life, and she wasted them.)

speaking of chapters: at one time, i was planning on writing a book about what ultimately was a glorified, protracted, bittersweet love affair with Lisa. perhaps some day i still will. but it will only be a few chapters, and it will be in the beginning of that book. that book is not about her any longer.

(and i never had any designs on Holly while i was with Lisa. i felt weak a few times, and sometimes i really thought how easy it would have been to just give up on Lisa and run to Holly. i did openly like Holly, and declared as much to both. but i would have been good. ultimately, i would have been a good man. i would have Done the Right Thing, i think. i now am ironically thankful that Lisa threw me away, because now i can be who i really wanted to be, and be with who i know in my heart i should have been with. things now just make so much more sense this way.)

so fare well Lovington! fare well Lisa!

i saw my grandfather today. maybe it's just bad timing, but the last two times i've seen him, i've not been entirely certain that he was fully aware that i was there, or who i was. he was just laying there, in his chair, eyes not quite shut; swimming in his mind, asleep like some lame angel. my heart sinks; i nearly cracked right there. i don't want to see this. maybe that's the real reason why i've been avoiding my family, avoiding that sacred House of my now long-abandoned childhood.


yes, i think i'll cry tonight, but for all of the best reasons.
transmothra: (eyes on you)
saw my grandpa today.

it was hard not to cry in front of him. he just looks so much older than i want him to be. he looks like a weak, frail 85 year old. he is a weak, frail 85 year old.

i'm not grounded any more.

i told him i loved him and that he was my best friend, and my favorite person. most of the time he just laid there with his eyes shut or shutting. he was tired, and his poor old sweet eyes teared up and he told me he loved me with this pained, furrowed brow like 'o god i love you so much'.

it was so hard not to cry in front of him. i miss the young, healthy grandpa who was always tinkering with things, puttering around in the yard or on a ladder or with his power tools.

and i kept thinking, jesus christ, i just went through this in 2001 with my poor sweet old grandma. now i have to sit here and helplessly watch him helplessly die too, just like then.

a whole galaxy of pain, welling up inside of me. why are the young punished with the death and dyingness of the old? it's such an old game, an old tragedy; marked from the very dawn of time and life with saline and regret.
transmothra: (eyes on you)
the other day, when i was at the hospital, i picked up the birthday card from my grandfather and stashed it and left without mentioning it.

it's just that i don't want to upset him. he forgets things now, and my birthday was not something i wanted him to worry his sweet heart about.

i did look at it, though. i've been looking at it, actually.

the only handwriting in it is this:
Ralp your grandfather

...scrawled in barely-legible chicken-scratch.

he never, ever signs cards for me like that. it's always either "RJ" or, more often, "G-pa".

this means he didn't know what he was signing, or for whom. then he [somewhat suddenly] corrected (hence the unfinished "Ralph"), and wrote something different. probably on a cue from my dad, who obviously picked up the card.

i wish, for so many reasons, that my stupid birthday would have just gone away perfectly.

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