Unexpected Paths

I grabbed a box of pictures to go through last night thinking it was mine. Turns out it was my grandma's box of pictures. Pictures of family from 25 years ago. Man, have we all changed! Pictures of family members I've never met (or met when I was 4) but I've heard their names.

I've become the keeper of the photos for the family. I took grandma's photo books and boxes when she passed several years ago and my cousin sent me a bunch of her mother's photos when she went through her things. It was a surprise to see pictures of all of us so young. I saw a photo of my mother at the same age my sister is now and I saw the same look on her face that I see on my sister from time to time. My grandmother, mother, sister and niece all have the same face. If you saw photos of each of them at, say, age 5, they would all look like photos of the same person.

I learned a lot from grandma. Besides my mom, she was the person who was around the most while I was growing up. She took us on vacations to Catalina and Tahoe. She made vegetable beef soup on cold days. That's probably the thing I miss most about her - her soup on cold, wet days.

The most surprising thing I learned from her (that I wasn't expecting) was how old people die. She was in the process of dying two years before she actually passed and if we had known what was happening we would have made the transition easier for her. She was in a nursing home and they kept giving her blood transfusions and all kinds of drugs just to keep her alive. She had no energy to get up and about. All she could do was lie in bed. She was hallucinating because of the drugs. When we'd come to visit she'd ask how we found her and tell us that they had taken her somewhere in the night and she didn't know where she was and wanted to go home. She was very unhappy.

It took us a while to understand that she was going through the natural process of dying. We talked to her Dr. who told us that the drugs he had her on were only prolonging her life so we told him to stop giving her all the drugs except pain medication if she wanted it. The last two weeks of her life she was quite lucid and remembered seeing her great great grandchild who was newly born. My sister and I were with her when she finally passed.

I hope that particular lesson I learned from her will help me be more understanding, compassionate and helpful to my other relatives as they reach the natural end of their lives.