General Update and Dead Grandmother
Sep. 11th, 2008 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyWell, my Grandmother isn't dead yet. They put her in home hospice care a couple of months ago. She's got bad kidneys, bad heart, put-upon lungs, a liver that isn't feeling like doing its job any longer -- or stuff like that. Maybe the liver is just fine. Or the heart. Basically the systems are failing. The most urgent issues have been her diabetes, her kidneys, and fluid retention. Meemaw lives at home with my mother. I get periodic email updates from Mom. The one from yesterday said that they think that she had a mini-stroke while she was in the hospital and that she was unresponsive and twitching. They were treating the twitching.
The email I got today said that she had woken up in the night and had a coherent conversation with the nurse. Now we get to the creepy family stuff. My mother was disappointed that Meemaw didn't die today, because it's her wedding anniversary, and it would have been so nice if Meemaw could have celebrated it with her predeceased husband. I realize that this is the necessary conclusion if you are an evangelical Christian. (Well, without the whole date fetish thing which Poppy, the grandfather in question, would have denied because he believed that people who died stayed under the big stone, don't ask me which one because this isn't my tradition, until judgment day and until then they sleep the sleep of the dead.) Let me say that it's just creepy for your mom to be rooting for her mother to die. It's a happy event, going to see your Lord and all that. On the other hand, I don't particularly want special measures used. She's old, she's losing coherence, she's in a lot of pain, and probably can't live at home much longer. Which is kind of like the same thing, only based on different premises. Like I'm too polite to say anything. Which is obviously not true, because look at this post. Nothing about my family fails to confuse me.
My grandmother was a funny, tough old bird. She was the kind of church lady who knew where all the bodies were buried and decided what the altar flowers would be. She was deeply prejudiced, except for all the people she met, who "weren't like, you know, them." She took soup over to the gay couple where one of them was dying of AIDS. They weren't, you know, like "them". They were good people, so nice with the neighbor kids, so kind to each other. She had friendly acquaintances who were black -- they weren't like, you know, "them." She was an RN, and Poppy was a house painter. They never had a lot of money. I didn't know her well. When I was growing up, the family would make a trip to Boston once a year. While there we would go over to visit Meemaw and Poppy. Just one evening meal a year. That was pretty much it. The meals were memorable, though. Meemaw was the worst cook in the world and Poppy loved her cooking. Of my grandparents, she was my favorite.
I don't feel a lot of emotion. I can't tell if it's blocked up or if I just don't have a huge investment in this interesting old woman (97) who I didn't spend a lot of time with growing up. I did make a trip to see her earlier this year when they first said that she was dying. It was an interesting trip. She was talkative a bit, and told me all sorts of things, like going on honeymoon with no money to Nova Scotia, where they didn't know anyone specific. If I understand the implications of the story, and I may not, she lost her virginity on the side of a roadway camping out. Later, they came to a church and there was no one that Poppy knew, but they got offered a place to stay anyway. I should explain that Nickersons are pretty thick on the ground in Nova Scotia. Much later, my grandparents lived on Clark's Harbor Island in Nova Scotia, and my grandmother had to be identified as Mrs. Edie-Bernard because there were other Edith Nickersons on the island, and other Mrs. Bernard Nickersons, but none of the Ediths were married to any of the Bernards.
So I've been checking my email all day to see if Mom has a further update, but nothing has shown up. I should probably call. A sympathy call. But I'm terrible at them, I don't know what to say.
In other news:
I'm back in class. I'm taking Biomedical Terminology and Intro to Sleep and Rest. Biomedical Terminology is kicking my ass already. It's kind of like a foreign language class, with a lot of vocabulary, and breaking words down to be better understood. Parsing prefixes and suffixes. The book acts as if the definition of a suffix is as difficult a concept what the Greek and Latin suffixes are and their plurals and singular forms are. And it has spelling tests. I despise spelling because I'm very bad at it. So the class is basically rote memorization, which is not my strong suit.
Intro to Sleep and Rest isn't kicking my butt yet, but it has that potential. The book we're using is surprisingly cheap (17.50), but it is not a text book. It is a popular non-fiction text, part memoir, part propaganda (get more sleep!), and partly sleep studies and research. Because it is not a textbook, it doesn't highlight or draw out the details the way a text book does. The quizzes are open book and untimed, so I've been able to find the answers in the book by looking. I've done the reading, too, but he asks questions about things that I would never think would be in the book. I'm worried about the exams. They're open book, too, (this is an internet course) but they have a 30 minute time limit on them. I've taken two quizzes so far. One of the questions did not appear to have an answer in the text. One of the questions appeared to have been taken from reading for next module (but I can use an index, so that was ok). I haven't taken the exam, yet.
I'm not working. There's very little temp work out there and even less that satisfies my school schedule -- which is one class on Mondays at 2:00. How hard can it be to find something? There's one possibility which is 20 hours a week, better than nothing, but it hasn't come through yet, either.
So that's the slice of life I'm living at the moment.
The email I got today said that she had woken up in the night and had a coherent conversation with the nurse. Now we get to the creepy family stuff. My mother was disappointed that Meemaw didn't die today, because it's her wedding anniversary, and it would have been so nice if Meemaw could have celebrated it with her predeceased husband. I realize that this is the necessary conclusion if you are an evangelical Christian. (Well, without the whole date fetish thing which Poppy, the grandfather in question, would have denied because he believed that people who died stayed under the big stone, don't ask me which one because this isn't my tradition, until judgment day and until then they sleep the sleep of the dead.) Let me say that it's just creepy for your mom to be rooting for her mother to die. It's a happy event, going to see your Lord and all that. On the other hand, I don't particularly want special measures used. She's old, she's losing coherence, she's in a lot of pain, and probably can't live at home much longer. Which is kind of like the same thing, only based on different premises. Like I'm too polite to say anything. Which is obviously not true, because look at this post. Nothing about my family fails to confuse me.
My grandmother was a funny, tough old bird. She was the kind of church lady who knew where all the bodies were buried and decided what the altar flowers would be. She was deeply prejudiced, except for all the people she met, who "weren't like, you know, them." She took soup over to the gay couple where one of them was dying of AIDS. They weren't, you know, like "them". They were good people, so nice with the neighbor kids, so kind to each other. She had friendly acquaintances who were black -- they weren't like, you know, "them." She was an RN, and Poppy was a house painter. They never had a lot of money. I didn't know her well. When I was growing up, the family would make a trip to Boston once a year. While there we would go over to visit Meemaw and Poppy. Just one evening meal a year. That was pretty much it. The meals were memorable, though. Meemaw was the worst cook in the world and Poppy loved her cooking. Of my grandparents, she was my favorite.
I don't feel a lot of emotion. I can't tell if it's blocked up or if I just don't have a huge investment in this interesting old woman (97) who I didn't spend a lot of time with growing up. I did make a trip to see her earlier this year when they first said that she was dying. It was an interesting trip. She was talkative a bit, and told me all sorts of things, like going on honeymoon with no money to Nova Scotia, where they didn't know anyone specific. If I understand the implications of the story, and I may not, she lost her virginity on the side of a roadway camping out. Later, they came to a church and there was no one that Poppy knew, but they got offered a place to stay anyway. I should explain that Nickersons are pretty thick on the ground in Nova Scotia. Much later, my grandparents lived on Clark's Harbor Island in Nova Scotia, and my grandmother had to be identified as Mrs. Edie-Bernard because there were other Edith Nickersons on the island, and other Mrs. Bernard Nickersons, but none of the Ediths were married to any of the Bernards.
So I've been checking my email all day to see if Mom has a further update, but nothing has shown up. I should probably call. A sympathy call. But I'm terrible at them, I don't know what to say.
In other news:
I'm back in class. I'm taking Biomedical Terminology and Intro to Sleep and Rest. Biomedical Terminology is kicking my ass already. It's kind of like a foreign language class, with a lot of vocabulary, and breaking words down to be better understood. Parsing prefixes and suffixes. The book acts as if the definition of a suffix is as difficult a concept what the Greek and Latin suffixes are and their plurals and singular forms are. And it has spelling tests. I despise spelling because I'm very bad at it. So the class is basically rote memorization, which is not my strong suit.
Intro to Sleep and Rest isn't kicking my butt yet, but it has that potential. The book we're using is surprisingly cheap (17.50), but it is not a text book. It is a popular non-fiction text, part memoir, part propaganda (get more sleep!), and partly sleep studies and research. Because it is not a textbook, it doesn't highlight or draw out the details the way a text book does. The quizzes are open book and untimed, so I've been able to find the answers in the book by looking. I've done the reading, too, but he asks questions about things that I would never think would be in the book. I'm worried about the exams. They're open book, too, (this is an internet course) but they have a 30 minute time limit on them. I've taken two quizzes so far. One of the questions did not appear to have an answer in the text. One of the questions appeared to have been taken from reading for next module (but I can use an index, so that was ok). I haven't taken the exam, yet.
I'm not working. There's very little temp work out there and even less that satisfies my school schedule -- which is one class on Mondays at 2:00. How hard can it be to find something? There's one possibility which is 20 hours a week, better than nothing, but it hasn't come through yet, either.
So that's the slice of life I'm living at the moment.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-13 12:10 am (UTC)Here among the Left Behind (for now), ISTM the important target for good wishes is yourself. I wish you well in dealing with the funny farm you're unaccountably related to.