Sanctuary

In the Series of Unfortunate Events series of books the author is constantly throwing out big twelve dollar words and defining them through the action in the book.  In the first book he uses ”sanctuary” to describe the tent the orphans set up in the house of the bad guy.  I suppose my affinity for this word might have to do with the fact that in the movie Jude Law narrates, but this word, “santuary,” with Jude Law’s delicious accent, always comes back into my head in my really stressful moments.  It’s become a sort of mantra for me really.

It popped in there last night when I was thinking about my grandma.  My grandma and I are very close, always have been.  She took care of my sister and I on a regular basis when we were kids because my parents couldn’t always afford childcare.  Most of the comforts I seek in my life were inspired by my time with my grandma.  I love swimming, they always had a pool at their apartments and took us all the time.  I still crave potato buds, Stove Top stuffing, and Spaghetti-Os as comfort foods.  I think of her pots of flowers now when I work in my garden.  She would rub my back until I fell asleep as a kid.  In the stressful environment I grew up in, my grandma was a sanctuary.

This week I found out my grandma went into congestive heart failure.  This is the third time in her life that her heart has failed her.  She’s already had two triple by-pass surgeries.  Surviving physical set-backs is my grandma’s forte.  She had to leave Colorado when I was in high school because her heart could no longer handle the altitude.  Shortly after moving back to the east coast my grandpa passed away.  She moved into several assisted living complexes before eventually moving in with my uncle and his wife.  For years I had to hear about my grandma’s battles to survive via my mom.  As per her usual, every physical problem my grandma went through was a sure sign of her impending death for my mom.  Weeding out the truth through the forests of my mom’s anxieties and exaggerations was an exhausting process.  I, unfortunately, only got to see my grandma every other year or so.

My belief in fate was restored when, as Scott and I were preparing to move to Minneapolis, my grandma told me she, my uncle and his wife, would be moving to Wisconsin, my grandma’s childhood home.  They are about a three hour drive from us.  I visit her regularly now.

 I invited my whole family here this past Christmas largely for her.  My uncle and my mom haven’t been on speaking terms for years so, acting as a mediator, I convinced them to let my grandma spend the holidays with us.  Her 90th birthday was also December 29th.  The difficulty here is that since September my grandma has begun sufferring from demetia.  Her usually sharp memory is fading rather quickly.  I tried to prep my family, especially my mom, for this, but the holidays still ended up being difficult.  My family had a really difficut time dealing with my grandma’s new state of being.  While she still jokes and has moments of lucidity, she was cognizant of when her mind would go and as a result spent much of her time quiet or sleeping.  

Since the holidays she has slipped further, hanging up the phone when relatives call or falling asleep while they talk to her.  Faces and names of those closest to her have begun to slip away from her.  While everyone around me mourns this, I have attempted to embrace it, encouraging her to tell me her thoughts and dreams, supporting her trips across multiple places and times as she talks to me, coupling her loss of a sense of time with an open acceptance of her new reality, whether it’s this present reality or not.  She’s been my sanctuary, it’s my turn to be her’s.

When I called earlier this week to schedule a time to visit and my uncle’s wife told me she had been in the hospital I went to Wisconsin the next day to visit her.  Paula, my uncle’s wife, had talked for some time about the deteriorating condition of my grandma’s mental health.  On Paula’s last visit to my grandma in the rehabilitation center my grandma had fortgotten who she was.  She’s lived with Paula for almost a decade now.  While my grandma expressed a desire to come home, she wasn’t making an effort in the center.  She was sleeping most of the time, refusing to eat, and making no effort to do anything on her own.  Paula had tried everything to cheer her up, brought her their family dog to visit, and nothing seemed to be working.  So maybe I was the ticket.

It’s a strange thing to try to prepare yourself for someone not remembering you.  I sat in the car, a teddy bear and one of my grandma’s sweaters in my hand, trying to prepare myself for that possibility.  I don’t think I ever really believed it would happen, ( do you ever really believe it will happen?) but I definitely was afraid she might not know me.  We walked in, she was sleeping, so I knelt down by the side of her bed and woke her up.  She opened her eyes, looked at me, and this huge smile crossed her face.  “Shannon?”  Then the smile faded.  “Are you really here?”  She doubted my presence in her reality.  She looked confused.  “Yep.  I’m here.”  The smile came back and she bit her bottom lip like a kid who just got a piece of candy.  “I didn’t know if I’d see you again.”  It took every ounce of strength I had to not cry at that moment.

I gave her the teddy bear and my uncle and Paula went to get a wheelchair so we could take her for a walk.  I sat there holding her hand and watching her slip in and out of sleep.  The nurse came and asked us to step out of the room while she got her in the chair.  When she opened the door my grandma was sitting there still clutching the teddy bear in her lap.  We took her outside.  It was a gorgeous day.  She fell asleep a few times as we walked.  When we came back to the entrance near the hanging flowers I asked her to tell me all the names of the flowers.  She did and for a brief few moments allowed herself to fall back into her past and talk about planting flowers.  I showed her some pictures from Christmas.  She named Scott and I and could remember kissing my nephew, but it was clear the other people in the pictures, my aunt, her eldest, and my dad were more fuzzy.  She asked to go back inside.  I didn’t wait for the nurse, but looked at my grandma when we got to her room and said, “Okay, you’re going to get out of this chair on your own with my help.”  She stood up and walked to her bed, still clutching the teddy bear, and laid back down.  I whispered to her to be feisty with the nurses and tell them she could do everything on her own.  She smiled, the lights wents out again, and she fell back to sleep.

Now I’m the one who has to pass information about my grandma to the rest of my family.  I spoke with my mom and totally understood the frustration in her voice at not being able to be with my grandma and having to hear about it from her daughter.  I suddenly realized I’ll be the one to call them when she passes away.  I spend a long time on the phone with my mom as she quickly breezes through anger, frustration, sadness and a myriad of other emotions.  I talk to my sister who feels helpless and sad.  Twenty-four hours after my visit I finally have a space to take it in myself.  I get ready to write this blog and I’m interupted by life.  Now, forty-eight hours later I finally have my time.  Sanctuary.