Grandma, Can You Hear Me?

Old. 3 letters, big impact.  I use to think people my age were old and now I know better, 44 is not old.  My grandma is 92, that's old.  My mother is 68, slightly old.  (Oh, they would be pissed if they knew I posted their ages for all to see, lol).  

My grandma is fading away, she won't admit it, but we can see it.  Her day to day is not what it use to be, she just sits and waits.  In my heart of hearts I know what she is waiting for, but we don't discuss it.  She is still the woman full of pride and would never admit defeat.  She is so filled with pride that she refuses to get a hearing aid, so we have to talk scream loudly when we need to tell her something.  This ends up in an argument because she gets mad when we yell.  If we use our indoor voices, she says what, what, WHAT??? By that time, what we needed to say has lost all meaning, so we make something else up just to make her think we didn't lose interest in talking to her.  We laugh a lot, not at her, just at the situation.  She gets mad, thinking we are making fun of her.  We talk about the hearing aid again, she pounds her fists and yells telling us she can hear.  Ok, grandma, whatever you say... She says, "what?".

This past week paramedics visited grandma who was dangerously close to a diabetic coma, she thinks she is fine.  We know she isn't.  My mother thinks she is getting better everyday, we know she is not.  The rest of us are watching the two matriarchs of our family live in a world that doesn't exist.  The world where everyone else is wrong.  We fight, a lot.  My sister fights more than I do, we feel guilty for not helping.  They won't let us.  They win the fights, so we don't call and we don't visit.

Old.  Something we will become one day.  Don't stop your family from loving you, don't keep them away, and accept help when you can no longer help yourself.  Are you listening?  Can you hear me?

Grandma's 91st Birthday July 2011 (she wouldn't let us take pictures this year).