Terrible, terrible
The Delta flight attendant smiled widely as I crossed the threshold into the plane. It’s always a marvel to witness this vehicle up close, a lesson in absolute trust once aboard the metal beast that somehow takes flight. I’m tired after a long day spent in front of the zoom screen in a board meeting and on scheduled breaks frantically gathering my things for an unexpected trip toward family. “Mom’s ox is down to 73%” Uncle texted.
There was a time when I didn’t really have to think about blood oxygen levels. But ever since the beginning of our ongoing pandemic, when I dutifully assembled our COVID ready pack complete with a fingertip oxyometer, I guess I’ve been vaguely aware of what makes for a good reading on those levels. 74% was not it.
As I’d come to learn, you really shouldn’t let your blood oxygen levels get too low. That’s what kept happening to my Grandma Creel, my dad’s mom who we lovingly refer to as GC, the first time she ended up at the hospital. Well, maybe not the first, but around the time she started this run in and out of the intensive care unit, the hospital, physical therapy rehab, the hospital, the second assisted living facility with a few months stint back at the Cromwell Drive house. This back and forth happened over the course of the last two and a half years. Basically, beginning just months after our family lost my dad’s dad.
Honestly, it feels like not much time has really passed since then. And I remember finding myself in a similar situation crafting a newsletter amidst a cresting wave of grief. My grief today is in the shape of exhaustion. I am trying to trace the last two weeks so I can make sense as to why and how I missed my newsletter internal deadline. The frantic one-way flight to Kansas was on the 15th. Ahhh, I see. That newsletter was going to be pushed to the weekend anyways because I was in a two-day board meeting. Right. And then GC transitioned beyond this corporeal life on the 16th. I booked another one-way flight home on the 19th, finalized funeral plans on the 20th, drove back to Kansas on Sunday the 25th. Somehow, I co-taught a four-hour course on Saturday the 24th. Two days of grieving with family, the opportunity to carry her body from hearse to gravesite, remarks, prayers, tears and then a 12-hour drive home yesterday.
Anyone would be tired by that schedule I suppose, I’d have grace for anyone else suffering through a major event like that. And still, for me, I wonder if I’ve been effectively managing my time. Am I doing what I needed to be doing given the stark reminder that our time in this body, in this era is finite? I painted a couple of days in the interim between trips to Kansas. Feeling a sense of urgency to make a mark. To make my mark. I can't seem to make my spirit align with my body if that makes sense, I feel numb and disconnected.
Please don’t take away that I’m regretting how I spent my time. That is not it at all. I had the privilege of holding vigil for my grandmother as she began her transition. As other, better writers before me have put it, dying is a process, with death as one marker of the event. As I listened to some of my grandmothers last breaths, I felt so many emotions - one I’d wish to share for now is gratitude for the fact that at the latitude I occupied I could sit with my ailing grandmother as she navigated that journey. Unlike so many who for whatever reason cannot. My heart broke for me, but even more so for say a Palestinian grandchild not having such same luck. Either through the gift of being with their Grandmother for some forty years, or though the ability to sit beside her as she was kept comfortable with medicine, a hospice care team, family able to reach her by plane in friendly skies and car on safe roads.
In spite of my privileges, I remain troubled by our grieving rituals. Up to now they remain insufficient. I want to yell at strangers, “my grandma’s dead!” I know that those who have lost their grandmas will likely empathize. But when I was on that flight, pretending like it was just any other Thursday I also thought, what would this world be like if we operated as if somebody's grandmother was dying. Because someone’s grandma is always dying. And if this is reality, can we just be a little softer with one another? Can we be a little more gentle? Can we lead with kindness and compassion, instead of crushing urgency and the need to keep up the pace of the rat race without pause at all times?
Some of you know about my fears of the wind. And the journey I’ve been on to find peace and ease in the strength of air currents rustling the side of structures or through leafy trees. At Grandma’s graveside service on Tuesday we were praying the Our Father for her and the wind whipped the tent and our hair, knocked over full vases, uprooted plastic flower memorials from their concrete and granite containers, blew leaves across the dry grass, came at us with such force that it astounded us all. We exclaimed at its force. It felt like an embrace; for the first time in my forty-plus years I felt some comfort in the wind. It mirrored the roil inside me that makes me want to just scream, “is this it?” “Can’t you see, I’ve lost my grandma?”
I don’t want it like this. I want it like it was. I want more time. I don’t want to feel a hint of what is still to come as mi abuelita, at 93, needs round the clock care. I don’t want this to feel like a practice run, as my remaining grandparent ages, as do my tías, my tíos, my parents, my auntie, my uncle. I don’t want a remaking of our family unit each time. My heart hurts for those who have lost anyone who they loved. Which, if we’re lucky enough to age becomes each and every one of us.
I feel selfish in my desires.
Childlike.
Petulant.
I just want like one minute for the entire world to stop and honor that Marilyn Creel was here and now she's somewhere else.
Visiting my remaining grandparent on Wednesday I sit on the floor close to her on the couch. “¿Abuela, recuerdas mi otra abuela, Marilyn? La mamá de mi papá?”
“Sí,” she replies.
“Ella se murió” I tell her.
“Oh, that’s terrible” she says back.
“Terrible, terrible…” as she pats my hand resting on her knee, “terrible.”
The other sections of the Art of KCF Newsletter are on brief hiatus in honor of my grief - thank you for your understanding,
- Kandace
