The Deaths

Catchy title huh?

Are you still reading?

It's not where everything started, not even close, but it's when I started to notice things weren't quite right with me.

I was lucky enough to get to my 30's with all four grandparents.  No one in my family started having children particularly early.  We just tend to live long. 

Poppop wasn't the type of man you argued with.  He had been in the Army.  He had been in the Navy.  He was a carpenter, a railroad worker, a husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather.  And he knew what he wanted.  He taught me to measure twice, cut once.   Whenever I walk down a flight of stairs I hear his booming voice 'Hold the handrail Les!', whenever I make a left hand turn in my car I hear him again. 'Look left then right then left again!'  He inspected the very first house I wanted to buy and helped me with repairs once I owned it.  He was my mother's father.

Mommom was a quiet  little woman.  She was 4'10" standing up stick straight and weighed in around 90 pounds soaking wet.  She was a homemaker, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and in her later years worked at my father's drug store as a cashier.  She taught me love and was my confidante.  She kept the crappy little clay projects we all made as children on display in her home.  Santa always stopped at Mommom and Poppop's house.  She was my mother's mother.

Neither of them were real healthy in their late 70's and their 80's took them further downhill.  Heart attack and triple bypass for her.  Gout, recurring shingles and various other ailments for him.

2002 was a disastrous year.

Poppop was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer. He took all the chemo, but once the treatment was changed to radiation, he told his doctor's to suck it. He wasn't getting better, he knew it, and he wasn't going to let them burn him. He just wasn't. And there was no arguing with him.  The grandchildren accepted it before his children.  You just don't argue with Poppop. 

Mommom spent all of her time taking care of him.  But she was slipping, too.  You could see it. 

Come September, Mommom had found out that she needed heart valve replacement surgery.  Poppop went on hospice care.  I called my parents back from their vacation.  I spent nearly every night at their house taking care of them and my days at work.  It was a paradigm shift like none I had ever encountered.  I was picking him up off the floor in the middle of the night when he fell trying to get to the bathroom.  Soon he was in a hospital bed in the dining room and I was emptying chamber pots.  I, and the rest of my family, had become the caretakers of those people who had always looked after us. 

Mommom would not get her surgery.  She was terrified that she would be in the hospital and Poppop would need her and she wouldn't be there.  He knew this.  In the early morning of September 23, 2002 he got up, had his night nurse (thank God for this woman) get him up so he could have a cigarette, went to bed and never got back up. 

I don't remember the funeral.  I don't know if I blocked it out or if it was just so emotional that it's a blur.  Kind of like your wedding day, but in a bad way.

We all knew that he had willed himself to die.  He knew Mommom would never get the medical treatment that she needed as long as he was lingering.  We buried him in one of his many many many Philadelphia Phillies jackets with $10.00 for the bar.  We buried him at the cemetery attached to the church where my father's father had preached for 23 years.  The cemetery that was my weekend playground as a child.  The place I had called "alphabet park"when I was little because there were big stones with letters on them everywhere.  The place I used to go  when I was an adult when I needed to feel calm and strong and peaceful.  Now he was laid to rest a mere 200 feet from the outdoor pews where I sat as an adult.   

He died to try and save his wife.  So, we immediately turned our attentions to her medical condition.  No time to mourn, no time to grieve.  Now we prayed for Mommom's health. 

She went into the hospital two weeks later for her heart valve replacement.  She came through the operation fairly well.  Problem was that her heart was broken, and not in any way that the doctors could fix.  The doctors tried and tried to get her off the ventilator.  Everytime they tried, her oxygen levels went down.  She cried and tried to talk to us, but couldn't.  On October 18, 2002 my mother and aunt (my mother's sister) signed the paperwork to turn off the machines.  And Mommom went to join Poppop. 

Grass had not even started to grow on his grave when we buried her next to him.  We stood on his grave as we put her in her's. 

Our family ripped apart less then 24 hours after her death.  My aunt went after the material possessions of my grandparents, of which there was little.  She verbally attacked my mother, my father verbally attacked her and I had a nervous collapse.  Not even dead 24 hours and already her children were fighting over Mommom's stuff. 

Again, no time to mourn, no time to grieve.  Too much arguing, fighting, screaming and drama over possessions. 

I have since realized that death is selfish.  Whatever you may believe happens to the soul once the body dies, and even if you don't believe in the soul, the person who has passed is taken care of.  They are elsewhere and they are now fine.  It's those left behind who suffer. 

I bring this up in the context of The Big Move because I have finally begun to deal with their passing.  I realized while I was in outpatient therapy after my last nervous breakdown that I had not even started to cope with their deaths.  The cemetery became a place I avoided, taking away the space I could always count on to feel at peace.  My aunt and I have not spoken since the day after my grandmother died and I seriously doubt that we ever will. 

The crappy clay dinosaur I made when I was little now sits in MY china cabinet.  It's not a reminder of me, but a reminder of her.  My grandfather's Army and Navy papers are all in my possession as well as his Navy ring which I occasionally wear around my neck on a chain. 

The healing has started.  I imagine it will take awhile, but there is a part of me that is at peace, now that I have started to cope with their loss.

Still breathing....