Post by fusilier23 on Aug 19, 2007 11:50:13 GMT
I had said to my parents the other day when they told me that I was invited to a family gathering yesterday that it was too bad my grandmother, my father's mother, couldn't attend these events anymore. It was ironic, therefore, as we sat on my cousin's deck eating cannolli and watching the sun set over the Jersey shore, when my father got the call from my grandmother's health aide telling us she was blue and not breathing. A call or two later to Hospice confirmed this was no episode, and that Mary Olivo had indeed passed from this world at the age of 95.
I knew this day would come, by my age most folks have long lost their grandparents, but that doesn't make it any easier, nor any easier on my father and his siblings. It's a rare person who indeed seems like she will go on forever, although Brooke Astor was another, but up till the beginning of this century Gram seemed like she would. She'd seen almost all of the 20th century, though she saw it through the relatively unsophisticated eyes of someone with no more than a high school educations. She also raised three children and kept a household going long after they'd all left and her husband, my grandfather, died suddenly at the relatively early age of 64. For twenty-six years after that she stayed active in her community, serving many times as president of local senior organiations, singing in the church choir, and so forth. She saw six grandsons born and five of them ascend to the rank of Eagle Scout, four of them graduate from college, one from law school, three of them marry, and one present her with her first and likely only great-grandchild. Through much of this, and 26 Christmases, Easters, Thanksgivings, and countless lesser occasions, many punctuated with pasta and pastries, though we all changed, the slturdy Italian matriarch with silver hair and more than enough warmth to offset her lack of book learning never seemed to change.
Alas, the year 2000 saw the tipping of the first domino, as she fell ill with a kidney infection and later developed heart trouble in the hospital. Though she came home ultimately, this took its toll on a body already weakened by late-onset diabetes, and she was never 100% the same again. I won't torture you with a blow-by-blow account of the last five years, except to say that once the first domino goes, the rest go over faster and faster. When last I saw her last weekend, bedridden, emaciated from difficulty eating, and one leg gone ice-cold and blue due to an occlusion, I knew it wasn't the end of the beginning, nor even the beginning of the end, but the end of the end and it wouldn't be long. I didn't expect it to only be a week, but I'm in a way glad that it was over very quickly. The sad fact is that she had nothing left to look forward to but further deterioration, including gangrene if her leg had gotten any worse, at which point they wouldn't have been able to even amputate, because the shock of the surgery would have killed her. The thought of dying by inches as your body wears out is bad enough, the thought of lying on your deathbed as your limbs die and putrefy before the rest of you makes me shudder with horror.
The friends she'd made over the years had mostly preceded her to the grave, as had all her siblings save her youngest sister who is now 80. Apart from my dad, her children had moved out of the area and she saw them only rarely, and rarer still the last year. Her grandchildren, myself included, are all in our 20s and 30s. Some have moved out of the area and all of us were, I regret to say, too wrapped up in our lives and careers to spend much time or effort visiting a grandmother who couldn't do much. Her one great-grandchild (by rights she should have had four or five now) will barely remember her if she does at all. The saddest part of all is that she couldn't participate in any events any more, and we couldn't bring the events to her, so there wasn't much left tying her to this world, a world very different from her world growing up, of brick walls and iron fire escapes, tile floors and dusky hallways, tomato plants and grape arbors, Latin Mass and church hall bingo games, candle-lit altars and plaster saints, family bakeries and five and dimes, Saturday afternoon opera radio broadcasts and Sunday spaghetti dinners where the food and wine never seemed to end, and families who stuck together and stuck it out, so long as you didn't break the unwritten code of conduct, on pain of which you could be ostracized.
Life will go on, and we are all glad she got a good life until the last few years, but it is as though a piece of everyone in this family died with her. I can't help but wonder if, though, in a last act of caring, Gram waited until the family was all assembled to depart this world, that we might be there for each other, to help shoulder this last burden together.
I knew this day would come, by my age most folks have long lost their grandparents, but that doesn't make it any easier, nor any easier on my father and his siblings. It's a rare person who indeed seems like she will go on forever, although Brooke Astor was another, but up till the beginning of this century Gram seemed like she would. She'd seen almost all of the 20th century, though she saw it through the relatively unsophisticated eyes of someone with no more than a high school educations. She also raised three children and kept a household going long after they'd all left and her husband, my grandfather, died suddenly at the relatively early age of 64. For twenty-six years after that she stayed active in her community, serving many times as president of local senior organiations, singing in the church choir, and so forth. She saw six grandsons born and five of them ascend to the rank of Eagle Scout, four of them graduate from college, one from law school, three of them marry, and one present her with her first and likely only great-grandchild. Through much of this, and 26 Christmases, Easters, Thanksgivings, and countless lesser occasions, many punctuated with pasta and pastries, though we all changed, the slturdy Italian matriarch with silver hair and more than enough warmth to offset her lack of book learning never seemed to change.
Alas, the year 2000 saw the tipping of the first domino, as she fell ill with a kidney infection and later developed heart trouble in the hospital. Though she came home ultimately, this took its toll on a body already weakened by late-onset diabetes, and she was never 100% the same again. I won't torture you with a blow-by-blow account of the last five years, except to say that once the first domino goes, the rest go over faster and faster. When last I saw her last weekend, bedridden, emaciated from difficulty eating, and one leg gone ice-cold and blue due to an occlusion, I knew it wasn't the end of the beginning, nor even the beginning of the end, but the end of the end and it wouldn't be long. I didn't expect it to only be a week, but I'm in a way glad that it was over very quickly. The sad fact is that she had nothing left to look forward to but further deterioration, including gangrene if her leg had gotten any worse, at which point they wouldn't have been able to even amputate, because the shock of the surgery would have killed her. The thought of dying by inches as your body wears out is bad enough, the thought of lying on your deathbed as your limbs die and putrefy before the rest of you makes me shudder with horror.
The friends she'd made over the years had mostly preceded her to the grave, as had all her siblings save her youngest sister who is now 80. Apart from my dad, her children had moved out of the area and she saw them only rarely, and rarer still the last year. Her grandchildren, myself included, are all in our 20s and 30s. Some have moved out of the area and all of us were, I regret to say, too wrapped up in our lives and careers to spend much time or effort visiting a grandmother who couldn't do much. Her one great-grandchild (by rights she should have had four or five now) will barely remember her if she does at all. The saddest part of all is that she couldn't participate in any events any more, and we couldn't bring the events to her, so there wasn't much left tying her to this world, a world very different from her world growing up, of brick walls and iron fire escapes, tile floors and dusky hallways, tomato plants and grape arbors, Latin Mass and church hall bingo games, candle-lit altars and plaster saints, family bakeries and five and dimes, Saturday afternoon opera radio broadcasts and Sunday spaghetti dinners where the food and wine never seemed to end, and families who stuck together and stuck it out, so long as you didn't break the unwritten code of conduct, on pain of which you could be ostracized.
Life will go on, and we are all glad she got a good life until the last few years, but it is as though a piece of everyone in this family died with her. I can't help but wonder if, though, in a last act of caring, Gram waited until the family was all assembled to depart this world, that we might be there for each other, to help shoulder this last burden together.
