Goodbye to Gram

It sounds like they'll be taking my grandmother off the ventilator sometime tomorrow. After the surgery, her heart rate never really got back up to where it needs to be, and the level that it's at is powered by medication. If she had a tracheotomy, she would end up going to a nursing home where she would most likely remain in the same state.

Although I've seen her more times in the past two weeks than I probably have in the past year, I went to go say goodbye this evening. She was in and out, would make eye contact and smile when you called out to her, but for the most part just lied there with her eyes closed, the ventilator inflating and deflating her chest. After that tough goodbye, I did what any self-respecting Casey would do -- got myself a large, thick, chocolate milkshake.

Whenever we were at my grandparents house as children, they would ask us if we wanted ice cream. Morning, noon and night, the time was always right for the Breyer's box to come out and be dished into small metal ice cream dishes that would get so cold as you steadied the stem on the table. Gram always made sure that, during a big family meal, when everyone was drinking after-dinner coffee and tea, that I had had a little tiny china cup and saucer from her china closet, mostly filled with milk and a generous helping of sugar. Even today when I pour a little too much of those ingredients in my tea, I feel like a girl at the kid's table again, clinking a tiny spoon against the fragile wall of the cup.

Even though we didn't have a close relationship as I grew up, Gram always loved things to be pretty and relaxing. She loved to have opera music playing, at home or their place at the shore. She loved the beach, even though Pop would rather be cutting the lawn and cleaning the house; he would drop her off and pick her up with her beach chair. She always seemed to be basking in the sun, but with some shade on her head, either a hat or a canopy, and a handful of delicate gold chains around her neck, sandollar charms and saints' medals resting on her chest. She was always decorating and "making [things] look nice," as my dad would say. I definitely see a little bit of this in all her kids, and in her grandchildren. They are the perfect blend of her desire for beauty and their father's penchant for neatness.

Saying goodbye to her was hard, but I know it is what she wanted. She would not want to lay in a small room with a machine living her for and miss the birds singing and the warmth of the sun on her skin. I told her she has to pray hard for us and help us to make everything pretty down here, without her.