We wait.

I've wanted to write about Mary's grandmother Gigi for while but I haven't figured out how to do it.

Essentially I'm writing about waiting for someone to die, but that sounds so callous. But it's what we're doing. Waiting.

Gigi took a good fall almost 2 months ago. She fractured her skull and it left a blood clot on her brain. She left the hospital rather quickly for a 92 year old and was home after a short 4 day stay. Then she was back in after a fainting episode; this time for good.

She stayed at the first hospital for a couple weeks. It was trauma based and for the most part it seemed couldn't do anything for her. She needed rehab. So she was moved to a hospital with much better rehab resources.

She was there for 3, 4 weeks? I can't remember. The time is just blur of going there every night to visit. I don't know if this last hospital was able to help her at all. Gigi got steadily worse. No improvement. Her hearing worsened, her speech became softer and her body began to shake.

But I think the worst part for her was that she was having a harder time communicating. I think it was here that she decided that she was done.

So the family had to decide what to do with her.

Gigi's son didn't want her to go into a nursing home. I think he didn't want her to go a home because this would be admitting some kind of failure on his part. But he didn't want her to go home to his house. She'd spent the last 18 years at my in-laws' and why couldn't she go back there? So he came up with an unfair arrangement, Gigi would stay at my in-laws' house, the son would come over and take care of her during the day, and my mother in-law could take care of her the other 16 hours of the day after she got home from teaching elementary school.

Thank god a nurse came along and set him straight. She told him "There are 25 trained people taking care of her at this very
moment. What makes you think you can do a better job than them?" She let that sink in and walked away.

A little more than a week ago,Gigi ended up staying in a nursing home not even a mile away from our house. Don't confuse this with assisted living, this is a place where people go when they need long term medical attention. It's nice enough and a bargain at $2,000 a month.

Still Gigi's condition waned. It became obvious to us all that her condition wasn't going to get better. I know she knew she wasn't getting better because as Mary, Josh and I were leaving one day last week she told me she loved me. She'd never done that before.

Friday on my home from work Josh called from the home and told me hurry up because Gigi thought she was dieing. I got there and things were bad. The whole family was there. They had her on a breathing treatment. It didn't look good but her condition improved. After a while when things looked better we all left.

After I got off work Saturday morning, we went by and the nurses had her dressed and in a wheelchair. So along with Mary's brother, we wheeled her outside. Josh "drove" and we sat outside for about 15 minutes. Gigi hadn't really been speaking for a a week now and seemed to be content just looking around.

She appeared more delicate to me than ever before. She'd always been old from the day I first met her, but never delicate. Never fragile. Saturday morning she looked to me as if the wind blew the wrong direction she would break.

That afternoon as Mary was on her way to visit, her youngest brother Michael called to let us know something bad was happening. So Josh and I piled in the car and raced over.

When we got there we found out she had a seizure and this was probably it. She had a couple of more seizures before the meds kicked in. She's been unconscious since then and it doesn't look good.

She has a "Do not resuscitate" order so it's just a matter of time. We go and sit around, on the floor if there aren't enough chairs and just talk. Sometime about her, sometimes about trivial things. But always talking.

We wait.

Our lives are kind of on hold. So we wait.