If my grandmother were alive, she'd be turning 82 today. She and my grandpa would have celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary on his 85th birthday earlier this summer.
The last three years of her life were some of the hardest for her, which is saying something considering she was born at the start of the Great Depression. The day after her 71st birthday, her husband had a cardiac event and spent the next three weeks in a coma before the decision was made, as family, to take him off life support.
A little over a year later, her baby brother was put in the hospital due to liver failure. He was so jaundiced the whites of his eyes were yellow. An hour before his funeral, one of her sons-in-law passed away as well.
Within about six months, she was put in the hospital, diagnosed with emphysema and left with an oxygen tank. I remember visiting her after she had been in the hospital three days and nearly crying because I saw she had a cigarette butt mashed into her hair. I would remember that scene when I worked in a nursing home/physical rehab center as an activities assistant where one of my jobs was to help some of the ladies put on lipstick.
Throughout this time, she was also dealing with her father's dementia and Alzheimer's causing him to completely forget who she was. Her father survived her brother by 13 months and died on the birthday of her youngest grandchild. I had the prints for my senior pictures back and was scared to take them over to her place so she could pick out which pose she wanted for my frame in her living room. I was scared because she would smoke with the oxygen tank on.
She had completely lost her will to live and was in the process of filing DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) papers when she slipped in the bathroom one day. The daughter who lived with her was an EMT and their dogs (a Pomeranian and a Chihuahua ) wouldn't let her or any of the other EMT's near her to do CPR. She only outlived her father by 6 weeks, before I even got the copies of my senior picture from the photographer.
Amidst all this depression, I remember my mom, her brother and his wife having convinced her to come out to a bowling alley for karoke one weekend. I remember sitting across from her at the table while some short, overweight guy in his 60's with too much white hair got up to sing a song by Alabama. As his face got red and sweaty belting out "Mountain Music," I saw an unmistakable smile roll along my grandma's face.
It's the only pleasant memory I have of her after my grandpa's funeral. In some ways, it's the sweetest one I have because that smile was so rare during those years. (I think she may have smiled as we posed for a picture on my 16th birthday.)
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