I'm sitting here and my eyes are all red and puffy and sore. I'm running on very little sleep and a headache to beat all headaches. I feel like crying but right now I don't think I could right now. As my sister's fiance describes it, it's like dry heaving. Not fun at all. My mind keeps going a mile a minute and it won't stop.
I don't know why I'm on the computer but I had to do something to try to get my mind off of it a little bit. I read my friend's blogs trying to focus on the things that are going on in their lives and that worked for a little bit. I avoided mine like the plague though. I checked my email but I had nothing but junk mail so that didn't do much. I mean, how much thought do you have to put into clicking those little boxes and then pushing the delete key. And then I thought hey maybe I'll go blog.
So here I am blogging about the very thing I was trying to avoid.
My grandma passed away on Saturday, September 14, 2002 at 9.20 am EDT.
She went relatively peacefully but the night beforehand was shear hell. I got here about 10.30pm or so Friday night. She was kind of out of it, but she knew I was there. She told me how sweet I was for coming down again for the second weekend in a row. She had the biggest smile on her face. She had asked me to leave Tora at home because she didn't want to give Paul something else to complain to her about so I did and she thanked me for that. I explained to her that it wasn't a hard decision. She is the most important thing. We talked for a little bit longer. I delivered Karl's well-wishing thoughts for him and then we talked about him a little bit. They may have only met each other for two days, but she really liked him. I wish they had gotten a chance to get to know each other better. I forget what we talked about after that, but our conversation was one of the last, if not the last... damn, I can't think of the word... conversations that she had.
By about 11.30 pm, she started hurting really bad. She was given some morphine and even that wasn't helping. She started talking in Croatian (my grandpa spoke Croatian fluently and had taught her some choice words when they were married) and when she spoke in English we couldn't really understand what she was saying. About midnight I think (the night is really mostly a blur after this point) we finally understand that she is saying that she misses my sister and wants my sister. At that point, we knew it wasn't going to be long.
I called my sister and told her that grandma wasn't doing well and that she was asking for her. I think my sister was out of the house and on her way down in less than two minutes. My sister lives about an hour away. It's the families speculation that she asked for my sister because she knew out of the family that she was the closest to, she was the farthest one away. I was ever so glad that I decided to make the trip home this weekend. It was hard enough driving knowing that my grandma wasn't doing well, but the trip would have been so much harder knowing that it was close or that she was actually dying. After I called my sister, I called my uncle who lives about 45 minutes away. After that, we called my brother and sister and my aunt and my other uncle.
At this point my grandma kept screaming "It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!" over and over again. Every time it felt like I was getting stabbed. Mom called the hospice and got permission to give her more morphine to try to make it so it didn't hurt so much. We tried to convince her to take a nap... telling her it wouldn't be too long until the next person was going to be walking through the door and that she needed to be rested for their visit. She was fighting so hard - she didn't want to sleep and that made it so the morphine didn't help. She needed to try to relax. Every time she almost fell asleep she would wake herself up. It was like she afraid that she wouldn't wake up.
Finally the whole family was here (minus three cousins) and she was still screaming out in pain. We were all a wreck. She would talk about how she misses someone and then it started switching to she'll miss someone. I finally broke down and had to talk to Karl. I don't know how long we talked but it helped tremendously. Afterwards, I went back inside and they had managed to get grandma relaxed enough to sleep. She woke up a few times and would start screaming again but she would go back to sleep.
The grandkids broke up into little groups and left the living room so we wouldn't wake up grandma. The kids stayed to watch and take care of grandma. Around 3.30 or 4 am, I fell asleep. When I woke up about 7 am, my uncle and his wife had left, but everyone else was still there. Only my mom, my uncle, and my aunt were awake though. I then sent my mom in to go take a nap and my aunt napped in the chair in the living room. So that left me and my uncle. We talked a bit and I spent some time with grandma, careful not to wake her up though. She had pulled her oxygen off several times the night before and it still wasn't on. She was breathing really heavily too. I decided I was going to get a book and try reading a bit but I didn't have the concentration for that.
At 9 am my mom wakes up and my grandma was starting to get a little more vocal. She had been moaning in her sleep a bit for the past hour or so. This was nothing terrible. She wasn't screaming in pain or anything, just moaning a little louder. She seemed like she was starting to wake up, so my mom thought it would be a good time to get her changed, that way they could give her the pain medication afterwards.
So my mom goes and starts getting the stuff ready that she needs and the phone rings. I answer and it's the hospice guy checking to see how the night went for grandma. I defer the phone call to my mom and I go over to grandma. Mom starts telling him about last night and then all of a sudden my uncle states that grandma stopped breathing. She wasn't struggling for breath... she just stopped. One instant she was there, the next she was gone. My mom, still on the phone with the hospice guy, tells him that she just died. At this point my aunt bolts awake in the chair and I run around the house to the various rooms of sleeping people waking them up to tell them and let them say their final goodbyes.
I don't remember much from then on. Everyone was heartbroken. Tears, and crying, and phone calls. Letting everyone know. I remember that my aunt asked the hospice guy who showed up a little later not to call the funeral home people to pick her up until after my cousin from PA (2 hour drive) got a chance to show up to say goodbye. That was freaky beyond belief. Everytime we walked through the living room, there she was. The worst part of all is that my cousin didn't know that she was still going to be there. We had thought that he had asked for her to be there but he hadn't. He thought she was going to be gone. No wonder he passed out later... landing on me as well as my mom and my sister. That made my headache 100 times worse. I'm not exactly sure what part of him hit me, but it was quite a blow to the head. After the funeral home came, it was even harder to look at the empty bed. I tried to nap a little bit later after everyone left, but I couldn't sleep. Mom couldn't sleep either. So we started cleaning up the house. That day seemed to have lasted forever.
I dragged myself to bed at some point. I don't remember when. I slept heavy and hard... shear exhaustion will do that to a person. I do remember that it was a dreamless sleep. I fought going to bed though. I knew when I woke up I would find out that it wasn't all some terrible nightmare. That it was actually reality.
Sunday is an absolute blur. Lots of talking and remembering. Mom and I had been in the house since it happened, so my unlce and my sister insisted on us getting out of here for even an hour. So we went to the house and visited my niece and nephew. That was nice. We went back to grandma's and spent the rest of the day there until we all decided we were hungry and needed to get out of the house again so we went to Applebee's for a late supper.
The calling hours were yesterday. They made grandma look so beautiful. Like she did before she got sick. We went through tons of pictures on Sunday and found her high school graduation pictures. I've scanned one of them and when I get back to Michigan, I'll see if it turned out okay (the computer I'm on is really bad and makes all images look bad). The calling hours were hard though. Funny, in the hour before actually calling hours when it was just the family it was okay. That was until my grandma's husband wanted a picture of my grandma lying there. I find that terribly morbid and horrible and wrong. I wanted to scream and stop him.
When everyone started coming and offering their condolences, that's when I started losing it. I was trying so hard to be strong for mom... not always successfully though. It was weird, some people provoked more tears than others. And it wasn't even in a way that would have been predictable. The one the surprised me the most was my mom's real father's wife. Basically, the person who took my grandma's place it my real grandfather's life. I totally lost it when she came up and hugged me. I don't have any idea why. It's not like she said anything different from any of the other people, but it just got to me for some reason. And I didn't react nearly like that with my real grandfather.
It was nice though. They had polkas playing in the background. My grandma loved to dance and she loved the polka. Apparently she really loved the chicken dance too. I really wish I had more memories of that stuff. And they had Sonja Roses in the family bouquet just like we asked. Those were the flowers she was carrying when she married my Grandpa Frank. He was the best too. She really deserved to have him with her for the rest of her life, but unfortunately he passed away in 1987.
The funeral is today and I'm dreading it. This is it, the last goodbye. This is when reality is really going to strike.
Karl has really helped me through this all. He is truly wonderful. I know that he wants to be here with me helping me through this in person, but unfortunately things aren't that easy. I hope he realizes how much I appreciate everything. My uncle has the same situation. His girlfriend lives in Michigan and is unable to come down for any of this. So they talk on the phone like Karl and I. So my uncle and I use each other. Both of us are wishing our significant others are with us so we've taken to being there for each other when we need hugs.
So much for trying to put this all out of my mind for a little while...
