I live in a rural, poor town in upstate NY on the Canadian border. It’s an interesting place to grow up. But I don’t really feel like talking about that right now. I brought that up because I don’t really know how to start this post. So there.
I went home for about 10 days at the end of summer session I. I managed to make it through summer I while going through recovery from my surgery (I’m still in pain, and sometimes it gets to that grit-your-teeth-and-hold-onto-something-for-purchase point but it’s definitely less than before). I had to drop one class (advanced accounting) because the professor was…less than understanding about my situation (read: a fucking asshole). The other class, auditing, went fine, with much thanks going to the easygoing professor who was sympathetic to my plight.
So once summer session I was over, I took a break from Boston and went back upstate.
My grandmother isn’t doing well. She’s 83, but has a ton of health problems. Diabetes, heart disease, failing kidneys, cataracts and glaucoma, steady hearing loss, knee replacement surgery that didn’t go too well, arthritis and osteoporosis, and of course, old age. She was admitted to the hospital because her heart rate was so low, she didn’t register a pulse on whatever machine my dad used to check it. She had to be transferred to a larger hospital in Burlington, VT–about 2.5 hours away from where I live–to see if she could get a pacemaker. She was hallucinating pretty badly too apparently.
For a while her condition was really bad. My father (a physician) told my mother to call her siblings from various places around the world to come see their mother, because it may be the last time they would have a chance to do so. So they came, from Texas, India, New Jersey, and I don’t know where the last one came from. As a sanyasi (monk), he’s essentially nomadic. So I don’t know where he was in the world at that point, possibly Australia, but in any case, he came too.
Though the doctors stated they wouldn’t risk giving her a pacemaker (she’s already had heart surgery twice), my grandmother got better and was able to come home. But you can see that she’s tiring. Her body, as my father and med-school grad brother say, is “winding down.” Her eyes are glassy, her skin is pallid and lifeless, her body frail.
But having my mom’s sisters come and chat and gossip with her helped boost her spirits. When I left a couple of days ago to come back to Boston, she certainly looked better than before. She’s up and about using a walker. She sleeps a lot though.
The clock is slowing. It’s a weird feeling when every time you say goodbye to a person, you wonder if this is the last time you’ll ever see them. And then you have to steady your nerves not to look sad, because that’s only going to make the other person feel like shit.
My grandmother’s lived with us for almost 10 years now. My mom had her and my grandfather come up from Jersey City, where they’d lived in the same shithole of an apartment since 1975, to live with us as my grandfather’s health was beginning to fail. He died a few months later, if I recall correctly. That entire time was kind of hazy for me.
When we were younger, we didn’t see our father a lot because he was working constantly. My parents came from humble beginnings and really worked hard to get where they are now. As my father worked a lot and saved diligently for my brother and me to go to college, we didn’t have many family vacations or things like that. I don’t think my dad was too interested in it anyway.
Now that both of us are out of college, with my brother out of med school and me not going to business school until a few years down the road, we’re both very grateful not to have student loans to worry about paying off. I don’t think I can express or understand myself how fucking lucky and grateful I am. Well, at least I am. I don’t know about my brother. He kind of takes everything for granted.
But there’s a point to this digression.
When I was 16, I studied abroad in Japan. When I came back, I went through another severe nadir with my depression. (A lot of shit happened, and it’s just another thing I don’t feel like getting into right now.) I’ve had depression since I was 8, started getting treatment at 13. When I was 14, things were at their worst, but I’m digressing again. The point is: came back from Japan really fucking depressed and mind-fucked.
And it was after that that I started thinking about things I’d never thought about before. A lot of those thoughts and worries that began then continue to swarm in my head now. One of those thoughts was that I didn’t really know anything about my dad. And as the prospect of going to college wasn’t as distant as it was before, the reality began to hit me that I didn’t really have much time left to be with my parents like I had been up until then. And I realized that I could never live anywhere near my small town because there is no economy, no jobs, no infrastructure, no opportunity. (With the economic downturn, it’s gotten predictably worse.)
I remember sobbing on the basement stairs one night, talking to my dad about this, and that was the beginning of us getting to know each other better. Since then, we’ve tried to take more family trips.
But this brings me back to my grandmother. Having an elderly person live with you and depend on you is a responsibility. But the asshole in me thinks of it as a burden too. It’s not possible for us to take family trips and leave my grandmother behind, but she cannot travel with us either (besides her health, she has a lot of dietary restrictions based on a religious oath she’s taken).
My grandmother finds our town unbearably cold during the wintertime. It’s understandable. Hell, I think it’s unbearably cold in the wintertime when it gets to 30 below. So usually in October, my grandmother would travel to India to stay at my monk-uncle’s place in Vrindavan, a holy city in India. She’d stay there until March or April, and some of his followers would take care of her. Then she’d come back to our home. This arrangement has been going on for several years, but in the last few years as her health has sharply deteriorated, the question’s always up in the air as to whether or not she can travel to India. Sometimes my mother would fly with her to India to drop her off.
So before, we’d have half a year to try and make some plan to have a family vacation of sorts before my grandmother would come back to our house. In the last four years, I’ve gone to India three times. For me, that isn’t a vacation. (I hate going to India, but I’ll go into that some other time.) But we go because my father wants to see his mother in India.
As I’ve graduated from college and my brother isn’t going anywhere until he gets into residency somewhere, my mother wanted us to take a family trip (all four of us, which hasn’t happened since 2003 I think). I’m not sure how she expected us to go even before my grandmother had to be hospitalized. Perhaps her younger brother could come up from Jersey and take care of her while we went somewhere for a few days. But now that her health is so much worse, it just isn’t possible. Hell, my mother wasn’t going to be able to go to my graduation in May (that was the first time my grandmother had been hospitalized), so there’s no way we can even think of taking a vacation now.
But my mother still brings it up like it’s possible. And then I get angry. Because I don’t like getting my hopes up with promises made and having them come crashing down. (This is a product of post-Japan me.) I can’t take it. Call it childish, but you don’t really know my mind and emotions or where I’m coming from either so I don’t know how I could convey it to you.
I love my grandmother, really I do. But at the same time, I’ve had these selfish thoughts for more than 7 years. I know that the arrangement could not have been made any other way, but there are still times when I think of her as a burden. Over the years I’ve seen my mother age so rapidly as she drains herself taking care of her own mother. It makes me angry. I wonder why it couldn’t have been some other way. But my mother’s siblings are assholes. When my grandmother stayed with my aunts, both of their husbands treated her really horribly. So she vowed never to go back to either of their homes (Texas and India).
My parents’ 30th anniversary will come in December, but there isn’t even any way for them to go out to dinner because someone needs to be by my grandmother’s side constantly.
Part of it also is that my mother has never lived apart from her parents. I wonder if she too is unable to break away or give my grandmother up to any of her other siblings.
I find myself wondering how long this will go on for. That sounds horrible doesn’t it? But I’m being honest with my thoughts, and I’d be lying if I said these types of thoughts never crossed my mind. I also wonder that when my grandmother eventually does pass away, how will my mom be able to handle it? What will she do? I really don’t know.
Honestly, it’s not even the “vacation” aspect that I care about. It’s just an opportunity to be away and be with my parents and just…I don’t know…have more time with them. When I went home this time, my dad worked all day, and my mom was busy with her mother and all of her siblings. There wasn’t a single day when we didn’t have other relatives over. And my mom can’t handle having that many people to look after, so she gets really pissy and curt and that makes me not want to be around her when she’s intolerable. Any other time, she’s sleeping. I begged my dad to go for a walk one evening because I needed to get out of the house and away from everything. So we went for a walk and ten minutes in he gets a call from my mom’s brother saying that he just pulled into the driveway. So we walked back home.
Since I came back from Japan, morbid, depressive thoughts usually dominate my mind. My mom had her palm read when she was married, and the guy told her she’d die at 60. She’s 56 in August. I know it’s stupid and it goes against everything I believe in, but ever since I learned of the fortune-teller’s stupid fucking prediction, I can’t stop thinking of how long I will be able to be with my parents. I feel like I’m mourning them before they’re even gone, but I can’t help it.
Indians, for however smart we may be touted, are a superstitious people. I hate myself for falling into this stupid trap.
Like an idiot, I’m crying. I need to eat now, so I’m ending this here.
