Art thou serious?

The Inevitability of Death

My grandmother is dying.

I visited her at the nursing home she stays at today. She is a pale shadow of herself - her body is frail, and she has lost a tremendous amount of weight in the last year or so. Her skin wraps tightly around her narrow face, revealing an angular structure I never noticed.

Halfway through the visit, she appeared to regain some of her initial strength from about a year ago. She was frightful, and she told the nurse tending her to get lost. According to my mother, this was how she reacted a year ago when she checked into the nursing home - frightened and unwilling to accept the circumstances around her.

My aunt believes that my grandmother's time is up, and that she's regaining her energy to say goodbye to everybody one last time. My mother, on the end, also believes that my grandmother's time is up. She thinks that the sudden change in my grandmother's behaviour, and some other prominent physiological changes, such as her dramatic change in temperature, are signs of her preparing to leave this world.

It's a depressing thought, the inevitability of death. What's more depressing is watching people like my mother being affected by it. I can't claim a sense of closeness to my grandmother, due to our lack of a common language. But it's never fun to watch the strongest of characters around you fall prone to the shock of inevitability.

I'm speechless, really. I wanted this to be an entry that reflected my own feelings but right now, I don't know if I've got what it takes to reflect. My only hope is that when my grandmother passes away, it won't be with pain on her part.

posted by Song @ 6:31 PM