Where to Begin, That's the Question! (Prelude to Grandma's Funeral)

The wonderful thing about blogging is having a lot to write about; and the worst thing about blogging is having a lot to write about. Where to begin? Let's see......

I guess I should start with...*checking calendar on wall*....ah, October 24th. Yeah, that looks good (Yes, there's a lot of other things that happened in the month of October, and you will hear about it, it's just easier for me to work backwards. Which probably explains my housekeeping skills.....)

It was Saturday evening; The Wonder Hubby and I were chilling around the house, you know, the typical weekend evening thing. We got a text on my cell phone from my mother-in-law. Before we go any further, may I ask you to explore that sentence a bit more? My mother-in-law can text. AND she has my cell phone number. I'll be 52 in January (no point in lying about it, too many people know the truth), and my mother-in-law can text, and has my cell phone number. Now, imagine that Terror in your own life! Anyway, we got this text and it said something along the lines of "Grandma is doing very poorly and isn't expected to last much longer than a few days". WTH??!! Okay, this news was not exactly unexpected, Grandma had been in a care facility for a number of years now due to Alzheimer's and advanced age. BUT, it's not like we'd just chatted with her a few days before and she had casually mentioned that her mother was fading fast. This text literally came out of the Blue! No pretext, no "Hey, how y'all doing?", no "Let me give an update on Life in Oklahoma"--none of that. Just "Here's a bombshell for you to cogitate while you're finishing digesting supper". Which, sad to say, is pretty typical when dealing with Lachlan's mom. We're just not close and we don't talk much.

So, of course, the Wonder Hubby immediately calls his mom to get, oh, I don't know, a tad more info, maybe? So he talks to her for a bit, gets another bombshell while talking to her which I'll talk about sometime later, and finally hangs up with her somewhat the worse for wear. I'm sure his mom is a good woman, but subtle she ain't. She never eases into a conversation, she blasts the listener with whatever facts she's got for them with all the delicacy and compassion of a howitzer. Doesn't matter what that info does to you, anyway; it's all about how the info impacts her. Never forget that.

Needless to say, I had a somewhat shook-up Wonder Hubby on my hands. His grandmother had helped to raise him (his dad died in a car accident when Lachlan was eight and his mother has polio), she'd been a huge part of his life; plus, she'd welcomed me with open arms into their lives, and we both considered her a treasure. Watching a vicious disease like Alzheimer's slowly steal his darling grandmother away by inches had almost been too much for Lachlan to take. The last time we'd gone to see her, which was about 4 years ago, I think, she didn't recognize me at all, and she thought Lachlan was her son, not her grandson. Before we left, he'd made his goodbye to her. He knew she wasn't going to be in there anymore, and he just couldn't bear to watch her deteriorate further. As much as he tries to hide it, my Love has a pretty tender heart inside that manly chest of his, and seeing her like that was more than he could take.

The rest of the weekend was like going through the motions of Life, but just waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know the shoe is going to drop, you're expecting it to drop, you know it will be soon, and you know the shoe will drop on your newly-injured toe when it does drop, and when it does drop it's going to hurt, but you don't know when it's going to happen.

Now, before you get all philosophical on me and say something like "Life is a constant series of dropping shoes; One just has to learn to dodge" or something esoteric like that, let me say that I know that. I've known that for a long time. So does Lachlan. You know your grandparents will die before you, you know your parents will probably die before you--but that doesn't make it any easier. You know a sledgehammer to the elbow is going to hurt, but you don't really contemplate that fact until right before the head of that sucker makes contact with your skin, do you? You don't walk around thinking that sooner or later a sledgehammer is going to hit your elbow and when it does, it will hurt like a mother. You deal with the things at hand: Work, gardening (see, I remember what this blog is about!), your spouse, your kids, your washer leaking (yeah, that happened, too). You don't ponder intimate sledgehammer contact.

Lachlan, wonder to behold, actually took some time off. Now, I know that, in this economy, I should not complain about his workplace being the home of perpetual overtime, not here in Wichita where so many are unemployed. But I didn't marry his paycheck; I married him. And being rather fond of his face (and other interesting parts of his anatomy, but that's not important here), I like to see it (his face, I mean) once in a while. In a lot of ways, last week was a good week; we were together, we were getting some things done around here, and we were able to prepare for that freaking shoe to drop, so that at least when it did, we wouldn't make a ridiculous scene about it. Plus, we had to deal with the other bombshell that his mother had dropped on us as well, and that took some time and effort. (I hate to tantalize you about that, Gentle Reader, but it was a big deal: Too big to deal with in this posting. I will write about it, honest; it just deserves its own space.) So, we dealt with that, we eked along, we braced ourselves for the inevitable, and we waited.

Tuesday the 27th was my mother's birthday (Hi Mom!) and we went to take her some flowers that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of, but they were not cut flowers, they were living plants. Like any other red blooded woman, my mom loves to get flowers, she adores getting flowers just like I do, but she really, really likes living plants as opposed to cut flowers. What poor growing skills I possess are a mere shadow of my mom's ability: The woman could grow orchids on window panes. She's just that good. She doesn't have green thumbs, she has green arms. Matter of fact, I used to try to get her to exploit that talent a little more: I used to try to convince her that if she could overlook the illegality of the issue, she and I could make a good chunk of change in the highly lucrative field of a specific crop cultivation program. Admittedly, the retirement plan sucked, but the profits were amazing. She always turned me down, though. Le sigh. While we were visiting with her and my father, we updated them on Grandma's situation. They were very sympathetic and we left, promising to keep them posted. We returned home.

And that shoe I was talking about? It dropped.

Grandma passed away that evening. It was a quiet, peaceful passing, and I was happy about that. I'd harbored this fear that she was actually still in there somewhere, you know? That she was trapped and couldn't quite find her way out and not only did she not deserve that, nobody deserves that. She was free, and back with Lachlan's grandfather, who was the great love of her love, just like the Wonder Hubby is mine, and I was relieved and he was relieved, yet sad. So after shedding just a few tears, we called his mom to find out when and where the funeral was to be, all that good stuff. The decent, civilized thing to do, you know.

Halloween. My mother-in-law set the funeral of her mother on Halloween.

Stupefying.

So much for my civility.