Big Things vs. Little Things

Life is generally about the mundane. I think about what I'm planning to eat for lunch or for dinner. I get impatient when waiting for my dog to finish her morning (or evening, or afternoon) trip to the backyard. I get excited to spend an evening with my boyfriend, the Baker. I debate over whether or not I'd like to see a movie on Friday night or go out to dinner instead. I pay bills. I spend too much money on gas for my car. I get frustrated when waiting in traffic.

These kinds of things happen day in, day out, and they are very real to me. In fact, I would notice their absence if they stopped happening for more than a few days or weeks at a time, depending on the event.

It is life-altering events that feel unreal, I think, the kinds of things that only happen once or twice in a lifetime. When I got married, my wedding day flew by in a kind of happy cloud. There were moments of annoyance and nervousness, but at the end of it, it was hard to believe that I was finally married after two years of planning the event.

My divorce was similar. There is very little ceremony to the ending of a marriage. At the end of a small court discussion with the judge, that was it. I was no longer married.

My grandmother's death has felt unreal from the morning when its occurrence seemed a virtual certainty. After open heart surgery to repair her mitral valve, she took a long time to recover. She was not gaining in strength and health each day, much unlike the men and women around her. Her respirator stayed in for 8 days, when the original plan had been to have it out in 1. People with similar surgeries kept coming into intensive care and leaving as through a revolving door while she made minor gains each day.

We thought things were changing on that 8th day when the respirator came out. She started whispering at us again, and since she was on less pain medication because the respirator was out, she was tired, but much more awake than she had been. The next day she was making jokes to my uncle. Then overnight on Sunday, her blood pressure dropped. She stopped responding to the nurses. The respirator went back in.

We sat vigil all Memorial Day, the few people left in the cardiac waiting room. Every hour on the half hour we went in for our 15 minute visits, every time she was unresponsive, her eyes moving back and forth across the ceiling as if she was watching a tennis match unseen by anyone else but her. By the end of visiting hours that day the nurse seemed hopeful. She said that progress would be slow, but that Grandma was now more stable and things seemed to be getting better.

When I arrived the next morning, I was almost instantaneously greeted by one of my grandmother's doctors. He would not go as far as to say there was no hope, but he only granted her, rather arbitrarily it seemed, a one percent chance of survival.

We spent most of the rest of the day at my grandmother's bedside, holding her hands and stroking her forehead. After about an hour of silently watching the monitors as they slowly fell and the nurses took her off various machines and medications, we began telling her stories and recalling memories in which she figured prominently in the punchlines. It was almost as if we were having a party at which the guest of honor was not there, or at the very least, unconscious.

The very last thing to go was her pacemaker. It was a temporary pacemaker, meant to push her heart back into operating within parameters on its own after the surgery. Her heart did manage to pick up some rhythm, but not enough for the doctors' liking. She persisted for a while yet after the pacemaker was turned off, and the numbers representing her blood pressure and her heart beats per minute slowly fell as we watched, holding on to her and holding on to each other.

She was still hooked up to the respirator for her own comfort, so it would not be readily apparent when she was gone, unless one was watching the monitors, which I was doing, like a hawk. I saw when the blood pressure reading fell one last time, and the heart rate went from weak to nothing, and the woman who had taught me how to bake cinnamon rolls, and sew, a woman who ironed her jeans, who sat down last at family meals, and who always made sure that each one of us had something special to eat at barbecues, a woman who always brought me extra blankets when I spent the night in the guest room no matter if it was summer or winter, and was kind to every one she met, I saw her leave behind her tired body and depart this world for good.

I didn't see her every day. Despite the fact that we lived forty minutes from one another, we mostly saw one another at family gatherings for holidays and such. After making it through the first days, the gauntlet of the visitation and funeral, and the day after, my life has settled much as it was into the rhythms and routines of getting frustrated in traffic, trying to figure out what to cook for dinner, and trying to decide what to do with my Friday evenings. I think about her more than I had been on a daily basis, but only once or twice a day does it hit me that I can't call her on the phone, or that she won't be at my family's Father's Day barbecue.

This experience has probably been the most unreal experience of my life.