Convergence

Well, as many of you know, Grandma died on Thursday, and the funeral was yesterday morning. So, it’s been a rough week in the midst of what’s been difficult year so far.

We’re getting by though. I definitely feel as though a lot of prayers were answered (and thank you for your prayers for Grandma and for the family, by the way). I know I spent a lot of time praying for peace in the situation, and that was granted. Grandma was doing awfully badly, and I think that much worse than death for her would have been being torn away from her farm and being put in a nursing home. Thankfully, those things didn’t happen.

Plus, considering the life Grandma lived, I don’t think death is going to be much of a hurdle for her.

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Anyway, I guess along those lines, I just wanted to stick a couple of my thoughts down here. Feel free not to read them.

A couple of weeks ago, when we admitted Grandma to the hospital, I said that there were two moments from that night that were going to stick with me. At that time, I only wrote about one of them. This is the other.

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That night, those of us at the hospital thought Grandma was going to die at any time. We had gotten her into the emergency room, and the doctors had pretty much given us no hope. They had cleared up our answers to the “life-support” questions, and we had confirmed those answers with Grandma. Then, we were left alone in a room to wait.

Grandma was clearly miserable. She was writhing and struggling to get her breath, and her heartbeat was jumping all over the place, reaching speeds of over one-hundred-forty-beats-per-minute. Her skin was grayish and yellow. She couldn’t focus her eyes, and she could hardly speak.

Aunt June, Mom, and I stood around the bed not knowing what we might do to comfort her.

Besides just being there, we only knew one thing we could do, and we weren’t allowed to do that. Grandma had been able communicate very clearly that she was desperately thirsty. And I mean desperately. Her lips were cracked and bleeding because she was so dry. Grandma’s request laying there was that we give her some cold water.

The problem was that we weren’t allowed to do so. Grandma had pneumonia and congestive heart failure, and so she was basically drowning already. The nurses had told us that we couldn’t give here any fluids, though they promised that they would bring some ice chips eventually. That would comfort her some without putting too many harmful fluids directly into her.

They were busy, though, and understaffed and never could remember when they came by to get her the ice chips, and we didn’t know where we could get any to help Grandma.

Finally, Mom hatched an idea. She (and Aunt June) figured that Grandma could suck water from a rag, and it would control the intake of fluids about as well as sucking on ice cubes would do. Mom grabbed a rag and wetted it under the tap. Then, she put it up to Grandma’s mouth. Grandma sucked in, but she immediately spit the rag out.

“I want cold water,” she said. (At this point should could grunt short phrases)

Mama: “That was cold water.”

Grandma: “Didn’t taste like it to me.”

The odd thing was, this little interchange struck us all as being extremely funny. We all laughed aloud, and I swear, Grandma smiled, too. I think she was meaning for it to be a funny statement. It definitely fit her normal sense of humor.

Anyway, Aunt June then remembered that I had snuck in a bottle of water for Mom and her to drink over in the corner of the room where Grandma couldn’t see them. It was cold. Mom poured that really cold water on the rag and put it to Grandma’s mouth.

She closed her eyes and sucked the water from the rag as quickly as she could, Mom maneuvering it so that she could reach all of the wet parts. When Mom moved to rewet the rag, Grandma said, “It’s good. It’s cold.” Then, she smiled even though she was still in such pain.

And somehow, at this, the mood of the room seemed to have lightened. The three of us stood around the bed, Mom repeating the process of wetting the rag and holding it to Grandma’s lips and Grandma drinking in the cold water. And the three of us around the bed laughed the whole time and Grandma, when she wasn’t busy drinking, managed to smile.

I can’t claim to entirely understand this scene. Looking back, it seems slightly odd to me that we could be standing around what we thought was Grandma’s deathbed laughing. It struck me as odd at that moment.

Of course, it seemed natural in the moment as well. There was potential for some joy, despite the difficulty of the situation.

I remember being reminded, as I stood there in the hospital room, of the point during the crucifixion, as it’s told in the Gospel of John, when Christ is thirsty and is offered sour wine on a sponge to drink. He drinks and says, “It is finished” and dies. As I watched Mom holding the wet rag to Grandma’s lips, I was struck by this instance of convergence. At this point, I thought, Grandma’s life had pretty much become aligned with Christ’s. And as so many people who knew Grandma can testify, that had been the end toward which she had striven her entire life, and here she was well-prepared to take those difficult, final steps along with Him.

As I wrote earlier, I don’t think death is going to be much of hurdle for Grandma to overcome.