Grandma

I only ever knew one grandparent, my mother's mother, and it seems like she was sick for my entire life. Now, I know on an intellectual level this wasn't true. I have clear memories of afternoons spent at the playground with her and weekends when my sisters and I stayed at her apartment, and sick people don't do well chasing three little girls around.

But, from the time I was about seven, my grandmother was in and out of the hospital. First it was her gall bladder. Then it was breast cancer. Then the cancer came back. Then it spread. Then she had Alzheimer's that might have been masking cancer in her brain. Then, she went into the hospital on my sixteenth birthday and, while my mother was frantically trying to get her into a nursing home, she died.

As a result of all this, my memories of the eleventh grade are largely frantic.

My first clear memory that something was wrong was as my grandmother was getting sicker. She had a home nurse at the time and had taken to wandering away when she was alone. She disappeared once in a driving snow storm and just as my father and sister were about to get in the car and drive to Brooklyn to file a police report, a nice young man returned her home. She had wandered to the temple and this man wouldn't let her walk home alone in the snow.

Around this time, I was making plans to go away to the camp for the summer. My mother sat me down and asked if I wanted to even know if my grandmother passed away while I was at camp. I would be several hours away and, because Jewish funerals have to be performed fairly soon after death, there would probably not be time to get me. Plus, it was an academic program and nothing was more important to my family than academics. Did I want to potentially miss three days of a class that was only three weeks long? To this day, I appreciate that my parents respected me enough to make it my decisions. I told them I didn't want to know. But in the back of my mind I wondered how they would manage to not let me know.

The whole discussion became irrelevant on the weekend of my sixteenth birthday. My older sister had gotten my father and me tickets to a play as a birthday present. But my grandmother's sister called that morning to say that Grandma had fallen out of bed and they couldn't get her up. My aunt and uncle refused to call the ambulance themselves, so my father and I would have to detour into Brooklyn before we went to Greenwich Village for the show.

The first half of my birthday was spent in the emergency room of Coney Island hospital standing by a weak, shrunken version of my once strong grandmother. This stranger in the bed didn't even know who I was. I was terrified for the first time in my life.

Two weeks later, my mother asked my sisters and I if we wanted to visit our grandmother one last time. As the only one who had seen her recently, I was the first to say no. That woman in the hospital wasn't my grandmother any more. It was too late to say goodbye to my grandmother. She was long gone.