My Amazing Grandmother

 

That's my grandmother, Irene...but everyone calls her GG. It started when my children needed a way to tell the difference between Grandma and Great- Grandma. GG. With her is one of my sons, Steven, at his graduation from Air Force BMT. But I'm getting ahead of myself....

You see, two years ago today, GG moved in with my family. It wasn't a run-of-the-mill "Grandma can't live alone any more" move. No, this one had more urgency. On January 25,2011 I was on a bus full of 7th and 8th graders in Washington DC for the March for Life ( and class trip). We had just finished off our plans and I gave the driver the go-ahead to make way toward Ohio. My mom called: GG was in the hospital, and it wasn't good. I cried when I hung up the phone. God bless Jim Riepenhoff for sitting there with me on that long drive home.

We arrived back in Lima around 3am, I got all the kids and ( most of) their stuff into the correct vehicles and headed home. When the alarm went off at 6am, my husband asked me if I wanted to go to Cleveland to see GG. He took the day off of work, and we took our two youngest with us to say good-bye to my 91 year-old grandmother. At all of  5'2" and 100 pounds soaking wet, she looked lost in the hospital bed.She had a wound that got infected and the infection got into her bloodstream. During some tests at the hospital, she awoke disoriented, panicked and had a heart attack. Her kidneys were failing. The doctors said she was too old for a transplant, too frail for dialysis... so let's just put her in hospice. They wrote her off. There will be a LOT more of this coming with Obamacare- only the government will decide whose life has value.

GG felt horrible and - I learned later- she thought 'hospice' meant 'nursing home.'  For the record- my husband, Tim never gave up on her, "You grandmother is feisty. Don't count her out!"

I then went through the very frustrating experience of getting a priest to the hospital to anoint her. Frustrating because- as my husband points out- I have 8 priests in my cell phone contacts who would- and HAVE- gone to anoint someone because I asked them to. But that's in Lima/ Toledo Diocese. God bless you in Cleveland if you aren't actively dying and need anointing! Persistence paid off.

Over the next few weeks, my car made a lot of trips to Cleveland. We cleaned out GG's apartment. She had put notes on many things so we knew who to give them to, not that our family is that large. Debbie left BG for a couple days to help. My uncle flew in to help with sorting through things, then we had an estate sale. The day of the sale, my mother looked at me and said, "What are we going to do if she lives? We're selling all her stuff." I looked at her, and in the presence of my 12 and 14 years olds said, "She'll move in with us."

This photo was taken Feb. 9, 2011, around the time of the estate sale.

By the middle of February, her inpatient Medicare-paid hospice days were drying up quickly...and she wasn't. My mother started calculating how long her money would last, and looking at Holy Family or Malachi House. ** I talked to Tim about moving her to Lima. We had his dad living with us in his final illness, so this was not something beyond the pale for our family...and I couldn't stand the thought of my grandmother dying in a nursing home. But before we could bring her here, I had a boatload of work to do to convert the living room into HER room. I had staked my claim on her living room set... so we would be able to set the room up with her own furniture. First, though, I had to paint. No way around it- the colors would have been awful together. I also had projects for work resetting Walmart paint departments around western Ohio (involving construction, and "I" was the team lead on them) AND I had to coordinate Confirmation for both parishes, as my counterpart's son was critically ill and she wasn't working at the time. 

Cool thing? I painted the living room, dining room and foyer for under $50. Remember those paint sets? I snagged the clearance paint! :-) 

I circled the wagons, rounded up the troops and recruited our children's friends for furniture moving (including my grand piano and a huge computer hutch and large home office desk and credenza) . Tim found curtains and new rods. It all came together, and on March 3rd, St Rita's delivered the hospital bed, oxygen concentrator, wheelchair and commode 2 hours before the ambulance with GG pulled into the driveway.

As an aside... she got here as the LCC boys were getting home. She was hungry- and a little miffed that the guys in the ambulance wouldn't stop for a hamburger on the way. I sent the boys to Happy Daz for a burger...which she devoured....

As I said earlier, that was two years ago today. She had been bedridden for over 5 weeks and the hospice in Cleveland said she had 2 weeks to live. I said they would be the best 2 weeks of her life. I  brought her meals in bed for a couple days, then moved her to the wheelcahir and into the kitchen  to eat. She enjoyed sitting on the sofa...and Juneau helped keep an eye on her. This photo was taken March 11, 2011.

Hospice brought a gait belt and one day I told her we were going to just stand with the walker and see how that went. Well, she stood.... and took off across the living room floor to sit on the couch. We haven't used the wheelchair since- except when traveling or when we would go for longer walks outside. 

When my mother came to Lima on March 23 to celebrate GG's 92nd birthday...GG met her at the door. It really is something to celebrate a birthday with a person you were sure would not live to see that birthday! 

May 15th, as we ate breakfast, Juneau was eying GG and whining like she was mooching. Thing was- GG was eating a banana, and although GG will always give Juneau a bite of what she has, Juneau doesn't like bananas. I reminded Juneau of that, then watched as GG's faced drooped on both sides- she was having a stroke and Juneau knew! You can see the fire station from our back yard, I could hear the sirens before I had given 911 all the information. It was a mild stroke. The only lasting effect? Her memory improved!

Each day when the kids came home from school, Steven would sit next to GG and ask her to go to prom with him. She blushed. Time came for prom and after they had dinner, Steven and Mary stopped at the house and he danced the first dance of his senior prom in the driveway with his 92 year old great- grandmother.

She made it to Steven and Moose's high school graduations. She flew with Mary and me to San Antonio for Steven's Air Force BMT graduation. This photo was taken at the airport, February 1, 2012.

She went to the world premiere of Bee Dead last year. She went along for the ride on the one-mile Positive Addiction in 2012 ( we're going to start training for this year). She loves the St Rose Festival and generally wins on the Joes. :-) She has gained over 20 pounds and keeps complaining her clothes are shrinking and she needs new jeans because she can't button hers any more.She gets her hair done every Thursday and takes care of her personal needs herself. I'm the pill passer, chauffeur, and cook.

Oh- that wound that started all this? As of 3 weeks ago- it is completely healed!

She shares wonderful stories of growing up on a farm with a horse-drawn plow... her mother, the moonshiner during Prohibition...getting a job at a bank with an 8th grade education and working her way up to head of the department...helping my grandfather study for his exams to be an engineer on the old Penn-Central ... rationing during WWII... the ice-box days, when you shopped for groceries every day...saving up money with a friend to share a banana split at the ice cream parlor when she was a girl in Galeen, MI... the dogs she has had throughout her life...I could go on and on! She is a living history text, and we are so blessed to have had this time with her- and look forward to celebrating birthday #94 on March 23rd!

** Holy Family Home and Malachi House are both AMAZING places. But they are for people with no money and/or no family to care for them. They are for the destitute. They do God's work there, but it was not where GG should be when she had family.