Bad Feeling

It is not the first time I have had this feeling – a bad feeling – like the end is near.  This disease is such an emotional roller coaster.  Gram goes through phases; she’s down for a few days, then back up and about and crazy.  She stops eating for a while, and then just as quickly as she stopped, she starts eating again.  One never knows at this point.  Her hospice record – being placed on and discharged twice – demonstrates this idea well.  I look at each visit as potentially the last.

She slept all day they told me when I called earlier to see if she was awake, in the hopes of bringing her a fried chicken dinner.  “She is not,” the person on the other end of the phone said.  “And she will not wake up.”   When I subsequently arrived and went to her room, I pulled back the blankets to see if she needed her diaper changed.  She opened her eyes and kept them open for a while.  But she was despondent and distant.  Her eyes looked at me and beyond me at the same time – as if she saw something else.  I talked to her and she just stared at me.  I turned the TV on and she just stared at that.  Her facial expression was blank- vacant.  I sat with her for a while, her eyes jetting back and forth between the TV and me, but as if not seeing either.  She dozed.  The room was so hot that I was down to my T-shirt by the time I left.  Gram, on the other hand, was covered in blankets.  There was an occasional deep sigh and groans, but no movement.  I hate seeing her like this.

I got up to leave and kissed her on her forehead as I always do.  “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, as I always do.  She nodded and in a whisper voice, mumbled some words that I could not make out.  She closed her eyes once again.  As I walked out, I thought, God, I hope I don’t get a call tonight.