27 March 2002

This month's On Display collaboration topic is: Write about someone you love.

A few days ago, I got an e-mail from my grandmother. My grandfather's doctor believes that he has less than a year to live, and has recommended that my grandmother sign up for hospice care for him, to make his last months as comfortable as possible. Grandmom wondered if she had done the right thing.

My grandmother is frightened and lonely. Which, I must admit, is a thing altogether outside my experience of her. But I think about losing Matt, and I recall that my grandparents have been married for more than sixty years... And I think, she's still stronger than I think I could be in her shoes.

Kris is a hospice nurse, and what I have learned from her has filled me with nothing but the most profound respect for the work these people do. I reassured my grandmother, as she obviously wanted, that it was the right thing to do. The quality of my grandfather's life has been declining steadily.

This picture was taken at my brother's wedding, a little less than two years ago. At that time, he was still mentally alert, but he could barely walk. Since then, his health has declined to the point where he's practically bedridden, and much of the time his mind is clouded. My grandmother's e-mails these past few months have been full of pseudo-optimistic things like, "He was lucid enough this morning for a little conversation. I read him your last letter, and I think he understood most of it."

I do think hospice care was the right thing for my grandmother to do. Taking care of him alone has been draining her reserves, both physical and mental. But it's easy to be practical from a thousand miles away. Yesterday I talked to my manager about bereavement leave. It will be six months or more before I need it.

My father and his brother have been trying to help my grandmother with the practical things. She can do them, but I think it comforts all three of them for her to ask them for advice. The same way it comforts her to exchange e-mails with me and pretend to be positive about things, to bury herself in my reports of gardening plans or vacations.

I'm not afraid for my grandfather. I'm sad, but... his life is already over. We're just waiting for the body to catch up.

I'm afraid for my grandmother.

This morning, as I was getting out of my car, already mentally composing this journal entry, I happened to look at the ground beside the sidewalk.

I've seen four-leaf clovers before. A friend of my parents' even found one just outside the church before Matt and I got married, and gave it to us in the receiving line. We still have it, pressed between the pages of the guest book.

But I've never found one before. I bent down to look. A four-leaf clover, right enough. And another, just next to it. For a heartbeat, I wondered if I was actually looking at clover at all - but all the surrounding stalks only had three leaves. Two four-leaf clovers.

Two Lucks. I looked at them for a long moment, and then picked them both.

It wouldn't have felt right to separate them.

--Liz