My Grandfather is Dying

Now I don't say things for pity, it is just a fact. He is aging, and he has literally given up on good health. The doctors have given up on him and put him in a nursing home to await the inevitable. It's not what they've said so much as what they've done that drives the point home.

I usually don't focus on death much, mostly because it isn't important to me. It has no real grasp on my life, and I refuse to let thoughts of that final departure taint my now with those I love. I'll miss them when they are gone, not beforehand.

What brings this to the blog is my mother. She called me in tears the other day needing me to come over and talk. She was worried about her father's passage, and needed someone to lean on in her grief.

Well I'm mean. I won't let her grieve until he is gone. He is still here, and she should cherish every moment for all it is worth instead of worrying about what we all know will happen to us at sometime.

Instead, I raged and complained. About the DRs who refuse to treat him aggressively, about his refusal to do any more rehabilitation, about the whole family's reluctance (and achingly slow forward movement) towards naturopathy for health, about nearly everything concerning my grandpa's current condition. See, I know for a fact that he can regain his health with the proper diet and natural healing methods, combined with traditional medicine and a lot of physical therapy. Give the man a DR more stubborn than he is who actually gives a carp, and grandfather will be walking (a little, with a walker) again in 2 years or less. He's been bed-ridden for over 4 years now, and the DRs keep sending him home with unhealed bedsores and other various infections. They just don't care anymore.

My mother stopped her crying, sat up straight, and agreed. She will try to convince my grandparents to see a naturopath here in the city. She will not mourn her father until he has moved beyond this life's journey, and she will try to enjoy the time she has left as if she doesn't know the end is near. It's really all she can do. That, or give up and cry in a ball into her pillow, possibly missing the last moments she may ever have with him because she is too busy missing what is still there.

To me, that is no choice at all.