Hear Us Please...

Today is the latest I had my bath after waking. It’s coming close to half past noon already but the chores of the morning were just concluded.

Coming home has always been poignant but it has never touched the depth that it did today. It drives home the point that life is so much easier to assimilate and adapt to when you’re many miles away. It less guilty for one to say “but what can I do with this distance in between?!”

My aunt asked if I could help her with my grandma’s daily shower this morning cos my other aunt and uncle have their own things to attend to. Doing chores around the house has become the norm – we are after all now grown adults, running our own households. Besides, with my grandma being so withered as she is now, how difficult can it be to assist in lifting her from the bed to the bath?! Add to that, I may not be professionally trained, but I’ll be the next in line after the two nurses in the family to be exposed to healthcare as a reality.

Little did I know that what I had expected to be a sit-and-wait-for-15 minutes turned out to be a 2 hour affair.

You see, grandma has been bedridden since her fall 2 Christmas ago. Add with the fact that she is now about 7 years shy of a century in age, it is more or less a serious state of internal systems failure. She no longer has any control over many bits of her body.

As I waited each time my aunt checked if she was ready to come off the throne, it was evident that aunty’s sanity is shaved off that wee bit more. When we finally got her cleaned and out of the bath, as we made the trip, encouraging her to take that step forward towards the bed so we could dressed her, I could smell that she would need another cleaning. And that was the straw that broke the camel on my aunt’s back.

My aunt is not a bad person. She really isn’t. To do this, day-in, day-out even as she is in her own golden years, is not something I can see myself doing. I would have the mental strength to be able to take it. And I know it pains her to see grandma in the state that she is.

Last night, as I read Gwen’s daily posting, my heart broke when I read of Jemima and Ezaye. I sat on the couch and tears welled up in my eyes as I read of how Gwen cradled these babies and sang to them of joy awaiting them in our Father’s house.

Today those same emotions are brought right back to the surface that I had to hide in the backyard, using cigarette smoke to shield the break I know that was and is evident on my face.

I ache not for the burden that has been given to our family. We were all brought up right to know that it is a privilege, not a burden.

I ache for one plain simple fact through all this, my grandma is well aware of what is happening to her – this loss of control and the pain she deems to be bringing on to the ones who are taking care of her.

I ache cos we were all brought up by her, and so we carry in ourselves, the one fierce sense of independence. And if even in my quarantine period from suspected H1N1 I had refused any one to bring me food, I cannot imagine what goes through her mind (though I do not really need my imagine – she voices out her wish to be released from this earthly world often enough).

I leave tonight and there are no immediate plans for me to come back, unless I am ‘summoned” to.

I do not have any concrete plans on how to spend the rest of today and I am sorely tempted to go sit with her, hold her hand and do what Gwen did many thousand miles away with the babies Jemima and Ezaye.

I am sorely tempted to sit with her, hold her hand and sing in English:

Do you want to go to my Father’s house,

to my Father’s house, to my Father’s house?

Do you want to go, to my father’s house?

It has joy, joy, joy.

Honestly, if I thought my words had any clout with God at all, I would spend the rest of the day, the week, the month to do this daily with her until He hears our prayers. Instead, I guess the best that I can do for now is to simply ask:

God – let this cup pass from her…