Blogging it out
My wife, Amy Raymond, wrote this last night, specifically intending for it to be posted on this blog. Amy is the assistant news editor at The Oklahoman and the editor of Viva Oklahoma, the company’s Spanish language publication. She’s also my favorite person.
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I am writing this now before the end arrives.
The health of my grandma, Irene Schmidt, has been declining precipitously in recent days.
I spoke to her on the phone on Sunday. We stayed away from a trip to Kansas because I had a cold and didn’t want to spread it. It was an incidental conversation. And it could be my last with her.
I’ve been waiting for the phone call — the one with the bad news and funeral plans.
Thursday night, I got a different kind of call. Bittersweet might be the best way to describe it.
There was the health update — she can barely drink and isn’t eating anything. She’s not able to talk very much but has gotten in a few zingers.
She said she had thoughts in her brain that wouldn’t come out. My cousin who was there visiting said she could get a new one of those in heaven.
“Put me in the front of the line, then,” my grandma said. ”I want a good one.”
Not being able to get thoughts out must be tough for a woman who readily speaks her mind.
She seems to be handling things OK, my mom says.
My grandma is 92 and a woman of great faith, so she’s ready for what comes next.
It’s that faith that was the rallying point Wednesday and Thursday for those in my family who are overseeing her care in these last days.
A chaplain asked my mom and aunt if they wanted to sing a hymn Wednesday. They’d been away from my grandma’s bed, but she heard singing and asked them to move nearer.
The chaplain bailed after about three hymns, my mother reports, but the others sang “every old church song you could ever think of” for about an hour and a half.
My grandma tried, unsuccessfully, to clap along with the singing.
And Thursday, she asked for and got a few more hours of song and the joy that comes with it.
My grandma is 92 and a woman of great faith, so she’s ready for what comes next.
I just hope the rest of us are, too.
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