***Death TW***

My grandmother passed away today. I have spent hours attempting to sort through the cacophony of competing emotions that have been vying to take hold of me during this time. But over the course of the day this clamor of grief, guilt, sadness and regret has been drowned out by a feeling of numbness that envelopes me like a blanket, muffling everything.

When my sister told me with cracking voice that my grandmother had had a stroke early this morning, that she was on life support—hooked to machines to keep her breath flowing and her body “alive”—it didn’t feel real. “Alive.” What did that word mean? Furnished only with the information that could be quickly transmitted by my father (already on the road by 9 am) over the phone, I tried to make sense of the little that I had. “It doesn’t look good;” “she’s on life support;” “the doctors think that she only has a few hours left.” But what did that mean to the body laying on that hospital bed; to the woman who was my grandmother? I wondered, distantly, about what to make of this body—the one that they were trying so hard to keep “alive.” Was this still my grandmother, or was she already gone?

My physical distance from the event gave me a strangely removed feeling from all of this. “You should be inconsolable,” I berated myself. “Why aren’t you crying?” The emotions did hit me, but intermittently throughout the day; as the tides of numbness ebbed I was left with grief and guilt, sharp and hard as the broken shells that lie beneath the ocean water. But I was always soon overtaken again by a dull and numb feeling that was approximate to “normal.”

I had no context for what was happening. The last time I spoke to my grandmother, she had sounded as good as ever. It was a typical phone conversation for us; she talked about her garden and the birds that she worked so hard to create a home for in her backyard, and I told her about my knitting projects and that, no, I hadn’t had a chance to try out the spinning wheel that she had given to me and my sisters yet. The last time I saw her she had stood on the car pad in front of her house, waving as I drove away down the dirt road lined with the pine trees that smelled so clean and bright.

When I tried to think of her as she now was, it was these images that came to mind—it was the sound of her voice on the phone that I thought of, not the beeping of the heart monitor she was now attached to; the smell of the pine trees as I watched her fade into the distance, and not the image of her unresponsive body. These sensory memories—these sights, sounds, and smells—were far more real to me than the actual reality of my grandmother’s situation. I had to force myself to confront this throughout the day—I had to force myself to listen for the grief, the loss, the guilt, over the muffling numbness.

In her living will, my grandmother made it clear that she did not want to be kept alive like this. Out of respect for her wishes, she was taken off life support late this evening. As absolutely devastating as this decision was, I was glad that it was hers to make. I was glad that up until the very end my grandmother—the strong, fearless, trailblazing WWII marine and mother of three—had the final say in determining when her incredible life came to an end.