While I attended ETSU, questionably pursuing a computer science degree, taking courses in JCL (job control language) and computer programming (learning to implement algorithms in Pascal), I wrote, edited and published a shortlived underground newspaper called the Swashbuckler, an alternative to the campus paper (and a takeoff on the ETSU mascot, the Buccaneer).
During that time, my grandfather suffered a stroke (or brain attack) and lay in a bed at Blount Memorial Hospital. I drove from Johnson City to Maryville to see my Pa-Paw, sitting with him by myself and talking to him at the urging of a nurse who told me stroke victims can still hear.
What did I say? Not knowing him well, I spoke of the positive influence he had on my sister and me, that Ma-Maw would soon be with him again (or looked forward to seeing him again) so it was all right if he felt like letting go and dying. He did not need to struggle to be alive for our sake if he didn't feel like it.
The nurse returned to the room and encouraged me to touch Pa-Paw so I patted him on the arm, noticing how thin his skin looked. I sat with him for a while and then told him goodbye.
Later, I wrote an article for my alternative paper, which I used years later as an entry for a short story contest, sponsored by a local public radio station, requiring the use of the phrase, "kudzu grows twelve inches a day."
While thinking about my cousins I saw at the funeral home yesterday, with whom I laughed as we looked at old family photos, while we stood next to and leaned against the coffin of Uncle Ralph, who looked a lot like my mental image of Pa-Paw in the hospital bed, I remembered the story I wrote:
I visited my grandfather last week. Stricken by a stroke a few days before, he lay on the hospital bed and gazed into the unknown. I looked at his face, not long ago a bastion of strength and source of wise sayings, now simply a wrap of yellowish-tan skin covering an old skull. The patriarch was gone, replaced by a vegetative hospital patient in a sterile room, dominated not by my grandfather’s country voice but by the noncolloquial voice of medicine. A tube ran from my grandfather’s nose to a gurgling oxygen machine on the wall. The slow drip of life from a glucose bag led to an IV needle which hung from a vein in his left wrist. His wheezing struck a rhythm in the still air.
I sat next to him, choking on the proverbial lump in my throat. I tried not to think about what I saw or felt. I let myself sit and stare at an old man.
This semblance of a human no longer was my grandfather. My grandfather had been a man who considered a cold as something to be ignored like a "pesky fly." In the 54 years he had been with his wife, he had lain on a hospital bed for two days because of a bladder problem. Otherwise, he put in his time at the aluminum plant, coming home everyday to work on his farm, pulling weeds and planting seeds so my mother and her brothers could have vegetables in winter. "A garden doesn’t grow by itself," he once said. "It must be nurtured to mature but weeds...well, I reckon kudzu grows twelve inches a day. Weeds can choke out a garden just like bad things can destroy a good man."
Before he went into a coma, he had said he didn’t want to be hooked to machines to live. Unfortunately, we didn’t get his wishes on paper, so there he lay, the tubes growing around him like that persistent Southern weed.
I cried as I left the hospital for the man who was my grandfather - he’s already dead (though his guidance lives forever in my mind) - his body’s supposed to die sometime this week.
= = =
I saw most of Ralph's family, most of my mother's family, ate a delicious late lunch at East Maryville Baptist Church (prepared by Patricia's Sunday school class, served graciously by Jill and Donna). In a sign of getting older, I, a Presbyterian, was the one who volunteered to lead the prayer before we ate the meal under the roof of a Baptist church with other family members from Methodist and Church of Christ parishes, Protestant denominational differences being a fact in dogma but not in general practice of religious ceremonies.
We should see some of Uncle Gordon's family at the funeral. I'm glad we had a family reunion of sorts (sans the elusive Barry) at my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party a few years ago.
On 1st June 2009, the crinum lily bulbs I planted at Mrs. Berry's house in Rogersville, Tennessee, are finally coming up. The ones I gave to Mom and Dad are blooming in Nort Port, Florida, and the ones I planted in Big Cove, Alabama, have one to two-foot long leaves -- a worthwhile geographical experiment.
On a personal note, I get tired of living with my thoughts in public, always enjoying a good sarcastic laugh with myself but not knowing what to say in crowds, especially when others are bathing me in compliments, because of fear of sounding boring, disingenuous or unoriginal. Yes, fear. I the adventurer have a weak, fearful side! I cannot handle compliments, which trigger memories of the cruel bullies of my youth who taunted me with fake compliments about my intelligence and getting preferential treatment by teachers (i.e., the teacher's pet) just before they pummeled me with complementary punches; the cute girls whose boyfriends set them up to compliment my good looks before revealing they were lying (even though I was/am good looking - go figure). I'd rather have been pummeled with Punch magazine!
Time to fix the toilet in the guest bathroom of my mother in-law's house. Real life awaits. %^P
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment