week in a flash (week 26)

1. Guess what?  I get to leave for Colorado tomorrow for Thanksgiving break!!!  Yaaaa!!!  Four whole days and one half-day in the great state of CO!!!!!  I get to see my parentals, my Uncle and his fam, my cat and the new Harry Potter movie!!  So excited!!!!!!!  Yaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2. This is from my PR book in the chapter about  writing ~ “Writing is easy,” said U.S. journalist and playwright Gene Fowler. “All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”  (and a little later)  Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway declared, “Writing is easy.  Just open a vein and bleed on paper.”  ~ I laughed at both of those quotations  :D

3. I thought my mom would enjoy this one – this is from my Twitter feed there was this little movement the other day where people would tweet something that they would have told their 16-yr-old self and this one came from someone who posts as Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter ~ Lord_Voldemort7 #tweetyour16yearoldself Choose Neville Longbottom! Choose Neville Longbottom!

4. I’ve been watching waaaaaay too many Westerns, the other night I dreamt that I was part of a cattle drive (the cattle were owned by my dad) and that I trained my own horse (she was beautiful though, I liked that part of it).  Wow.

5. I looked out my peephole the other morning and it took me a few minutes to realize that what I was seeing wasn’t the sun shining brightly but was in fact bright, white snow on the ground…damn snow (and winter) has arrived in SoDak.  That wasn’t so bad though because it was a light snowfall and was mostly gone by nightfall.  I’m hoping that any blizzard-type weather waits until I’m not living in the state anymore…

6. You know I might have been able to handle living away from the mountains of CO and farther away from family if it weren’t for the damn wind in this state, it’s unbelievable!

7. Days to graduation = 17

w/ weekends and holidays = 25

w/o holidays = 21, by the next week-in-a-flash this one won’t be necessary because the number will be the same as w/ weekends and holidays…hmmm…

8. Bored, excited, stressed, tired…I am so eager to just be done already.

9. I wonder if, sometimes, my strong reactions to things and my passions come off as bitchiness…*sigh* why is it so hard to talk to people about hot button issues without it dissolving into an argument?  I just don’t understand, I mean I understand being passionate about an issue and wanting to convey to people the reason for that passion but that doesn’t mean you have to dismiss someonelse’s viewpoint, does it?  That’s what I don’t understand, I don’t understand being so locked into an opinion that anytime someone raises an opposing view you are unable to proceed in the discussion and remain polite…I try, I really try to remain open-minded while still retaining my views and beliefs and I try to give other people’s views and opinions a fair shake but I also like, adore engaging in discussion and debate. I like it when people disagree with me, I like it when someone has a different point of view but dammit I don’t like it when people are so set in their ways and so locked in the status quo that they dismiss me out of hand.  I just wish that I could find a way to engage in discussion and debate with others that doesn’t end in an argument…that’s all.

10. The song and the video brought me to tears, so beautiful!

11. This was too awesome not to share, read and enjoy! http://thenoreaster.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/sunbeams-12/

12. I have a professor who can’t remember my name in class but when I pass this professor in the hallways they call me by name and say hi..wierd, maybe there’s some sort of memory vortex in the classroom…

13. Yesterday I looked outside and it was…well, I guess it depends on how much you like snow, it was either a winter wonderland or an arctic tundra.  I prefer arctic tundra.  (btw #5 happened either Wednesday or Thursday of last week, completely unrelated).

Gram’s story

Yes this is a reprint for those of you who read my blog by way of The NorEaster’s but I felt this was the right thing to do.  Here is my Gram’s story with (hope he doesn’t mind) The NorEaster’s intro as well as mine.  Twice, so really there are three into’s.  :)  But anyway here you go.

Oftentimes, we mistakenly limit miracles to extraordinary, eye-popping occurances–a winning lottery ticket, a medical recovery, a car starting on a cold winter morning.  Perhaps a house that sells for half a million dollars just before the market dries up–which, of course, only means that we benefit while someone else loses out.  Yes, often we relate miracles to what we want, instead of glimpsing God in the details of this decaying world.  We might see the suffering of others and wonder, “How could God allow that?”  But when suffering hits home hard, as it has for this Storm StoryTeller, we eventyually realize that the wind and the rain and the cold is so great that only the dawn of a new world, without our loved one, alleviates our suffering.  But through it all, God gives us the spiritual strength and stamina to run our own enduring race, the marathon of survival to our promised Crown of Life.  Survival is the miracle of life.

INTRODUCTION

When I first signed up for Nor’s Storm Stories, I thought long and hard about what I should write about.  I decided against writing on my struggle with depression since I covered that pretty well already so I asked God what I should write and His answer was this: “Write about Gram.”  I said ok and started.  Then stopped.  And cried and said, “no way, I’m not doing this…I’ll write about the ‘church’, [the one that burned me].”  God was quiet.  I didn’t do anything for a while then I found myself sitting down and writing about Gram.  I stopped again and cried.  I kept thinking how this wasn’t going to work; I should pick another topic, blah, blah, blah.  I asked God if He was sure I should write about this, just in case you are wondering He said yes.  So I wrote it.  Madre, Padre if you read this I apologize for any facts I may have gotten wrong or anything I might not have remembered accurately.  Everyone else, here’s my Gram’s story and my family’s storm story.

MY GRANDMOTHER NEYSA

I was in the fourth grade when Gram got sick; at least that’s what my Madre tells me.  My personal memories of when exactly Gram got sick are fuzzy.  I remember hearing about an incident which I think got the whole crazy train started where Mall Security in California had to call my dad to get the license plate number of my Gram’s vehicle because she had forgotten where she parked it and had left my 90-some-odd-year-old great-grandmother in the van in the middle of summer.  But I don’t remember how old I was.  It had to have been around fourth or fifth grade because my bro and I were still being home-schooled and were still living in Mountain City, Nevada.  And then I remember hearing something about how Gram and Granny had been surviving off of grilled-cheese sandwiches and that Gram had been spending all of her money on useless pointless things.  The next thing I remember is driving up to California and moving her and Granny out of their house.  I remember how at the time I thought that was the worst thing ever because I loved Gram’s house and was so disappointed that we had to sell it.  Turns out that wasn’t the worst thing ever.  So we moved her and Granny to Mountain City with us.  It was a tiny town about a day from good medical facilities and any sort of civilization.  I don’t remember when Gram was officially diagnosed but I remember it was difficult to get someone to definitively diagnose her.  All the freaking doctors wouldn’t commit or couldn’t agree on what was wrong with her or if there was even anything wrong with her.  Even when it was obvious they kept saying oh it’s nothing to worry about its just old age.  Finally one of the doctors gave us a name for the thing that was killing my Gram: Alzheimer’s.  We had no idea what to expect.  I mean you always hear people joke about having Alzheimer’s when they get a little forgetful, but it doesn’t come close to the actual nightmare of the disease.  It eats away a person’s mind.  They forget in sort of a timeline.  The earliest or most present stuff goes first and then the latest or past stuff goes.  It’s painful to watch and I’m sure it must be terrifying to go through.  And then there are all these nice little side-effects that no one ever warns you about.  Gram became paranoid; we had to keep her from watching the television because she couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy and would try and call the cops, she hallucinated and worst of all, in my opinion, her personality changed.  We had to lock the house up at night because she’d wake up, not remember or recognize where she was and wander around the streets.  We moved from Mountain City to Spring Creek (which is a suburb of Elko, Nevada) after a few months so that we could be closer to medical facilities and nursing homes when the time came.  Granny moved in with relatives in New Mexico. At the time I didn’t understand why she did that but thinking back on it now I don’t blame her.  Can you imagine watching your child lose their mind, their memories until nothing is left?  Anyway so Granny moved to New Mexico and Gram was with us.  My memories of this entire thing are kind of fractured.  I believe that I separated school and friends into a different space from home, family and Gram.  So even though I remember them all happening in the same place I’ve segregated the time period it all happened in.  It was easier for me to deal with it that way.

There are a number of small incidents that I remember most clearly.  Little snapshots in my mind that show what Alzheimer’s did to my Gram.  She used to be the sort of Grandmother that’s the cause for all those T-shirts saying “spoiled by Grandma” and stuff like that.  Gram always had these little jars of candy around her house that my bro and I had full, free access to.  She would let us eat breakfast in front of the television on weekends and watch cartoons.  During the weekday (we lived with her for a time) when it was just me and her and Granny after I had finished my bowl of cereal she would pour some more milk in my bowl because I loved drinking the milk that was leftover and there was never enough.  She used to take me with her to her Salon appointments and the ladies would let me sit on the floor and play with my toy horse, Beauty.  My bro and I pretty much owned her backyard and she would let us use her bathtub sometimes which was like getting chocolate for dinner.  She was the one I remember telling me that scabs were God’s band-aid.  And then she got sick.  I remember watching her walk down our hallway with her walker tilted up one side and when my mom tried to get her to put the walker down so she wouldn’t fall she got mad and insisted that she was walking on a hill.  Our house was level.  I remember one particularly bad afternoon she stood in the kitchen and put her head between her knees because she said there were bugs in her head and that was the only way to stop them.  My brother yelled at her.  Told her it wasn’t bugs that she had Alzheimer’s and was forgetting everything.  I think he was angry, whether it was at her or God I don’t know.  I don’t remember being mad, just heartbroken.  I don’t think it was until years later that I realized I was angry.  But not at God or Gram, I think I was angry at my parents for taking her in, for not putting her in a nursing home sooner, for always being responsible and not taking the easy way out.  I remember her walking out of her room with her shirt unbuttoned and when we tried to tell her she got mad, told us her shirt was buttoned and wouldn’t let my mom help her so instead we convinced her to change her shirt and to let me and mom help pick out a new one.  I remember her and my mom arguing a lot.  I remember her walking into my room once, I was in bed and she asked me what I was doing in her room.  I tried telling her it wasn’t her room but she didn’t believe me and kept asking me why I was in her room.  It wasn’t until mom and dad came over and confirmed what I was saying that she finally remembered and then she tried playing it off saying something like “I knew this wasn’t my room I was just checking on her (me).”  We all pretended we knew that.  I remember her getting sick more than once and taking her to the hospital where she hallucinated a little boy sitting on her plate “helping her eat” her meat and another visit where she punched my mom.  I remember the last straw the incident that prompted my parents to finally put her in a nursing home.  There was this huge fight between her, dad and mom.  I sat in the bathroom the whole time crying and just praying it would stop.  Mom found me and her and dad talked and decided it was time to put Gram in the nursing home.  None of this was helped by her paranoia at several points over the course of the year or so she was living with us she became convinced that we were trying to kill her and in turn convinced one of my uncles who then turned around and told us we were, not only gold-digging murderers, but damned and non-existent in God’s eyes.  She was in the nursing home for I think it was two years.

There were a few good things that happened during this time.  There was this one time we went out to eat at a local restaurant, it was one of her good days.  We had almost finished eating; my mom had a piece of steak left over and had given to my brother (the bottomless pit).  Well he had to go to the restroom so he left the table and my grandmother reached over and oh so innocently took the leftover piece of mom’s steak off of my bro’s plate and set it in her lap.  My brother came back and sat down and looked down at his plate.  The steak was gone.  He looked over at my mom with this look like “what did you do?  Why would you do that?”  And then my Gram held up the piece of steak and went “Na-na-na-na,” tauntingly.  We cracked up.  It was hilarious.  The only other good memory of have of her during all that time is after she went into a nursing home down in Colorado.  We spent Christmas that year with her and family members from my dad’s side of the family.  It was the last time I saw not only Gram but one of my uncles and his family (he was the one that thought we were of the devil).  It was both the best and worst Christmas.  It started badly in my opinion; firstly she didn’t recognize us you could tell because she’d smile at you with this sort of vacant expression.  And then she opened a present from someone that was a picture frame with pictures of family in it.  Seemed like a good idea until she saw a picture of my uncle E who had died a year or so earlier from a heart-attack and she looked up and asked us where he was.  We had to tell her that he had passed away.  The look on her face made me want to hit someone, her heart broke all over again.  But then we went to my other uncles’ house (uncle R) to open the presents from him and my family.  Gram was still confused.  She kept asking how we were going to get everything back to Nevada.  We just kept saying don’t worry, we’ll manage it.  And then there was this one point in the evening Gram had just finished opening one of the presents we were just kind of milling around, I was sitting next to Gram.  At that point I had pretty much checked out mentally and was just floating.  Gram put her hand on my arm and clear as a bell said “(my name) can you get me a glass of water?”  I checked back in pretty quickly and said, “Sure Gram,” walked into the kitchen and cried.  I remember telling my mom and I think she hugged me.  I remember thanking God, just telling Him thank you.  That was the last time I saw Gram alive.  I know she got progressively worse.  She forgot how to use a phone, forgot that she’d been married twice and then she forgot how to chew.  After that I began ignoring the constant updates, or at least pretending I was ignoring them.  But I heard it all, she developed Parkinson’s and her muscles atrophied, she stopped dyeing her hair, she lost a lot of weight and then she died.  I didn’t even cry.  I was relieved, maybe even glad.  It was the second time during this whole ordeal that I thanked God.  It sounds horrible but I just wanted it to be over, I wanted her to be at peace and for all of this to be done.  I was happy that she had gone home, she was whole again and I knew God would take care of her now.  Just like He had taken care of me and my family, I count it among one of the miracles of my life that we managed to survive as a family through Gram’s illness.  God managed to keep us together and keep us strong, that wasn’t the first (or last) storm we went through as a family.  But we survived (and continue to do so).  Thank God.