That's My Bix!

In the middle of all of this, my grandmother has been diagnosed with hardcore balls to the wall bad MF cancer. The kind that is very much not at all good. I try to respect her privacy here (she is my Mafia Grandma after all) but it’s probably not spilling anything major to say that she’s got like seven rounds of chemo on the calendar over as many weeks and that’s just what we’re starting with. My aunt Drusilla has been shouldering the bulk of her care, with my mother and Aunt Brunhilda taking to lackadaisically flitting in and out and refusing to take much accountability. They have an attitude that it’s Aunt Drusilla’s job, because she’s never been married or something? Ignoring the fact that neither my mother or Aunt Brunhilda are currently married, this is how the logic in this family goes. So, in interest of not overburdening my maiden aunt, some of the load has fallen to me and my sister, who is, by the way, leaving for month-long gig in India next week.

So I’m doing my grandmother’s grocery shopping (apparently some of which ends up getting snarfed by Aunt Brunhilda because “Grandma can’t eat all of that!” so she sends it home with her kids to help them save money. I have no idea how long this “shopping in Grandma’s refrigerator” has been going on but apparently it’s not a new thing, or so I’ve heard from the gossip tree, which is ridiculously in overdrive amid the three sisters who tend to act like MacBeth’s witches at best and lash out at each other the rest of the time) and trying to find someone to cut down the tree in her backyard that split in half during a storm while she was in surgery and then taking her to appointments and fetching her medication from Walgreens, all the while she keeps telling me not to bother, because Aunt Drusilla is going to do it. Aunt Drusilla who is begging for anyone to help her while on the other side of the room, Grandma is waving us away, telling us not to worry. It’s fun to argue with her.

It’s these little things that you don’t consider when a family member takes ill.  Dealing with the realities of when my grandmother’s nurse is supposed to be at the house versus when my mother is supposed to be there (except isn’t), dealing with the very real fact that she has tubes that need to be cleaned and she can’t reach them and Medicare doesn’t cover a daily nurse, so family members have to take up the slack. My grandmother is uncomfortable with relying on anyone and we’ve all come to the realization that to impress upon her the idea of moving to an assisted living facility would very likely mean that she’d get sick of all of this neediness and decline to pursue treatment, and since that would mean she’d have no chance at all, we’re at the mercy of these realities. It’s not a burden, not at all, and I am not complaining but I also would be lying if I didn’t say that I really would desperately love to emulate my mother and her sister and pretend that my grandmother’s illness is just a temporary blip.

That’s really the worst part. I was sitting in the chair next to her at a cancer wig shop, watching this very strong-willed woman come to the slow realization that she is powerless to control even so much as the hair on her head because this thing eats at her from the inside. She regards her reflection wearing a stranger’s shiny hair that is too large for her head, a young girl’s Rachel bob with a 79-year-old face peeking out from under it. She turns to me and says “You never think about water until the well runs dry.” And yet, that’s all I can do right now. How much is left. How long we can make it last?