In Clemson

Last night, after two train rides, two flights, and one rush-hour shuttle-bus drive from the Charlotte Airport, I arrived in Clemson, South Carolina to visit my Grandmother. As soon as I rang the doorbell, I heard the familiar howls of Ginger, my Grandmother's dog, and the click of her nails on the wood as she made her way to the door. A few minutes later I heard the chain lock slide out and the deadbolt click open before my Grandmother slowly opened the heavy door, and I stepped into the foyer to embrace her.

My Mom had warned me that she would look different - weaker - than when I saw her last June, but I don't know if you're ever prepared to see the people you love literally shrinking before your eyes. She looked older, feebler, and so tired.

My Grandmother was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer last October (right around the time I had my nervous breakdown - it was an awesome fall, internet). Her doctors told us that if she went on intensive chemotherapy, she might have a year, but that the chemo would be aggressive and likely difficult for her eighty-four year old body to handle. If she opted for a lighter version of the chemotherapy, they said, she might have a few months. She chose option B.

We planned to spend Christmas in Clemson, and we all braced ourselves for the possibility that we might never see her again. I drove down to Clemson as soon as my classes ended last December, abandoning Preston and the dogs in Bryn Mawr for his last week of classes. I wrote one of my seminar papers stationed at her dining room table in between cooking our meals, running her errands, and making sure she took her five million medicines on time. I turned in that paper nearly a week late, and did not even care (neither, for that matter, did my professor). I knew that I had spent my time in the best possible way.

And then, after Christmas, she just kept living. She made it through the winter, and then into the spring. She was even able to see my youngest brother (and her youngest grandchild) graduate from high school in May. She had defied all the odds. After Mary and Luke's wedding, Preston and I made the drive down from Richmond to see her, positive that this would be our last visit.

But then the summer passed, and we still hadn't had a funeral - she was getting progressively weaker, but still able to maintain a watered-down version of her day-to-day routine at home (albeit with my Mom and my aunt as very frequent visitors), and she remained completely lucid. She mixes me up with my older cousin occasionally (coincidentally, the one who hates me), but otherwise she is as sharp as a tack.

When my Mom came up to Bryn Mawr a few weeks ago I asked her if she thought that I should go down to see Grandmother, and she told me that I probably should, if I wanted to see her before she died. All along I had been assuming that, when the time came, I would get a call from my Mom and that I would, without hesitation, drop everything and fly down to see my Grandmother before she died. That's what had happened when my Grandfather died five years ago, and I just assumed that that was how the death of a grandparent worked - you got a call and BAM you hit the road.

No, my mother assured me. That was not how this was going to work. The end would come suddenly and without warning; if I wanted to see her again, I needed to take the initiative and go NOW. Which is how, yesterday, I ended up taking about thirty-five (or three, whatever) types of transportation to find my way from Bryn Mawr to Clemson.

Almost as soon as I'd walked in the door last night, she needed to lie back down again. I texted Preston that I had arrived, and went over to the sofa where she was resting. Once she sat back up, I rubbed her back and could feel every bone, even through a thick sweater and a dress. A few weeks ago her doctors took her off the appetite stimulant that she'd been on for the last ten months, and since then, she just hasn't been hungry. The cancer is so far advanced that she just doesn't need food. It's heartbreaking.

When I went to replace the medicinal patch she wears on her arm, I was terrified that my nails would break her skin - it was like tissue paper. She told me to put the new patch on the fleshy part of her upper arm, which was, to my eyes, completely nonexistent. I gently pressed the patch down where she had indicated, and we sat quietly in the den together until eleven, with Ginger sticking to my Grandmother like glue. She knows that something is wrong.

The weekend will be quiet - she's taking morphine every four hours, and I think she'll sleep a lot. I know that she's ready to die - she's in pain and she's exhausted.  She's told all of us that she's ready to go. I've had a year to prepare for her death, and when I'm at home in Bryn Mawr, I find that I'm calm and at peace with the fact that one day in the near future, she will die. It will be hard and sad and awful but it will happen, and then, life will move on, because that's just the way things go.

Now that I'm here, however, in her presence, I find myself clingy and not quite ready. As in, I can't imagine that when I leave for the airport on Monday morning, I might never see my Grandmother again. It makes my stomach flip to think that the next time I come to Clemson, and hear Ginger's nails clicking on the wood floor as she makes her way to the front door, my Grandmother won't be there to calm her down.

Mostly, of course, I'm here because I want my Grandmother to feel supported and loved. I wanted her to have someone with her over this weekend (otherwise she would have had to call a nurse in to sit with her), and I did not want her to feel alone. But I'm also here for completely selfish reasons. I know that a big part of this weekend is about making myself ready - of taking in every moment, and hugging her as much as possible, and rubbing her back, and gently kissing her head, and listening to her talk softly to Ginger when she gets up from her nap. It's about saying goodbye and giving myself the time and space I need to grieve. It's self-protection. But selfish or not, I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm so glad that I'm here.