Nana has died

A great 2011 so far isn’t it?

And it’s another one of those highly conflicted deaths where you know what you’re supposed to feel and what you actually feel is nowhere close to it and then you feel guilty and it’s all snarled.

Nana was 92. She was registered blind. She was deaf (technically she could wear hearing aids to give her decent hearing but… she couldn’t understand them and was horrified by the things in her ears). She had advanced alzheimers. Very advanced. For the last 10 years she’s gone from having odd, slightly disturbing and concerning moments, to being completely disconnected from reality.

She didn’t know anyone, she didn’t remember anyone. She thought she was a child again and wanted her mum and dad and didn’t understand why everyone was keeping them from her. She was always angry, always said – for months, years. She used to scream and rage, or sit and just chant “nana, nana, nana, nana”(she didn’t know her grandmothers, so we didn’t even know who she was calling for) for hours upon hours on end until you had to beg her to drink. And she’d bite and scratch and punch and pinch. And she’d taken to wandering, she’d just get up and walk. She couldn’t get out of the sheltered home she was in, but she’d just walk the corridor for hours and hours until she fell over exhausted or someone managed to convince her to sit down – which was so hard because she wouldn’t – couldn’t – listen and she couldn’t understand and she was looking for things that were long gone or maybe never existed and she couldn’t even tell you what she was looking for. And she’d be angry and upset and cry because she never found it.

But above all I know that in the last… 6 months? Year? 2 years? Gods, 5 years? She has never been happy. She has been constantly afraid and upset and angry. Every damn waking moment she has lived in a personal hell of uncertainty and loss and rage.

And I look at that and her passing and I think… relief. Relief that she is, for the first time in years, not upset, not sad, not angry, not grieving, not raging, not fearing, not endlessly, constantly unhappy.

And I think that is something that the whole family feels.
I think dad’s having problems above and beyond what’s natural. He’s generally incapable of dealing with grief and emotion. He wants to be strong for someone but he’s the primary griever. When granddad died my brother and I were children, he could be strong and powerful for us. He doesn’t have to do that now and I don’t think he, a man who wouldn’t let himself cry at his own dad’s funeral, can deal with his own grief without distraction.
Worst I think is that while he grieves he feels the same relief we all do. And that makes him feel guilty – after all, one shouldn’t feel relief about one’s mother’s passing, right? Even if it’s natural and reasonable – well, we’re not always rational and reasonable people are we? So dad’s several kinds of conflicted and needs to work this through.

What annoys me personally the most is that I don’t remember nana. She’s been falling to this disease for 10 years. I can’t remember her before it had her, it’s all been replaced by her confusion and fear and anger. I can’t remember her as my grandmother, as a person who even knew she had grandchildren let alone knew who I was. I can’t grieve for her because all my memories of her are overwhelmed by who she became.

I feel rather angry about that. I grieved for my other 3 deceased grandparents. I wept for them, I felt pain, I missed them and I clung to fond memories of them. I’ve lost that and Nana lost that. She deserved to have been loved and lost and grieved for just as my other 3 grandparents were – but the disease didn’t just take her, it took the memory of her as well and the opportunity to properly respect and mourn her.

Not good times. Not good times at all