Gijew’s Weblog

So I just got the news that my grandmother is moving into an Alzheimers care facility… This woman was my mother for the majority of my pubescence and now she’s gone off the deep end… What the fuck is this shit? She has had one of the hardest lives I’ve ever heard of and get’s nothing for it.

She grew up in a small mining town in Nevada with a father that was the town policeman, justice of the peace, judge, lawyer and mine foreman. She loved him dearly but he died when she was 10 in 1933. Her mom married four times after that and each of those husband (who had life insurance policies) “mysteriously” died. She even had a favorite stepdad. He was a barber. She still has his scissors.

After her childhood she had to move to Reno to go to high school. You have to understand that on the roads we drive on today with the speeds of the cars we drive today it takes three hours to go from her home town to Reno. She was 14 and she lived that far away from her family. High school was just a blur of bad grades and poor social graces. She eventually got her diploma and went to work for 25 cents an hour at a stationary store waiting for the next thing to come along. And he did

His name was Paul. He was 20 and she was 17. They “courted” for a month or two and she married him. I later found out that she only married him because he was there and he got her out of Reno. He beat her… a lot. He would always buy a new car and sell it just about every month just to look cool. It put them really really far into debt. He was a bastard. This was the only man she was ever with…

Then in 1940 My uncle came along. Then my other uncle (who had fetal alcohol syndrome). Then my mom. My mom was choked by my retarded uncle when she was a baby so they had to put him into a home. Later her eldest son grew up, had three children with his wife, and left them. She had to deal with her three grandchildren being raised to hate her because of what her son did.

My mother actually got a hold of him by phone about a year ago. He was living happily with his third wife in San Fransisco. He felt virtually nothing about what he had done. What a fucker.

My mother grew up, left home to go to nursing school, graduated, and married my dad in 1974. Her father  (the abusive one) died in 1975 of hepatitis. My grandmother had to take car of him while he was sick.

She was the only working one in her house at this point. She worked for the phone company as the manager of the switch board operators. This was a terrible job. She was absolutely hated by her employees because she was forced to keep such strict rules. She had to fire anyone that was more than 30 seconds late even once. No matter the situation. If there was an ice storm it didn’t matter. If a child was sick it didn’t matter. she still had to fire them…

And then my mother had children. Me and my brother. We were the only ones of her five grand children that she ever knew. She came to hate my brother as he grew up because he reminded her of her late husband. He likes cars. That’s pretty much the only correlation. She likes me though. It’s nice to have.

And now we come to the end of her life. It’s been hard… I used to think that everybody catches a break every once in a while but now I don’t know. I would have thought a woman with a life like hers would at least be able to die with some dignity but I guess not. You might say that she still has the chance to die happily but I worked in Alzheimers care for a year. I know what happens to people when they die of Alzheimers. It’s not dignified. It’s not happy. It’s just death.

There never really is anything dignified about death. There is no music. There are no lights. There are no fireworks. You just stop breathing. Then it’s over. You can kinda tell when someone dies though. If you’re in the room it gets kinda cold all of the sudden… Fuck.