On Sunday, I was jolted back to reality when I answered my dad’s call. On the other side of the line, I heard heavy breathing and a serious voice. “Your grandmother is in the hospital.” My breath stopped. “She went in because of a leg clot.” My breath resumed. “They fixed her leg.” Regular breathing returned. “But she had a stroke afterwards…” My ears hummed loudly and my heart beat furiously in my chest. I no longer heard a single word after that phrase. I’ve watched enough “House”, “Law and Order” and “CSI” to know what a stroke implied. On the one end, it could mean full recovery (very rare). In the middle, it could mean amnesia or another form of deterioration of the brain. Or… on the opposite end, the end I feared my grandma had come to, coma and inevitable death. “…Hello…? Hello? I think we lost her. No one’s answering…” I heard them. Both my parents’ voices. Loud and clear now. I couldn’t respond. I didn’t want to seem childish—who cries in their mid-twenties? But the tears had already started to pour. It took several minutes before I mustered out a wimpy “Okay.”
So there it is. My grandmother is in the hospital under critical condition due to an unsuspecting clot waiting in the darkness to attack when no one was watching—or too preoccupied with the clot in her leg. My grandmother—the one I grew up with, the one who raised me while my parents worked, the one who played peek-a-boo with me when I was a baby, the one who openly revealed to the whole world that I was her favorite—that person I had always (naively) believed would be in my life forever was now in a hospital bed unaware of the world around her.
Through the buckets of tears I had shed these past few days, I couldn’t help but wonder what this means. Death is inevitable. Death at an old age is even more inevitable. My grandmother was lucky and lived a fulfilling life (80+ years). Anyone would be lucky to have lived that long and through tough times like WWII, economic downturns, worrying about raising children, etc. Yet, I couldn’t help but feel it was unfair… especially to me. I had so much more to learn from her… so much more…
Now, the question has turned to me, when I look back at my life in 50-60 years, would I be satisfied with the life I had led? Would I have a smile on my face as I leave this realm?
Go to:
Part 2: reassessing the path
Part 3: follow the Nike slogan and “Just Do It”
