2005-02-27

Things aren't at their best right now. I don't really feel the need to pour my heart out right now. Maybe I can just say that my grandfather, the one I've been living with for three years, is gone. The worst part is that he was in perfect health. He was eighty-three, the doctor was marvelling at how well he was doing just the week before. He'd had type 2 diabetes, but he'd lost so much weight, did every single thing the doctor told him to (and some that he'd seen in articles). He was seriously in such perfect health. Then I find him in his room on the floor. He was just getting dressed and he knocked his head on the dresser. There wasn't much bleeding on the outside. It was all inside.
A man can be perfectly fine one moment, then you knock on his bedroom door fifteen minutes later and he's on the floor and won't answer. We spent a week in the hospital with him before finding out there was no way he would live. Even with a respirator, he had no brain activity and his heartrate was falling. I have never been in such pain.
You can tell yourself that he went healthy and isn't it so much better that he didn't have to die sick and helpless? And it's not your fault. But it doesn't stop you from replaying that day over and over in your head and thinking of that one tiny thing you could have done so this wouldn't have happened. And it doesn't change the fact that you'll be going home to no one after you go back to California.

See, we're burying him here with my grandmother who he's been mourning three years. And everyone says that he's happy and with her. But we don't know for sure.

It feels like this is happening to someone else. Everything before the accident feels like a minute ago and everything since feels like it took years. It's been two weeks since he fell. Everything's out of joint. I can't make sense of my life anymore because he was such a huge part of it. I don't know how I'll go about my day without him.

And I don't know where I should live in a few months. I'm being pushed and pulled from coast to coast. Do I leave Uncle Joe and the kids when he's so sick? Do I move back East where everything won't remind me of him? I can't think of any of it now.