My grandmother is visiting my parents and I'm visiting my parents. So that works out well, don't you think?
Gram is getting old. Looking old, I mean. Her face looks the same, but she looks tired and often has the distant look of a person who isn't engaged in the conversation. I think she's 87. That's not young, is it?
I saw pictures of her when AngerTrain was little. She looks like a regular person. It seems weird, but she's always been old to me. She's always been less speedy than I would have liked. She's always been convinced that things shouldn't be the way that they are, that they should be the way they were.
So now, although the same things are true, they're more and extra true. She's less speedy now. And she has a cane. She's convinced that people should behave this way or that way, but she isn't in touch enough to know that things aren't the way they were, that they can't ever be the way they were, that they don't resemble the way they were, that people don't know they were different at all.
I sat next to her tonight while we watched a little tv. I asked for a blanket because she looked cold. She put her hands on my leg and said, "You're so warm. My hands are cold." I said that they were, indeed, cold. "You can feel that they're cold?" Yep. They were cold.
She must have warmed up, though, because she fell asleep. I rubbed her neck a little, she's so delicate, and she fell asleep. Powerful me! Or maybe weak her.
I worry.
My UnkieP has his special "old lady falling down" radar in high gear. Gram is teetering a lot. I know it's not unusual or new or anything different from what everyone else in the world has experienced. It's just that it's happening to me now, and it's scary.
Posted by dotty at October 18, 2005 11:23 PM