Today we visited my grandfather in his nursing home, St. Benedict Center, in St. Cloud. When we arrived my grandma was in the middle of telling him a story from his childhood that had been reprinted in the Chisolm Times. Hail the size of men's heads had fallen from the sky over 70 years ago. My grandpa was commenting about how big the hail actually was, and how he hid from the hail in his cellar. To give a little background, my grandfather has had multiple strokes, and he simply is not the same sharp witted man that he used to be.
I was looking at the sheets and pictures posted around his room. Instruction sheets that said things like, "Richard swam for 35+ years at the veteran's center (VERY STRONG)" or, "Andre Boccelli and classical music will calm him" also, "Once a fighter pilot in WW2, crashed his plane in the South Pacific." Although I turned toward this wall to avoid crying in the cramped and awkward space, I noticed that his whole life seemed to have marginalized into a page of statements of these kind of facts- good conversation points and distractions, it seemed, to help with difficult patients.
My family was visiting my grandfather before taking my grandmother to her family's lake home, a place she had not revisited for any length of time in the past five years. It was a favorite place of my grandpa's. When he found out where we were going, he spoke incoherently, and asked questions about going home, coming with us to the cabin, and always referred back to the head-sized-hail. "Can I go home?" he asked. I remember when my grandma told him that they were moving from their home in the historic district of St. Cloud; he cried and cried, he loved his house so. His children grew up there, he built and painted and fixed. I know when he asked to go home he was asking to go to 223 South Street, not the new townhouse that my grandma now lived in. Grandpa asked where the group of us was going. We told him, and he said, "Well, I'm not doing anything..." "I could go with you..." Although he seems emotionally unattached, I think he is very present and aware that he is left out a lot of the time.
The day at the cabin was like usual- mowing the long grass, repairing the dock, reconstructing the beach, and then after an afternoon of work, a picnic lunch and windsurfing. We taught Phe how to run and jump off the dock after a stick. After a while, she started to jump off the dock for the heck of it; like a little kid off the diving board.
I kept thinking back to my grandpa- how much I miss the old him, and how much it hurts to see him deteriorate. I guess you'd have had to know my grandpa when he was well to understand how hard of a situation this was, He is so dependent on others now, something that I know he doesn't like, but really can't help.
