My last memory of my grandmother is of her sitting in her dressing gown in a raised hospital bed, snot oozing out from her nose underneath her oxygen mask. She had been bed bound for two months at that point and was entirely emaciated. Muscles were near the state of atrophy. Her once taught flesh from her formerly overweight body hung in loose folds all around her. Her fingers were bony and bent. She was on massive amounts of painkillers and had that look in her eyes — the one that said, \”Why are you forcing me to keep doing this? Why won\’t you let me go?\” She aimed that hard stare at everyone who approached her, including me. She barely recognized me and seemed adverse to me having come to visit.
The drugs — a morphine patch and god only knows what pill cocktail — had her looped out of her only recently very lucid mind. At one point during the visit she sat up in the bed, pulled her mask away from her face, and whispered with all the tortured venom her gasping breathe could muster, \”They\’re going to kill me, you know.\” My aunt, who was with me at the time, essentially ignored her remark and continued to babble about inane things like the weather and family gossip — as though my grandmother even gave a damn at that point. My aunt wanted her to, and it was her way of coping with the inevitable: by delaying it as long as possible, perpetuating the cycle of denial, and treating the suffering of someone going through a slow death as though it was selfish to not want to continue the pain in order to live.
Last night \”they\” finally succeeded. The five year struggle with emphysema — watching her collapse time and again, rushing off in ambulances so often that the local EMS crew knew us by name, spending the last few years tied to an oxygen machine and unable to leave the house — it\’s all finally over. But I\’m not relieved.
I was the one that got her to quit smoking in the first place. She\’d been doing so since before she met my grandfather in the \’30s. 1984 came along and my precocious three-year old self announced to her that she \”stunk real bad\” and that I wasn\’t going to hug her or kiss her anymore because it was \”gross.\” She never smoked another cigarette again. If only I had done so sooner, or if her older grandchildren had, or her children, or someone she cared about. God fucking damn it.
Never smoke around me again. Every time I watch the end of your cigarettes start to glow I relive every gasping breathe, every time we found her collapsed in the bathroom, every sorrowful look in my grandfather\’s eyes — my grandfather who loved her in a way I cannot comprehend, who after 60 years of marriage still found little ways to show her how much he loved her, a man who is now completely crushed and refusing to eat or speak because his wife is gone. I am his favorite granddaughter, and even I cannot get him to eat his favorite foods or read any of the books that we have loved together.
Yeah, it\’s so damn cool that you think you\’re invincible, impervious, or that you just don\’t care that one day your little habit is going to drag the last years of your life out in a state of misery that you only dreamed of when you were thirteen and whacking off to Morrissey, wishing something deep would happen to you. Well it\’s going to fucking happen, and when it does, you might not care, but those of us around you who do will live every second of your suffering and the suffering of the others who love you over and over, ad nauseum, until your life savings are gone and your family has spent their last dollars on care for you and you die rotting in your own shit in a state financed hospice. My grandmother\’s eulogy will be the last one I write for someone like this.
Memorial contributions in honor of Catherine Disque may be sent to:
The National Emphysema Foundation
The Historical Society of Washington, DC (City Museum of WDC)
