There and Back Again
An update on [last week's post]:
After a day of fretting, I hopped on an eastbound flight back to Michigan last Friday.
I got to Clarkston just as my grandmother was getting released from the hospital. The prognosis was simply negative; by this time the cancer had gone to her blood and become leukemia. Or maybe it was in her blood all along, and the lymphoma was a symptom. If you’re interested, see [acute lymphocytic leukemia], but the exact cause hardly mattered. The disease was spreading at a freakish rate. By this point she was well beyond the limits of medicine. They were releasing her to hospice care so that she could pass away in the relative comfort of her own bed.
On Friday, she was tired but clear-headed, as if she was layed up in bed with nothing more than the flu. On Saturday morning, the pain began in earnest, and small drops of liquid morphine were placed on her tongue. By Saturday evening, she was gone.
The body was turned to modest ashes, by her request. The memorial service was held on Tuesday in a quintessential Midwestern funeral home in the town of Ortonville. The date of the funeral was not even published, yet scores of people came. Jill Zundel, the Methodist pastor of the village of Clarkston, delivered an eloquent eulogy.
I just got back to Tempe last night.
It’s hard to explain, but I already feel back to normal. My grandmother was in her nineties; my mind had long ago accepted sudden death as a possibility. I had a chance to visit her one last time. I helped prepare her funeral. There wasn’t much left unresolved.
If anything, I was anxious to get back here to Tempe and get my own life moving forward.
