Girls, Ink, Bikes, & Everything in Between

28th May 2012

Post

The Saddest Tale Told

… is watching your 87-year-old grandmother sob at the intangibility of life and the weight of mortality. As she’s hooked up to machines that you’ve read about, seen on patients at work, the distance between cold and calculating science and yourself, a self-proclaimed student of healthcare and medicine, you finally realize how those parents felt as they watched their scared and crying children be put to a drugged sleep, how those family members felt as they obliviously cried over their dying daughter. 

You will remember, for as long as you live, the tragic powers of knowledge. 

You swallow those familiar, burning lumps in your throat while you caress the forehead of your grandmother, who continues to slip in and out of shaky consciousness. Her blank eyes occasionally open, once dark brown but now grey with age and imminence, and you could swear that as you look into those orbs that once held you with a parent’s glee and admiration, they see through you from another dimension. A one-way road.

She used to coddle you and lift you with a warrior’s strength, bestowed kisses and laughs upon your chubby cheeks and your pudgy fingers. She used to play cards with you everyday after kindergarten even after she suffered hemi-paralysis from her stroke. She once healthily sneezed all over your cards. She, from her wheelchair, threatened to beat you with her cane. She always used to watch Wheel of Fortune at 7 o’ clock, Monday to Friday nights. Always.

You’re barely an adult, a poor excuse like every other kid your age who think they know it all but secretly still crave the warmth and security of known, existing love. How’s it feel to sit in with the adults and learn, once again, the tragic powers of knowledge—that someone you’ve known and loved since birth has only so many more days to live? How’s it feel to be the one the adults turn to because you’re a student of healthcare and medicine, to answer as stoically as possible that you concur with the diagnosis? How’s it feel to be the one this time connecting someone you love to tubes and machines?

Your lively and calloused hand from sports and writing grasp one wrought with age, war-refuge, illiteracy, disease, and maternity. She can’t speak much now, but you know what she’s saying in those moments she’s here again. 

She’s scared, and despite your knowledge, your stoicism, and your false grandeur, so are you.

Tagged: medicinedeathlifelove