Cold Case

Okay, so the G-ma drama wound down Saturday morning. Yes, she is back in her No Ho apartment. Oh, and she fired her current helper. I wasn’t kidding about that. T3 got the chance to hear all about the aftermath as she stuck around for the dirt-fest after a successful Pampered Chef Party. For the rest of you, let me rewind.

G-ma had been getting more and more ornery as the week was progressing. She was making more phone calls, and since she is legally blind, someone had to dial for her and she was more and more determined to prove she is independent and can go back to her apartment. She even had my bro track down a previous case worker of hers who moved to a different center. Of course, all she could remember was the cross street and a store near the center. And she wanted my bro to track down the lady that way. And then the social worker wasn’t in but G-ma wanted to know what she said.
It is extremely difficult to communicate with G-ma. She is mostly deaf but she also has the tendency to have selective hearing when she wants to. Sometimes she just kind of fades out in the middle of a conversation and you are not sure if she is still following you. So you’re trying to hold a conversation and she stops answering and you don’t know if it is because she hasn’t heard you, doesn’t want to answer or if she stopped listening, either because her attention wandered or because she wanted to stop listening. As I said, it is difficult to converse with G-ma.

Any way, She is getting more and more difficult and she is complaining more and more, a sure sign she is feeling better. Example, our house stays pretty cold. So G-ma is sitting in the living room and she is shivering a little. So my brother asks her, “Grandma, are you cold?” And she responds by saying that it’s okay, that my mother doesn’t like to turn on the heater and my father will sweat too much while he is fixing dinner. Mind you, Dad will be home in a couple hours but won’t start fixing dinner until hours later, like five hours later. My brother offers to get her a blanket but she says no, she’s okay. So my brother tries to figure out how to turn on the heater but he can’t get it to do anything but blow cold air. My bro called my dad and asks him how to turn the heat on. My dad is on his way home so he tells my brother that he’ll be home shortly and he will take care of it when he gets there.

Dad gets home and he puts his stuff down on the dining room table and he starts to head down the hallway to turn on the heater. Except my grandmother calls him over. My dad tries to tell her that he will be right back as soon as he turns on the heater but G-ma insist that he come over to her. So he does. And you know what she wanted? She tells him, “Feel my hands.” Dad tells her that he knows she is cold and he will go turn on the heater right now but she continues to insist he feel her hands. My dad told me later that he thought he was missing something since he couldn’t figure out why she was so insistent he feel her hands but she was just being childish for lack of a better word.

How’s the view from atop that cross, you poor martyred soul?

Long story short, mom decided that G-ma is going back to her apartment. She is too stubborn to listen to reason and if she really can’t be on her own, she needs to find that out for herself.

She’s going to die in that apartment, alone.

This may sound cruel but let me tell you what happened. G-ma started saying things that should never be spoken out loud. When mom and dad took her home, G-ma told my mom, that men are kinder than women; that her two brothers are nicer to her than my mom is. Never mind that Grandma’s oldest son doesn’t call her and doesn’t pick up the phone when she does call, lives in Downey but never visits her and flat out told my dad that they have no room to take G-ma and no money to help out with her care. Never mind that her other son lives across the nation with his second wife and while he is willing to help out with his mom, had no plans to come out this past weekend to take her. Now, he is at least sending G-ma money every month and he does call her on a regular basis. But he is far away. If G-ma needs anything, it falls on my mom.

Oh, and my G-ma is a manipulative B!tch. If my mom doesn’t jump right away to do something for her (because, duh, my mom is still working full time and can’t jump to do her mother’s bidding), my G-ma will call her sister Rose. Rose then tells her daughter Sally, whom she lives with, what my G-ma said. Sally, in turn, will call my mom and tell her off for, “Not taking your mother out more, or not getting her what she needs.”

Verbal and mental abuse that my mother survived as a child aside, that last comment G–ma made as Mom and dad dropped her off at her apartment was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. She has no kindness in her. She is 86 years old, I guess it’s the mean ones that live the longest. She walked out on her marriage, leaving her three young children with their father during the early 1950’s. She use to tell my mom that she couldn’t go to school as a punishment since my mom loved school so much. She would get mad at my mom and stop talking to her for days and my mom wouldn’t know why. She would go out drinking with her sisters and then pick my mom up from her sister’s house and drive home drunk with my mother in the car. About the only thing she never did was beat my mother with wire hangers. It’s amazing to me that my mother turned out as normal as she did.

You know, I use to think of myself as a decent person. Then this week happened and I have no compassion in my heart for this woman I am related to. She made her choices in life and now she is alone. And the two people who are there for her (mom and dad) she treats like crap. She is going to die alone in her precious apartment and the only person I feel sorry for is my mom. Because no matter how awful she is, this is her mother and once Grandma passes, my mother’s parents are gone.