G.Mac, or, losing the matriarch

Grandma, our Grandma Mac, our G. Mac, is dying. She is 91 years old so it should come as no surprise and yet, of course, it does.

She's had a long life, a life full to the brim with husband and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and spoiled plump cats and travels all over the United States and Egypt and Germany and probably other places I don't know about and a college degree and catfishing at dusk and hunting nightcrawlers in the dark and joy and afternoons at the ice cream shop in Harrison and long walks down to the Haines' and back and Cougar Gold and dinners out on the deck and sorrow and making the best spaghetti and meatballs in the world and frustrating attempts to get her youngest granddaughter to knit and a life-long commitment to the League of Women Voters and being informed and setting an example of tolerance and love and lugging buckets up the hill to water the flowers around the tree where the ashes of her husband and her son have been buried before her.

Nathan drove from Portland up to Olympia on Saturday to sit with her for a bit while she slipped in and out of sleep, in and out of consciousness, surfacing into different levels of lucidity. He's not sure if she ever really recognized him, and he's not sure whether she took comfort in his presence, but I imagine that she did, and I imagine too that he took comfort in hers.

He said that he's never seen anyone this close to death before. We share so much, Nathan and me, that I sometimes forget he wasn't there with me when Dad died. I imagine that Grandma's dying is different: quieter, less jagged -- a slipping away instead of a being taken.

Mom said tonight that in those moments when she is awake, she is sometimes afraid.

I wish that I could be there too, even unrecognized, if only to hold her hand, to absorb some of her fear, to say goodbye. But we have said goodbye before, she and I. She has been preparing, has perhaps been ready, to die for awhile now, and the last few times we've seen each other she's cried a little as we hugged, and explained once that every time she went through these partings with her loved ones, scattered as some of us are, she worried that this would be the last.

I swam sometimes in college, for a PE class or on my own, back and forth in that pool beneath the gym in Barnard Hall. Grandma swam laps too, for as long as I can remember-- in the lake in Idaho (little red bouy faithfully anchored the proper distance from the dock first thing every summer) or the pool at the WSU gym. She told me once, just a couple years after my father, her son, had died, that she liked, that she needed, this time in the water every day. She said that no one could tell if she was crying then.

My grandmother, my Grandma Mac, our tough old bird, is 91 years old and dying and I'm afraid I won't ever see her again and this makes me sad, even as I know that hers has been a good life, a full life, and that this is a good death, a quiet death, surrounded by some of the people she loves, some of the people who love her.

This, joking, mostly, from a journal kept during the summer of 1996, while a few of us were gathered at the lake cabin in Idaho:

The McNeil Matriarchal Clan
Grandma: The Supreme Matriarch
Vicki & Ellen & Sue: Minor Matriarchs
Emily: Matriarch-in-training
Nathan: The Token Boy
Grandpa: Father Figure



"and i've come here to ignore your cries and heartaches
i've come to closely listen to you sing
i've come here to insist
that i leave here with a kiss
i've come to say exactly what i mean"