This week has been somewhat stress free as regards Grandmother, at least for me. Not being able to go see her at all has removed the need to figure out exactly when I am going to go. This normally consumes a great deal of mental and emotional energy.

She’s becoming more and more unresponsive now, and I am afraid each trip will be the last. I’m at a bad place. I can’t wish the stress would end, because when the stress ends, when I no longer have to struggle with getting away for a couple/three hours, it will mean that I no longer have my grandmother. Even at almost 40, even with her unresponsive, I love my grandmother. She is still the emblem of all that can be right in the world. She is the last tie to my childhood, to my grand-dad, to unconditional love. (My mother is not that for me. We’ve found our own adult terms of relationship. For assorted reasons, most of which have very little indeed to do with her, I do not ever think of my mother when I think of my childhood.)

The end of my stress will cut me loose from my moorage in a way that I cannot yet fathom. Even for losing fifteen pounds from sheer raggedness, even for having mastitis because I couldn’t stop running long enough to get well when it first struck, I’d rather live with the stress than without it.

Technorati Tags: Grandmother, stress, mother, childhood