Amongst the Living Dead

Today I returned from Seattle where we visited my grandfather who is dying. They gave him a week to live on Tuesday; he may continue a little bit longer than that, but it's unclear. He has Alzheimers, which slowly deprives a person of memory and eventually bodily functions. At the end, a person will lose the ability to swallow and die from lack of nutrition. On Tuesday he had stopped eating and drinking, so it seemed as if these were his last days--and they probably are, although he did drink some thickened juice today and yesterday.

More interesting than the mundane details of vital statistics and impending death, is the manner in which the layers of a person's personality are slowly peeled away under these circumstances. When we first arrived, he was relatively ecstatic (I say relatively because he is bedridden and has difficulty making much movement at all) to see us, and although he did not know our relation to him, he still knew my mother and he knew by my name that I was of some significance to him. Rather than being his grandson, however, he was under the impression that I was my mother's fiancee, and he gave a long, albeit slow and labored, speech about wedding arrangements and how we were his "pride and joy," which he repeated numerous times. Eventually though, this conversational facade ended, and as he became tired the true core of his personality became exposed. For the rest of our visit, whenever he said anything approaching coherency, it was dominated by a pervasive monetary worry--a worry that the business deals would not go though, a worry that the board would do something foolish, a gratefulness for having taken care of the money in the right way, etc. It seems that our environment shapes the most fundamental level of our personality, becoming a masked obsession that is only apparent when we have no other mental faculties to employ. When he was still at home (he went into a nursing home about 3 weeks ago) he would apparently hold board meetings in his room at night, discussing who should sell the stock. After a few hours of slow, light conversation, he once again become a vegetable, totally unable to do anything but mumble a few words. Although he theoretically could be kept alive for months--if not years--with various life-support measures, he's on nothing but oxygen. While the morphine is stocked and ready to be used, he's not in pain; he's merely teetering in and out of consciousness, as comfortably as possible.

While it's depressing to see him rotting away in a nursing with the alien glow of a dim florescent light, the clunk and hiss of oxygen, and the constant attention of just a few family members, his impending demise may be simultaneously sad and inspiring. Although his life will soon be over, it gives me hope that I might possibly approach his 97 years of age with as much happiness and fulfillment as him, and thankfulness that I have so much more to look forward to.