I’ve been ill the last couple of days and we drove up to my Grandma’s house over the weekend. Those are my excuses for my lack of posts. I’m sure I could think of more excuses like my Carpal Tunnel has returned and is trying to bring me down or that I’m trying to cope with this whole Circle of Life crap.

Grandma isn’t doing well, at all. It doesn’t seem like she could weigh more than 50 pounds. She looks worse than those children you see on those television segments where they try to get you to sponsor a child. I’m not even kidding. She actually looks exactly like the skeletons we saw at The Human Body exhibit a few months back. It is all too much to take in at times. I have to separate my mind from the whole ordeal and just pretend this isn’t even happening. And even though she has been deteriorating for the last year, I don’t think anything could possibly prepare me for the day that we get the phone call that she has passed away.

I keep thinking back to May of last year, at Memorial Day, she was fine. And then in September of last year she was in the hospital after Chemo just about killed her and she looked like death. And since then, she has slowly gotten worse. She outlived the doctor’s predictions by almost a year… But was the year even worth it? She’s been mostly unresponsive since then and her mind has been going and going, slowly.

Anyway, that’s what has been on my mind. And I’ve been sick. So I’ve been away from the computer. I uploaded a bunch of pictures to my Flickr account from our trip to Grandma’s house this last weekend. I love going to their house because it seems like time moves so much slower in a small town. The smells, the nature, the memories. It is all so overwhelming, in a good way. When I’m there I feel like I just want to revert back to when I was 10 years old and would spend an entire summer there. Grandpa would make popcorn and serve it up in paper sacks. We’d go to Braum’s for ice cream in the evenings and he would take me fishing.

Grandpa is hanging in there. But he looks so worn. He has been taking care of Grandma because she always said she never wanted to go into a nursing home. After seeing all that he has had to do and seeing how much it is taking a toll on his own health, I told Gene to just put me into a home if I ever get that bad. I feel so bad for Grandpa but he is a true hero to me. He has done so much for her and still does to this day.