A Grandmother Passes

Has this happened to you? I can say honestly that it has happened to me.

A card, letter, story read, television show watched or an email read has a theme or a mantra that I genuinely believe at the time that I am going to put into practice in my life. The messages that I have seen or read are different variations of “make sure you tell loved ones that you love them before it is too late” or something to that effect.

Too soon the actions of living and surviving take control of my mind and that fleeting thought of telling the ones I value and love gets lost or sorely minimized in my daily schedule. I look back and can remember when many opportunities were there that would have made my life fuller and another’s happier.

I am writing this in the hope that everyone who reads this will take the time “to cherish” the people in their lives; take that small amount of time to say “I value you, I respect you or I love you. I do not want you to have to experience the sadness or regret that can come from not having told someone how much they mean to you while they were still alive. The family of the woman I write about today had to say words to her never knowing if she understood.

Today this Good Friday my sister Allana’s ex-mother in law died of a massive stroke. Her name was Barbra and she was eight-nine years of age.

Allana left her home on Thursday afternoon to travel to and visit with her daughter and grandchildren in Armstrong for the Easter weekend. Armstrong is a small town north of Kelowna. Night was beginning to fall by the time she reached Kelowna, where her ex-mother in law lived, she stopped for the night intending to resume her trip to Armstrong in the morning. The next morning as Allana was doing the dishes in Barbra’s kitchen; Barbra entered and asked Allana to pull out a chair for her as she could not. Allana noticed that Barbra’s right arm was hanging at her side, Allana asked her to lift the arm, when she was unable to so Allana ran to the bedroom where her son (he lived with his grandmother) was sleeping calling to him that she thought there was something wrong with Gram.

She was gone from the kitchen no more than a few seconds, when she came back into the room she could see that Barbara had worsened, she had collapsed and was un-responsive. She now screamed for her son to get up and call 911.

Mid morning is when Allana called me to talk about what had happened, she called again just after lunch to say that the Doctor’s had done a Cat-scan on Barbra and discovered that she had suffered a massive stroke, in effect leaving her brain dead. Allana’s ex-husband had been called and was driving the three and a half hours to Kelowna as we spoke the second time. The rest of Barbara’s children and grandchildren gathered in the late afternoon. Once everyone had arrived at the hospital and were able to say their goodbye’s to the unconscious Barbara she was taken off life support and passed away shortly after.

Today another grandmother is gone from the ones who loved her. I felt for my sister Allana, she had lived in real time the loss of her children’s paternal grandmother. The day that she had just gone through was almost an exact replay of how our mother died nine years ago. The group of family that gathered today and that of our family nine years ago were left with having to say that we loved the Mother/grandmother that lay in the bed more to ourselves than to the vibrant person who had been such a large and important part of our lives.

BCG