the thing about my grandma dying is like...
well, there are a lot of things about it. one is that it's just fucking sad, although at least she had a long life. it's evil that Alzheimer's progressively stole more and more of the last few years from her, but she had all the years before that. she did have a very full, long life. many people don't get to have that. she'd also reached a point where her quality of life was extremely low, so the person I knew had effectively already been gone for a while.
she was diagnosed with long covid before Alzheimer's, which could mean that early Alzheimer's was mistaken for the brain fog of long covid, but it could just as easily mean that her bout of covid triggered Alzheimer's in the first place, because that is very much a thing that covid can do. she caught covid in early 2022, I think, so back in the earliest days of "la la the pandemic is over now because we said so!" and I can't help being just generally sad and angry about that. my grandpa has developed some non-Alzheimer's dementia issues too, so maybe some mental deterioration was inevitable, but I can't help thinking that it just didn't have to be like this.
he's alone now. they were pretty much never apart, at least until her Alzheimer's complicated things. his health is...not completely terrible, all things considered, but nobody really expects him to outlive her for long. I don't think he was doing much most of the day anyway, aside from meals and family visits (which I don't think happened every day), and...now he's alone. well, right now he's not, family's there, but I don't know how much time they're spending at the care home given they don't want to tire him out, and inevitably he's going to be alone.
I always wished I got to see them more often when I was a kid. I know my cousins were closer to them growing up because they got to see our grandparents more often, just because they all lived in the Midwest. obviously it was a lot harder for us, living in Alaska, because driving to visit wasn't realistic and it was always an extra flight just to get into the lower 48. they did visit us sometimes, but not as often, I don't think. we often managed some kind of just-for-fun vacation and a visit-extended-family vacation most years when I was growing up, and that was good, but it doesn't compare to how my cousins regularly spent holidays with the grandparents and things like that. and then there were a few years when I was an adult that I probably couldn't afford to go anywhere, but there was a lot more time when I was an adult that I could have visited them and just didn't, first because it sort of didn't occur to me that that was a thing I could do without it being organized by someone else, and then because Trump was president and I couldn't stand the thought of visiting them and having to listen to hateful nonsense on Fox News, and also I was genuinely worried that they were going to have a problem with me being queer. and by the time I found out that the queer thing, at least, was probably a nonissue, it was summer 2021 and there was too much covid for me to want to do any travel, and I did finally visit again in 2022 and every year since then but my grandma had already started losing some words by then and I guess I'll just always regret that I didn't go back earlier.
and that's another thing. my grandparents were/are very, very Christian. it's a hugely important part of their lives. my grandpa was a pastor on and off for...a very long time. my grandma always led singing at his churches. all the tributes to my grandma focus primarily on her faith in Christ. and I'm over here like...trying to reconcile the fact that my grandparents were/are very fucking conservative with my strong belief that they were/are also good people, because I am wildly not the same person I was 20 years ago and "Christian" no longer means "good person" to me because I've seen what self-professed Christians do when they get even a sliver of power.
and the queer thing was complicated, and I never talked about it with them and now I never will, and I'm 99% sure they both voted Republican for most of their lives, and they liked ghouls like James Dobson, and yet I'm sure they were good people just in general and I'm gutted that I'll never have opportunities for serious conversations with them about...anything, like I probably could have done if I'd only visited them more when I was an adult.
it's all very easy, too, believing in Heaven, because if you're a Christian, of course you go there, and everything is fine. but for a variety of reasons I really don't know what I believe anymore, about what happens when we die, so I don't know what to think. because it doesn't make sense to me that we can have these souls--beautiful, evil, mediocre, everything--and then they can just be gone like they never existed. that feels...deeply, deeply wrong. I have to think that the soul continues to exist somewhere beyond the physical. but where and how, I have no idea. it's a black box. I'm sort of inclined to think that all religious people of good will get the positive afterlife their religion taught them to expect. (I won't lie, I also want to believe there's a punishment after death for the truly evil people, because a lot of them just aren't going to be punished while they're alive.) and people of good will in general who aren't religious, I don't know. I hope it's a pleasant surprise.
so, I mean, I think my grandma is with her sisters again, all but the youngest, who will join them at some point. I think my grandpa will join her. I think she's at peace, her mind and body no longer ravaged by Alzheimer's. it's just not as simple of a belief as it would have been when I was a kid, because I guess I'm not confident enough that I'll see her again, and I already missed the person she used to be even before she actually died.
