Dear Diary, I feel like I'm living the final chapter

My grandfather moved into the Hospice today. The hospice, you know, is basically where people go to die comfortably.

He's so weak now. He weighs 123 pounds and is starting to have some confusion about certain things. For example, the other day he called me my mother's name. Grrr... of all things! Had he not looked so damn helpless I might have taken that pillow... :D just kidding!! Gotta keep things light!!

Anyhoo, yah, I wasn't thrilled. Especially when he said it a second time.

But then he has moments of extreme clarity and he tries to joke around. Sadly, he's so quiet and frail that you have to ask him to repeat what he says, and then he just gets mad. I laugh when he does that because if I don't, I'll cry.

Last week, he made me take him outside for a cigarette, and the damn wind was as bitter and cold as Kate Gosselin's sex life (hahahah, see? laughing is good!). Anyway, after freezing his scrawny, old man ass of for a damn cancer stick, he said, "Go get me a touque." Because, you know, I'm the touque fairy.

I humoured the old boy and decided that if was a touque he wanted, it was a badass touque he was getting!

Oddly enough, he LOVED the touque!


I can't imagine the pain he's in. I don't remember my grandma suffering this badly. In fact, she died at home in my granpa's arms. (Did I tell this story? I can't remember... forgive me if I'm rambling or repeating myself).

Anyway, my granma died of lung cancer 17 years ago, almost a year to the day she was diagnosed. They were living in Kuwait at the time and she came back home for treatments at the Cross Cancer Institute. A couple of weeks before she died, my grandfather came back for a visit and the night before he was suppose to leave, she died in his arms.

He was devastated. Rightfully so because my granma was the only thing holding my excuse for a family together. She was so amazingly beautiful, funny, sassy and smart. He adored her.

I even remember the last time I saw my grandma; she came to the studio apartment we had shared before she moved back to the acreage in Spruce Grove that my grandparents owned, and one of the last things she told me was that she wanted me to be happy.

Fast forward 17 years, and now it's my grandfather's turn to go.

Watching someone you love, die, sucks. Plain and simple.

My grandfather is physically a shell of his former self. To see the man I grew up thinking was the toughest sunuvabitch that ever lived, now be physically unable to do anything for himself and have to swallow his pride, is heartbreaking.

I know they're going to make him comfortable at the hospice. I know the environment is much more caring and private but I also know that this will be the place where he dies.

Thanks again for the kind comments here on my blahg and on Twitter. Your support means more than you know and often brightens my day.

xoxo
t.