A quick update--everyone’s been wondering about Zack. After a few touch and go days of missing his mom, and a few days of Vodka ice cube de-tox, and I’m honest about that, he went through a few rough days, but he is doing amazingly. He will live with myself, my wife and these two guys for the remainder. No one knows what that means, but we’ll stick with him as long as it takes.
I also want to thank her entire support staff. I know Anna had to leave, but Bertie and all the girls who just took care of her when we couldn’t. She was just so darn active that nobody could keep up with her. She wanted to go out to dinner and to museums and places and we just couldn’t always do it because we had other commitments, so thank you ladies who took care of her, especially Anna who was with her at the hospital. When we didn’t even know she was there, Anna was with her.
Now for the part that will probably get my eyes a little bit glassy: It’s hard for me to memorialise the death of a woman who really only lived. That’s all she did. She never had one day thinking about dying. She lived every day to the fullest. I was with Gram in the hospital. Unlike the other grandchildren, I get this sort of honour of being the only one that lives in town. So pretty much every emergency room visit, every hospital stay, I’m back and forth to Christiana, St Francis, Wilmington, wherever she wanted to go that day, I happened to go. So I was with her that night by her side and the next morning when she passed. She never wanted to bother any of us with anything at all. She waited for her daughters to get into town, she waited for Jen to fix her hair one last time, and 10 minutes later, she was gone. No burden whatsoever, not one second of need.
I’ve already forgotten the details of those hours because it’s so easy to reflect on the amazing memories that I have of her, and I will carry those memories forever. I have two quick stories to sum up how she lived, and they’re very poignant because they’re within the last two weeks. And I can say honestly none of us thought she was ever going to die, and that was a good thing. We all just wanted her to go strong forever. I called her Saturday afternoon about three weeks ago when my family was in Florida with my Dad, and I asked her if I could take her on a date. And her answer was, “No, I can’t. I’m going to get shad roe with Marnie.” I might be the only man in the room who can say he was turned down by a 93-year-old woman, and you might think that devastates me, but truthfully, I was used it. The biggest smile came across my face knowing that I had to get in line like everybody else if I wanted to see her. How dare I call her last minute and think she was pining away, spending the last days of her life waiting for someone to take her to dinner. That was never the case, and I knew better.
The next story comes from the day she passed. I sat by her side kind of by myself like I usually do ‘cause, you know, no one’s ever in town. The doctors had already come to me and basically told me that there was no chance for recovery and that we should get everyone here as soon as we could to say good-bye. But I couldn’t bring myself to tears, and I couldn’t figure out why. I just sort of sat there in a daze and I really had nothing flowing.
The night nurse came in and asked me if there was anything I needed, and I said no, but I sort of just wanted to know some details of what had happened because none of us were with her. She didn’t give anybody our cell phones—again, she didn’t want anybody to burden us. I asked if she had any details, and I hadn’t talked to Anna at this point so I was in the dark as to what had really happened. She told me she would check but that usually they didn’t have a paramedic’s report for a few days. She came back about five minutes later and all she said was that there was a quick little note in the report and she didn’t think it was anything serious but she figured she would pass it on to me. She said all it said was that Mrs Dean was on her way to have dinner and drinks with friends when she collapsed. And the nurse must have thought I was nuts because that was sort of the first time that I broke down. It took me remembering how she lived, not how she died, to start my tears. And that’s sort of how I’ll remember her forever—how she lived, even though I was with her when she died. I won’t remember that at all.
Lain has something quick to say….
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