Parkinson's Takes My Grandmother

About a year ago, my maternal grandmother passed. Early this week, I got a call that my other grandmother (my father's mother) took a turn for the worse and that the doctors were essentially just going to make her comfortable; that there wasn't anything else they could really do for her. The "hours" she was expected to live lasted until Thursday morning, when she was finally released from the ailing body that had her trapped for decades.

When I was just a kid, the tremor in her hand was confirmed, along with other symptoms, as Parkinson's disease. She was told she had 10 years to live. However, true to her hardy nature, she lived double that, and the disease consumed her, bit by bit.

I and the rest of my family watched as the tremors became worse. When she could no longer hold a crochet needle, my grandpa learned how to crochet and finished her projects, continuing to make afghans for the grandchildren. Eventually, her ability to move around suffered, as did her speech and her mental clarity.

For the last 5-10 years, she's been in a wheelchair, rarely able to communicate. She often suffered from hallucinations and eventually ended up in a nursing home, under fulltime care. Along the way, expensive drugs and nursing care consumed nearly all of the money they had (I've been sending money monthly for quite a few of those years) just as the disease itself consumed her.

It's really hard to watch Parkinson's take someone. And, someone else close to me has been diagnosed with it this year. Because they don't know exactly what causes it, and the symptoms usually don't show up until someone is 50, it can be a ticking time bomb in those you love. Like Alzheimer's (which Shelly's grandmother has), it affects an increasingly large percentage of the aging population.

The funeral will be on Tuesday and I'll be a casket bearer. I did the same last year and it definitely makes saying goodbye easier: more definitive closure.