My grandmother is going down the same path. She has never been the same after my grandfather passed away. She’s depressed and extremely anxious, and I’m more than convinced that if her faith didn’t forbid it so adamantly, she would have taken her life long ago.
She’s grown to be forgetful, and while that is to be expected when one reaches 85, it has happened very quickly and the contrast to her very good somatic health is striking.
The family has a hard time with her because of her constant negativity. It’s the thing where she does everything in her power to stay miserable, and I really think she believes that she’s supposed to be miserable without my grandfather, forever.
So many people have offered help and advice, which she constantly throws back into everyone’s faces. My grandparents and parents have always been involved in Church and other voluntary work, and there is quite a lot going on which she could fill her days with. She doesn’t want to. She got flowers for her birthday, they’re too much work. She gets offers to go on trips, she doesn’t want to because it reminds her of my grandfather. She was gifted nice chocolates, she doesn’t want them because they could make her fat. (Honestly, grandma?! 85!!)
She doesn’t have any hobbies. She has stopped knitting and watching tv. She doesn’t read. She doesn’t listen to music. All she does at home is either solve crossword puzzles or stare at the wall. Honestly, she sits in her livingroom and does nothing. She says she goes to bed at 8 pm sometimes because she’s bored.
It makes me incredibly sad. It can also be a tad annoying, because she has this ideal in her head that she isn’t supposed to be alone, and at the same time she shouldn’t have to have to do anything to be in contact with people. “If I didn’t go for a walk today, no one would come here to see me all day.” Her ideal is the way my greatgrandmother lived out her days, in my grandparents’ apartment on a chair next to the heater in the kitchen. “She was never alone, you know.” she says very often, because she forgets she’s already said it a hundred times. “Me and your grandfather, we did our duty.”
Which of course is a backstab at my mother especially, and I hate when she does that. My mom and dad live only two houses down the street, and they have an incredible difficult time dealing with her constant negative attitude.
There’s also my grandmother’s unhealthy behaviour towards alcohol. She just doesn’t seem to get that she doesnt tolerate the same amounts she did twenty years ago. She drinks, and it has happened that she falls and vomits, and can’t remember a thing the next morning. My parents basically had to prime the entire family not to give her any hard liqueur.
It makes me so sad. I love her incredible much, and I feel so sorry for her, and at the same time I sometimes want to hit her over the head for being so stubborn and not giving things a chance to get better. It’s such a horrible waste. I’m thinking about writing a letter to her doctor, but I didn’t ask her if that was okay, so I’m in two minds about it. She’s a horribly good actress, she has dominated the yearly sketch show of the town’s Catholic Women’s Association for years. She’s made for comedy, brilliant at it. Many people thought my mom was an evil witch for having problems with her, until they saw the way she is when she’s drunk and went “Wow, I didn’t know she was that mean to you.”
Sad. Even I feel a good amount of dread when I go to see her. It’s hard to bear when she’s telling me over and over again, because she forgot she already did, how she doesn’t want to live anymore. I wish there was something I could do to make her get back the spark she once had, but I feel like all of us lost that fight from the start, when my grandfather died. It honestly makes me wonder if I ever want to find that special person, if it isn’t better to live alone and not that attached, and be self sufficient. Which is kind of sad all on its own.
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