Christmas Eve I went to stay overnight at my grandmother's. She's doing rather poorly and I fixed something for us to eat and helped her get back and forth from the couch to the bathroom and bedroom. I did some laundry and my mother visited with us. We exchanged gifts. I gave my mom a candle and a gift certificate to Amazon and she's thinking of applying it to a wi-fi Kindle. She likes how big you can make the print (she's having some trouble reading now that she's older.) I got a nice pair of pants and jacket from my grandmother and a personal-sized blender/chopper from my mom and stepdad that looks really cool. I gave my grandmother some photo frames (she has five grandchildren, three of whom have reproduced, so she has plenty of pictures of the great-grandchildren). My stepfather, who's a computer geek, got a card to Best Buy. I think I killed my grandmother's dryer, because after two loads it wouldn't go anymore. My mom took the last load home and dried it. (It smells vaguely of cigarette smoke, but is mostly underwear). After Ma went to bed I read the rest of 'A Christmas Carol' on my Kindle. I went onto the wireless on the Kindle and found an application for Monopoly and played that for awhile. Then I went to bed myself.
On Christmas Day, I came out and my grandmother was on the couch. We visited for awhile. I made some oatmeal for breakfast, but I couldn't get her to eat any. We were going over to my mother's for lunch, though. Ma was saying she really didn't feel like going, and seemed a little confused in general, but when my stepfather arrived, she decided to go, and I helped her get dressed. You know those walkers that roll with little seats on them? She has one, so we put her on the seat and rolled her to the car, with me lifting her over the small steps. Their car's a little hard to get in for anyone, but we finally got her in. We also had his mother, who's a couple of years older than my grandmother in the car.
Once we got to my mother's, we got the grandmothers out one by one and up the steps. Ma ate from the moment food was put in front of her until the time we left. :) The food was great. The broccoli casserole went quickly. We never got to the fruit salads or pies. I had a bit of my stepdad's mother's jam cake. Then we loaded the grandmothers back into the car, took them home, and were pretty exhausted, but John and my mom took me back to Lexington, where I had a quiet night at home except for a couple of phone calls.
It was a nice visit, but it is somewhat depressing to see my grandmother going downhill like she is. She's worse than at Thanksgiving, and that's just been a few weeks. I really think they need someone to come in more often and take care of her. I know someone who does that and talked with her a long time on Christmas night.
My grandmother helped raise me, taking care of me when my mom was going to work when I was little. She opened her home to us when we went through my parent's divorce. Of all the grandchildren, I'm probably closest to her because I spent so much time with her growing up. She's like a second mother to me (my grandfather, in many ways, was closer to me than my own father). She's 86 years old, having outlived my grandfather for almost eleven years. I know that it's inevitable, that we all die, but I want her to be as comfortable and happy as she can. Unfortunately I have no way to get down there on my own, really know nothing of caregiving myself, and really don't have the wherewithal to hire someone, so I need to talk to my relatives and see what we can come up with. My grandmother lives alone and has poor health and a tendency to fall. I'm really worried about her.
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