Dear Grandma,

Starting at the end, what you need to know is that you were feverish, discontent. You fought.

Some old people are ready to die. They have outlived their parents, siblings, spouses, friends; children, sometimes. They are no longer beautiful or needed. They soil themselves and, if they are lucky, hired strangers clean them up. If not, their sons or daughters do so. They forget. They repeat. They sleep. They feel each day that they are a chore or a task for another human being to complete. Look in on Mom today. Check. Tell the family Mr. Smith needs new sweatpants. Check.

No one wants to be prioritized before “pay the bills,” and after “get groceries,” and so some accept death. They are ready and fearless. Maybe they are wise about it, or maybe they are mean about it, but they accept it.

You did not accept. You were neither wise nor mean, at the end. By the time we all met on July 3 to say our goodbyes to you at the ICU, your brain and your heart had been torn asunder worse than my parents’ marriage. Your brain just checked out, and your heart limped along with support from various machines. My mother later would have to reconcile both of those bodily functions to a common end by way of “pulling the plug,” which is really more like pushing buttons. Even after the last machine was switched off, you fought for two more days.

Almost all of your grandchildren met to say goodbye. Our parents made us.

“Why is she so hot?” I asked a young nurse. As usual, I probably was clinical, bordering on cold, and definitely already creating checklists to handle the people and the probate that would come in the next few days and months. I feel like you would have approved. Meanwhile the youngest of my cousins behaved in hysterics that you would have abhorred: crying, carrying on as if in a soap opera or novel. They were selfish in that ignorant and non-pejorative way that only very young adults who have done nothing with their lives yet can be. They were a little tacky (flip- flops-on-the-plane-tacky), and I think you would have hated that.

I do not remember the young nurse’s specific answer, but I remember that it sounded fatuous. I wasn’t listening, or I didn’t think the nurse was old enough even to have an opinion, this being the first time in my life that I was older in years than a medical professional. In any event, you were hot, and writhing and agitated; irritated maybe. So irritated that I nearly expected you to get up and curse the young nurse. Or to get up and curse us all for standing around so uselessly and just looking at you. Good grief, why doesn’t someone just handle this?

My cousins talked to you. Out loud. The speeches seemed self-serving. My cousins knew a different woman than I did. They were younger, and met you at a different time in your life, when you really were solely a grandmother. I knew you when you were that, but also, still a wife. I knew you when you were still a mother to teen-aged children who lived at home; when your opinion still mattered to my own mother, and my aunts and uncles. I knew you when you worked, had a job at the bakery, somewhere to go each day. I knew you when you were, “Grandma,” but by the time my cousins knew you, they had changed your name to, “Omi,” a derivative of Oma.

My cousins made silly comments, sniffled through not-so-choked-back sobs, that belonged more at the back of an eighth-grade yearbook than in an ICU cubby with three walls, a curtain, and 10 grown and growing grandchildren: “I’ll never forget you, or your homemade applesauce!” Or, melodramatically, “It’s ok, Omi. (Pause for dramatic effect.) You can go.”

It was not ok with you. You thrashed so hard, you knocked your blanket and hospital gown aside. The silly nurse clucked patronizingly at you; that your thrashing had knocked loose one of your IV lines. Meanwhile, my cousins play-acted what grief should look like and sound like and be like. I held your hand, but said nothing.

After bit, I had had enough wallowing. The nurses had things to do, and we were due to meet our parents for supper. I think someone made a joke to you about who was your favorite – I do think you would have liked that. Everyone laughed, then we left. I didn’t cry because you were not in that room, and hadn’t been with us for a long time. It’s funny, though, because I openly wept this past Mother’s Day, when one of those cousins emailed me a picture of your 60-year-old peonies, pink and in bloom. Because you are there.

I rode with a cousin in her new Jeep to meet our parents. I kept thinking about an article my college roommate’s mother had emailed to all of us when we had just graduated from undergrad. It was something Oprah-inspired, in which the advice for young women was, if attacked in a dark parking garage, fight. Draw attention to the predicament. No attacker wants to make a scene. Above all, do not let them take you to another location. If they have a gun, run fast and in a zig-zag formation, because chances are, they aren’t trained marksmen. Fight for your life.

All I know is that you fought. For your whole life. You were the strongest woman I ever knew and I wish we had more time to talk about how you got that way.

I found some of your old fabric squares. Looks as if you were beginning quilt. I have started finishing it for you. I will write more to update.

Love you,

Stef