My last five days have been spent in vigil on behalf of my Grandmother, who, after experiencing a heart attack a week ago, is somehow still holding on. Grandma Fern. She is 95. Ten days ago she was going to movies, having dinner with family, attending church in her senior center. It was not uncommon to hear family talk about her making it to 100.
But things change. Sometimes rapidly. Whether the passage that is death, or other related passages that include loss of memory, loss of purpose, loss of bodily function.
I love Christina Baldwin’s writing. I love her friendship too. She wrote some of these passages recently, “Stardust, Black Holes, and Fog.” That post includes this poem below, crafted by her senior Mom.
“You see me sitting alone in my chair,
You think that I’m here, but I’m really out there—
Communing with angels, I’ll be with them soon,
Just after I learn how to jump over the moon.”
I have another older friend who once told me, while in her 80s, “this getting old isn’t for sissies.” True, right.