My adorable mother & beautiful grandmother
My grandmother died last weekend.
Mi abuela who, through the wonders of technology, I was able to see from my own hospital bed (in my room, in my house) to hers.
My grandmother in her hospital bed & me in mine (with Monkey my cat)
My grandmother, who I discovered – after sending her a card of one of my paintings – could no longer see. “I can still see!” she said, defiantly to my uncle, when I asked if they’d received the card I’d sent when she first entered the hospital over 2 months ago… “They just have the lights out in my room, and I don’t know why,” she said in her brightly lit hospital room, and I began to cry.
ME Awareness Day is May 12th because that was Florence Nightingale’s birthday.
I cry for myself, now that she’s gone. She suffered so long – 94 years this July. Will I have to lay in my bed another FIFTY years? More than 1/5th of my life thus far has been in this bed. Florence Nightingale spent the last fifty years of hers in bed, due to a mysterious condition suspected to be the same as mine …I don’t know if I can take it.
People living with M.E. have a lower quality of life…
I watched the film Interstellar the day after she died. I cried for my grandmother, my mother, myself, and time. I haven’t seen my mother since 2009. Neither of us can travel anymore due to illness – mine physical, hers mental – and I think about time stolen, time wasted, time ripped away through lies.
The spectrum of Myalgic Envephalomyelitis
I am crying for myself, my mother, my abuela. “She’s in a better place,” my mother said, “we’re only crying for ourselves.” This is true, and I know it to be true because I mourn my life in life as my life passes me by. I have a severe medical condition – one of many – for which no one knows the cause, that steals my life(force). My broken heart, my missing life, it all sifts by like dust in time. And I can only live this moment, from my bed, watching the world go by… and I cry.
