A Pilgrim’s Digression

All night I dreamed of games. First, I was playing some sort of charades-style guessing game with my best friend and his wife. My friend cheated blatantly and without any attempt to disguise his behavior, but in the dream I laughed about it. This dream went on repetitively for what seemed like hours.

In the second dream, I was an audience member on the show “Wheel of Fortune.” There seemed to be only two older women as contestants. Both were probably in their seventies and reminded me of the cranky lunchladies in all the school cafeterias in which I have ever eaten: large, gray, wig-like hairdos, floral-print silk blouses, and a grim wart on the side of their cheek.

The two women were competing to guess the title and author of a book. Enough letters were turned over that the book title was apparent (I don’t remember it), but the author was more ambiguous.

Nonetheless, one of the old women tried to solve the puzzle; however, she missed the author’s name the first time she tried, then blurted out the correct answer after already getting it wrong. The other old lady smugly told Pat Sajaks that she would like to solve the puzzle, and she did so, correctly identifying the author as “Barbara Walrus.”

The two old women then got in an unseemly argument, the first old woman commenting harshly that the other would not have guessed the puzzle if she had not inadvertently blurted out the correct answer after it was too late.

Pat tried to defuse the situation by asking the women to tell the audience a little about themselves. The first woman, still hurt from losing so embarrassingly, merely told where she was from, the name of her husband and kids, and that she was a lifelong homemaker. The second woman, quite proud of herself, told Pat that she did a passable impression of Marlene Dietrich singing the old German drinking song, “Lili Marlene.”

And then she proceeded to offer an impromptu concert.

Let me just say, if our native language is the language in which we dream, German is not my native language. I’ve heard the song “Lili Marlene” many times, but even subconsciously I could not reproduce it as anything but gibberish, with the words “Lili Marlene” uttered at the appropriate place.

Nonetheless, the audience applauded respectfully when the the old woman finished her song.

Curiouser and curiouser. A night of dreaming about games and game shows. The only explanation I can come up with is that before going to bed, I sat up with my elderly landlady, telling her about my grandma’s situation while “Wheel of Fortune” flickered, muted, in the background.

One thing I will always remember about my grandma is how when I’d stay with them as a kid, she and grandpa never missed “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” every evening from 7 until 8. I preferred the latter show, because it allowed me to show off my book-learnin’ whereas “Wheel” was a stupid show and I could never guess the puzzles until all but two letters had been turned over. I thought Vanna was too skinny, as well.

Our July 4th week in West Virginia passed well enough, though it was not necessarily a happy time. Grandma was in the hospital all week, not being released until Friday, and so the Fourth was “celebrated” by spending the afternoon with her in the hospital. In the evening, we had a quiet cookout at my Mom’s with just a handful of family members from her side of the family. My Dad’s side of the family did nothing for the holiday; Grandpa spent the entire day at the hospital, as he had been doing every day that week, only returning home after the end of visiting hours at nine.

I am not sure I have ever seen my grandma in the hospital before. She has certainly been in the hospital. Just last summer, she went in for a hysterectomy. Ironically, the doctor who did that operation chose only to do a lower GI prior to the surgery, rather than an upper and a lower GI, or a full CAT scan, either of which would have caught the cancer that is now killing her.

But I did not see her when she went in the hospital last summer.

This was a first time for me. I was surprised and disconcerted how reminiscent it was of my maternal grandma’s last visit to the hospital, in November of 2005. She died in the hospital, but when I visited her a couple weeks before her death, she was still well enough to sit up and eat a little and talk. I remember trying to talk about innocuous things, anything but her health, or the probability that she was going to die.

But it turns out that as much as one tries to turn the subject away, the dying only want to talk about their pain and discomfort and the routine of dying in a hospital where the nurse pops in every few minutes to try to force feed you Jello or check your heart and add another bag of fluid to the IV.

So last week, Grandma talked about what was happening to her. To be sure, she talked about other things, too. We, the living, insisted. But the subject always came back around to the unwelcome guest in the room.

Will she get a second opinion? Will she get treatment? She would not give a definite answer. In private, both Grandpa and Dad felt she was unlikely to seek a second opinion. “She’s not a fighter,” Dad said, glumly but also a bit angrily. He and Grandpa both want her to fight. Grandpa wants to take her to the cancer center in Columbus, Ohio, for more tests and a second opinion about treatment.

Without a second opinion, the verdict on her health currently stands as follows: she has inoperable pancreatic cancer that has spread to her lymph nodes and thyroid. Without chemo, she has about three to six months to live, give or take. With chemo, she might extend her time to a year or a year and a half. She has not decided yet whether to seek treatment.

In the hospital, she seemed much the same as always, though tired and sore from her surgery. We took Brendan to see her on Thursday, and she let him feel her wound through her gown. He wanted to see it, but she said it was too gruesome. She only let him feel it. Unlike my other grandma, who only sat up in bed with the aid of the bed’s motor, grandma could sit up under her own power and even swing her legs out and sit on the side of the bed for awhile.

When she came home late Friday night, we had already returned to Virginia, having waited all day for her to be discharged; but I called her and she said she was healing well. She said she was sitting around, mostly, but it still felt good to be home again and in her own bed at night.

I would say that my first thought when I get up in the morning is of her; and my last thought at night is of her, because I pray for her before going to sleep; and sometimes even in the night she is in my thoughts and dreams. This feeling of pre-death grieving is by far worse than what I experienced with my maternal grandma, because I am much closer to my paternal grandma.

Funny, but I remember thinking as my other grandma lay dying that “at least my Dad’s mom is healthy and will still live a long time.” One just never knows. Although the image has become corrupted, in medieval times the Wheel of Fortune was a potent symbol for life itself, with each person experiencing in turn the ups and downs of the wheel. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Mostly, we lose, especially in the end.

My grandma and grandpa were the ones who took me to Walt Disney World when I was a kid. They took me on other vacations with them, too, some of which I did not appreciate at the time. When i was younger, I thought I hated country and western music, so I was rather sullen and bored on the trip to Nashville. I remember my grandma trying to interest me in a concert–I can’t recall the performer, Ray Price maybe?–and me being a bit of an ass because I thought everything about the concert was just boring and uncool.

So why did I go? Well, I loved my grandparents and I loved spending time with them. They took me to my first play, an outdoor musical in Beckley, West Virginia, called “Honey in the Rock.” They also took me to see “Oklaholma” and “The Hatfields and McCoy’s.” I’d love to do that again with them.

When I was very small, it was my grandma, not my parents, who read books to me. She had a stack of Little Golden Books, and some that were even older from when my Dad and his brothers were boys, and sometimes she would spend a whole afternoon with me in the big, green La-Z-Boy rocker, reading to me.

It’s hard to think about these things right now. How much harder is it going to be if the worst case scenario turns out to be true, or even worse than predicted? How painful is pancreatic cancer? How bad will it get for her? For me?

It all seems like some weird nightmare. I only wish I could wake up.