When Squint's Grandmother became too frail to take care of herself, his whole family came together to help her. She kept on kicking for almost ten more years, it was a good opportunity for Squint to get to know his mom's side of the family.
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Chapter 35 – Grams
My life at home when I wasn’t hanging out with friends was pretty quiet and peaceful for the most part. My grandmother’s health was deteriorating though. Now she was having trouble remembering names and faces. A few times she even asked me who I was. Almost every day I would make her lunch, usually cereal or a sandwich, sometimes eggs with sausage if she was really hungry. My mom and my uncle usually handled dinner.
There wasn’t a whole lot that I could do for my grandma, other than just hang out with her so she didn’t get lonely. It was sad to see her mind going downhill near the end. The hospice workers were a godsend, they always knew exactly what to do. And grandma loved talking to them and telling them stories. Grandma hated the doctors though. But I couldn’t blame her, one time they kept her at the hospital and the nursing staff wouldn’t allow her to have any food or water at all until the doctor came in to see her. Unfortunately, the doctor didn’t come in to see her for about 3 or 4 days.
The nurses kept insisting that dehydration and starvation weren’t painful at all. I thought that was a ridiculously stupid argument. I was pretty angry at the doctors and nurses and wanted to do something, like call a lawyer or the newspapers to complain about how inhumane and unethical the hospital was. But my mom and my uncle both told me not to do anything. After the first couple of days my mom started sneaking tiny amounts of water to my grandma when she could. She would smuggle ice cubes into the hospital with her own bottle of water and then melt the wet ice cubes into grandmas mouth when the nurses weren’t looking. And my uncle kept putting pressure on the hospital to do their jobs.
Eventually grandma got to come home from that terrible hospital. But she was never the same again. She fell into a coma shortly after coming home and never woke up. A few weeks after she fell asleep we were having a service for her. I got to be one of her pole bearers. My uncle, my mom, myself, and one of my uncles friends went to an ice cream shop afterward to talk. My uncles friend wanted to make sure the family was okay, and my uncle insisted that we were. My mom suggested milkshakes, and I ordered a pumpkin pie flavored milkshake. I loved pumpkin pie, but my uncles friend laughed at me for choosing such a strange flavor. He asked my mom and I what we were planning to do, and my mom said we would probably move now that we weren’t needed there anymore.
Later that day, after we got back home, my mom told me she wanted to move back to the small town that I was born in. I agreed that it was a nice place and that I would like to go back there too. A few months later we sold almost everything we owned in a massive garage sale. My mom had a home-made mannequin that we were calling Sarah and it was sitting in grandmas old wheelchair on the front porch for a while, but someone stole the mannequin overnight during the weekend of the garage sale.
One of my moms friends came to visit us then and we made plans to move back to my hometown. He and my mom would take turns driving her car across the country. And I would wait a few days and then take a plane ride to meet them there after they arrived. It was eerily quiet those last few days at my uncles house. I mostly just played video games during that time.
My uncle gave me a ride to the airport and stayed with me until the security checkpoint to make sure I didn’t run off to somewhere else like my last trip. I always kind of got the impression that he didn’t like me, but he seemed sad to see me go that day.
After the security checkpoint I found my gate and waited there patiently. There were two men sitting together across from me in the gate. One kind of looked short but tough, and the other one was tall but scrawny. The short man never said a word the entire time that I saw them. The other taller man, however, just couldn’t stop talking to the shorter man. The only thing though was that the things the taller man were saying kept coinciding with my own thoughts. He seemed to be aware of it too. The tall man said something like “He thinks we’re psychics.” Then he laughed a little bit. I tried to change my mind and the tall man said, “Now he thinks we’re from the future or something.”
Now I knew something was going on. I looked around to see if anybody else was hearing that guy. Everyone else there seemed to be just ignoring him. Even the shorter man seemed to be looking off into the distance like he wasn’t really paying attention to what the tall man was saying at all, but sometimes he would nod his head. Eventually the plane was ready to board. I sat down by one of the windows. The other two men both sat together in the row of seats directly in front of my seat.
I was sitting by a window on the plane. The taller man never stopped talking, and even though we were surrounded by people, nobody else seemed to notice the bizarre things that he was saying. I was getting a little nervous, and after some time I started having chest pains. I chewed on a piece of gum and tried to calm down, but the strange pains in my chest continued. I felt almost as if I was having a heart attack. I knew I had to stay calm, and try to control my heart rhythm and breathing. I began to meditate for a little while and that seemed to help a bit. Then I think I must have either gotten very relaxed from meditating, or maybe I was exhausted from the stress, but either way I fell asleep.
When I woke up, the tall man was still talking. The person in the seat next to mine told me that while I was sleeping our flight had been escorted by a fighter jet for a while. I asked if that was true, and someone else nearby nodded their head in agreement. Then the plane landed and the tall man began to apologize to the short man, saying things like, “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t finish it.” And I wondered if he had been talking about my dream while I was sleeping.
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