Papa

My mind’s distracted and diffused, my thoughts are many miles away …
(I know, it’s a cheesy song lyric, but sometimes a situation requires a little Paul Simon to pull you through it.)
Today the distance from home hurts like nails. Since Tuesday, my grandfather – who is nearly 91 years old – has been in the hospital with a lung and bladder infection. His health has been failing for the past year or so, but for the first time in a while, I feel frightened for his health. Part of me says I’m being silly. What’s to be frightened of? If death is only another part of life, a second act that we might not understand, then it would be silly to fear it. But it’s a part of life he would enter without any of us, and although I know it will happen, whether sooner or later, I dread it.
My grandfather was a radio man on an Air Force bomber during World War II, and he was present for Japan’s surrender. He was the oldest person on his plane, and he’s the only one still alive. A photo of him with the rest of the squadron hangs in my house, and I’ve been looking at it a lot the past few days. His body is on the mend, now that he’s been given drugs to fight the infections, but his mind is nearly gone. He’s being restrained to keep from pulling out his IV and he’ll only allow my grandmother (who is 89; this is taking its toll on her as well) to feed him.
My grandparents refuse to leave their 50-plus-year-old home and move into a nursing home. They live an hour from my mother, who was their only child, so she and my father spend a lot of time at their house cleaning, taking care of the yard, and helping to move my increasingly immobile grandfather around and down the ramp to his myriad doctor appointments. Everyone is spent, but they do what they do out of love.

And I am here. I can’t help. I can sit and listen on the phone when my mother sounds like she’s about to break, and I can hope that what they give me is more than just a hollow reassurance that “I’m sure everything will be OK.” And I can sit and feel guilty and know that, a couple of years ago, I could have helped with these tasks and visited in the hospital and done all the things a good granddaughter should do. And I can know that the sudden downturn in Papa’s health coincided a little too neatly with my leaving and taking the great-grandkids away. And I can know that he might just not ever meet his fourth great-grandchild.
And that’s all I can do.