It's late and 18 hours after the start of this thread and you've gotten enough replies so that I am only posting this because I feel it will be lost in all of the other replies. So please disregard this as it is totally just a selfish vent.
I had no blood relation to my grandmother. We met when I was 4 years old, and I never knew her as anything else than exactly as what she was. My mother and father (her son, fuck biology) had 2 children after me, and there was never a single difference in how we were treated. I always loved her deeply but it took a long time before I realized how special this was.
Her husband had died 2 decades prior, lung cancer. He was a good man, flawed as we all are and as some attitudes of his time were; but there was a pure kind of love that a tough man allows, a love that I will never be badass enough to give. I was the only grandchild old enough to really understand what was happening at the time of his death. He had been sick for a while. I was young, still adolescent, 10 or 11. I remember weird snippets, driving to Cumberland falls in a car that had rear window louvre vents that reminded me of the Delorian form back to the future, cinnamon disk candies on the way. I remember him losing his composure one time because his medicine made everything taste like cardboard. I remember when she opened the door and said to my parents who were both nurses "I don't think he's breathing." and I remember someone telling me "it's just like he's asleep." but it wasn't, someone is still in the room when they're asleep. I knew him and I didn't.
She lived another 20 years, without her husband but with children and grandchildren and love. She had been in the hospital briefly, heart stuff but nothing too bad for her age. She use to walk for miles everyday, for exercise and because she never got a driver's license. Then her hips and legs hurt a little worse, then the heart stuff. My dad said the words to me, that she felt stuck in her apartment now and that us grandchildren should make time to stop by. He didn't demand or coerce or guilt me at all, just said it and I agreed because it was so very obviously true. She lived less than 10 minutes away from me.
She was close to the end, decades or years or months or weeks, time was a technicality. When you are pushing 90 then it can't really be a surprise, can it? I had gone to the hospital the last time she was in it, not that it was particularly serious, but just as an excuse to visit between holidays even though she probably hated the circumstances. And he had said to me "Stop by your grandma's some time, she's lonely and cooped up." and I had nothing but time.
Right before my grandfather died I had strange dreams that I remember to this day. One had a wooden coffin with a cross on it; that wasn't too sad, it was like a new beginning or something. The sad one had previous pets, theirs and ours who had passed, and I was at the bottom of a pool trying to save them, the surface was within sight and I knew I just had to pull them up with me but I couldn't. They didn't die in front of me, but I just knew that they were lost.
She had been there for me my whole life that I can remember, love me the same as her bio grandkids, even put down the money for my first car and I paid her back 50 bucks a month for a year and a half. In the end I wanted to go but I didn't, she was perfectly healthy (relatively speaking) but I couldn't face death like that. I was selfish about my own mortality. I was afraid, not even that she would validate or confirm the fear; just total pure cowardice of even entertaining thoughts of the inevitable.
She was funny, kind, sharp as a tack. I didn't do shit with my days, I was up by 7 and didn't work until noon every weekday. She was so happy for me, for getting a degree and good job, for getting married (she's so happy in the pictures); most of all she was just happy that I was happy, she never complained or asked for anything. I knew the thing to do, just stop by and spend a little time, it would mean so much.
I know a thing without knowing it. I know that I didn't go because I'm afraid of death. Those are just words though, insufficent words borne from indescribable ideas that come from something we can never explain. Something so universal and yet so completely foreign that the depth and breadth of it escape even the wisest among us. I was selfish, and afraid; and I left her alone. After a lifetime of love and care, I didn't bother to make the time. Not that any of us owe each other anything like that, it's not a tit for tat kind of thing; but being there was the right thing to do and I didn't do it because I am a coward.
My father called me on a Tuesday. The Friday paper was sitting in front of her apartment door. I had talked to her in over a month. I that she just loves me and wants me to be happy, she would hate it if she knew I get like this. It is the thing that I have come to terms with, I will never forgive myself for this. It is my reminder that I am not a good enough person, that I need to do better; but I don't do anything. I show up when invited but I don't make an effort.
I am so so lucky. My father made a choice and has been nothing but dependable. My family, all of them extended and immediate, are loving and supportive. And one day they will all die. I will be at more funerals, and I will commiserate and share memories; but I will avoid the end and the truth because I am a coward. I think to myself that when it comes my time that I will die alone, because it only seems fair. It's the one rationalization or cold comfort or whatever that I've allowed myself to have. I made a ridiculous promise to my wife that she could die first, because she couldn't live without me, although I don't know that I'll do much better. That was before this though, but now it seems like a fitting penance for all of the relationships I avoid, for every part of myself that I hide to protect, for every word I don't say for fear of its weight. I hope I die alone, and I hope that that's enough; if not to forgive myself then at least to be enlightened. I hear the same things in my head, over and over. "It's worth it" and "be grateful". Why is it so fucking hard sometimes?