The dead never look real to me. They look like wax sculptures or clever reproductions (but not too clever, otherwise they would seem real). The funny thing is, one of your cousins is bound to come up and say, "They look so good!" or "They look just like they did the last time I saw them!" But that's bullshit. They look unnatural and I think I'll keep my distance, thank you.
My aunt had other ideas, though. Her father was dead, but he wasn't gone-- he was still in his hospital room awaiting... well, whatever it is a corpse awaits. We walked into the room, and there he was in his bed, sheet pulled up around him as if he were sleeping. His mouth was agape and with his hooked nose he looked like a vulture. He had lost quite a bit of weight, his eyes were sunk back into his skull just a little, and they were open slightly. He stared at nothing.
She pulled a chair up to the bed, took his hand and began to sob violently. I couldn't bring myself to do or say anything, so I stood back, looking away. She prayed and her prayer was, "God, I know he was a bad man, but please take him to heaven. Please take my daddy to heaven." He was a real bastard and heaven hardly seemed like the place for him to me.
I'd rather not go into the abuse that he dished out to his wife and children, but you can surely imagine.
The man had suffered for nearly forty years. A motorcycle accident had crippled him and he lost his ambition. He stopped working and drank more than ever, which is a whole fucking lot. He began living in the basement in his own filfth and using five gallon buckets (which had originally contained Dunken Donuts icing) as toilets to save him the hobble up the stairs. Days would go by while he would binge and he would lose all sense of reality. He would complain about all the noise at four o'clock until Grandma would tell him it was four o'clock PM, and not AM as he thought.
All the while he deteriorated. Diabetes set in. His right big toe had to be amputated. His left big toe started to get bad while the doctors were threatening to take his right foot. Grandma got to sick to care for him and moved into an assisted living complex. He was left alone and his drinking buddy stayed with him and cared for him because no one else would. By the end, he had driven even his buddy away and my dad and aunt discovered him a week or so later, dehydrated, unable to get up, his bed full of his own feces. He wanted a popsicle and some cigars.
From there he went to the hospital, to a nursing home, and then back to the hospital after his kidneys failed. Grandma tried to visit him every day and he would tell her he loved her and call her "Mudge." I visited once and helped translate for the two of them (two hard of hearing elderly folks, Grandpa with a voice like a meat grinder from Georgia) and then for the Notary who was getting his paperwork together. His Power of Attorney, his Living Will, and such. He didn't quite comprehend much of it and it was my job to say, "Yes, Grandpa, it is a good idea to have a Living Will. It means they'll let you die naturally." He called a nurse that came in to check on him during the process "fat," and Grandma told the notary and I that he had made fun of another nurse's flat chest. He called the notary "sugar booger."
On the way out the door he shook my hand and said, "Thank you for all you've done for your Grandma and me."
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When the nursing supervisor arrived to talk to us, we found ourselves unable to answer her questions. She needed speak with my dad, he had power of attorney, but I wasn't going to tell her he was at home, passed out, drunk out of his gourd, so he probably couldn't answer her questions. That was the reason my aunt and I had came, sure that we would be able to take care of matters.
We decided we'd go home and try to get dad up and try some coffee on him so he could do what he had to. As we left the room it occurred to me that since the time I was old enough to understand the havoc Grandpa had wreaked, and the cycle he had perpetuated, I had been furious at him and even hated him. But now, seeing him dead, after suffering for so long, and so intensely at the end, I didn't hate him, and I wasn't angry anymore. In fact, I thought, if there is a hell, I don't think he deserves it anymore.
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