Confronting mortality...

My grandmother and I were talking the other day. She was lamenting her physical state due to her illness and the stress she is feeling due to my grandfather's illness.

She said, "if the Doctor I see tomorrow can't tell me what's wrong, I'm going to take a gun to my head. I don't want to live like this. I'm used to being active."

I paused for a moment and remembered a conversation I had with Tamar's now deceased paternal grandmother.

We were sitting in the den and Tamar's grandmother says, "you know, I think my time is up."

Tamar got very quiet, not knowing how to respond.

I figured, "she's just as scared as we are. It's not like she's ever been here before either," so I say to her grandmother:

"How do you know? Is there some internal alarm clock that is going off?"

It opened us all up to a very good conversation and relieved some of the tension.

So this past Sunday night, I took the same approach.

"Nana, I'm not going to argue with you that living like that would be easy, but you've got to reconsider the gun. I mean, first of all, it's so messy. It's also a lot of hassle...you've got to get a permit, background check in some cases, it just seems like a lot of work. Maybe you could do something cleaner?"

"What do you suggest?" she asked.

"I don't know, I'll leave that up to you, but I just think the gun is not the best way to go."

She laughed a hearty, solid laugh and the conversation moved on.

I guess my approach on these things is to think about how I would respond to someone who didn't think s/he was going to die any day or at least some time in the very near future and respond accordingly. That's living, when you treat the person as if s/he's fine and not as if s/he's already in the grave.