Yesterday evening when I was just ready to open “the message to the planet” by Iris Murdoch the telephone rang. It was my mother. She told me I could go and visit my grandparents with her. I couldn’t say no. My grandfather’s been worse recently. In the summer he had his gall-bladder removed, but his heart was going worse, as the doctors finished the operations before they could kill all the neurons damaged by the surgery. The pain caused by them, together with the pain of his sore pancreas and gastritis, made him afraid of eating. He was so cautious not to eat food which could cause him pain that he nearly stopped swallowing anything. Naturally, he got too weak, and now he can’t do anything but lying and thinking about his missing health. The worst thing of all is that he doesn’t want to believe that he can ever get better and he doesn’t even try to eat more or distract from the bleak feelings of the last few moths.
Every time I visit him I am trying to be as cheerful as possible. I think he hasn’t encountered anything but concern faces and health instructions for quite a long. Nonetheless, I can’t do it for a long, because soon after I see his apathy and surrender to the illness, my empathy takes place and I transmit nothing by pity.
On my way to my grandparents’ apartment the picture of what our visit was going to be like was already vivid in my head, and again I started thinking of a possible plan how to take grandpa out of this all. I had already rejected making him meet people - he can’t talk to anyone; everything makes him rather nervous and he is unbearably impolite; he could neither do agriculture anymore - the only thing that has ever been his entertainment, nor he could read books - he says he can’t see any point in doing it anymore, and he refuses to read anything. The only thing left, I thought, was finding a faith healer to disperse his despair, only if there were some psychoanalysts in Haskovo…(Please, tell me if you know someone to practice this here, I’d be really happy if I could find someone to help). The other profession that works with faith healing is energy therapy, I suppose, but it would sound very nutty to my rational-minded relatives to rely on a charlatan, mesmerizing people by talking about energy fields.
How can I persuade my mother to take grandpa to her nephew’s godmother (a well-known energy therapist in Haskovo) as she always consider her job ridiculous and she barely meets to my cousin after his wife decided she doesn’t like us? How could I possibly help? … or how could I stay indifferent to my grandfather’s aggravation?!
lyd said,
February 19, 2008 @ 9:43 am
Well, I did the same - just tried to urge my parents and my uncle and aunt to take Grandma to town to have her eyes examined and cured, so she could at least read again (she had broken her leg and never learned how to walk again - she was about 90 then, but her brain was as nimble as ever). They told me the diagnosis they had made up, so they believed I had to accept that. You know what? I did nothing else. I had a million excuses - I was a single hard-working mom without a car and enough money. Now I know it’s bullshit. If I were you, I would call that energy therapist and take her to your Grandpa’s without warning anyone else if they tell you it’s a stupid idea. Try to talk them into it, and if they refuse, just act. If you need money to pay her, I could help you. As simple as that. Sorry for reading it 10 days later