I just got off the phone with my grandparents. I love my grandparents very much, but sometimes talking to them is so tedious. For starters, they want to know, all the time, if A. and I are back together. I think that will end now (finally). Tonight I got to tell them that we had a court date set. That's a little bit of finality that they can take to the bank.
Of course, when they ask questions like, "How is your love life?" (which is creepy coming out of your grandmother's mouth), I never know what to do. I mean, I know that the question really means, "What is going on with you and A.?" I also know that I've been asked not to say anything about my actual, current love life. I also know that my very Catholic grandparents would have a bird if they knew I was seeing someone else when I wasn't officially divorced. So I stammered. And mentioned the court date, which killed the conversation.
My grandfather (and then my grandmother) told me that Thelma is in the hospital. Thelma has been my grandparents' neighbor since they were younger. My father and uncle grew up with Thelma's children (Tony and Sandra). My brother and I grew up with Sandra's children (Bobby and Keith). She's almost like my own grandmother - she knows everything about me and has sent cards and things for birthdays, graduations, weddings, etc. When I was little, she used to tell me that Keith and I were going to get married and "have smart children." Over Christmas she asked me, in reference to Liberace, "Is he queer?" and I nearly died laughing. (Is it possible to believe he wasn't?)
Anyway, she's in the hospital, and has been for three weeks, and it's apparently so serious that Tony has flown up from Florida. She had pneumonia that just wouldn't go away and is apparently being assisted by both a respirator and a feeding tube. It's not looking good for her at all. I feel terrible for her, and for her husband Parky, and her family. I feel terrible for Bob and Keith.
And then the selfish me is so terribly thankful that it's not one of my own grandparents. I can stay inside my little secure bubble of surrealism where nothing ever happens in my family and everyone is healthy and bounces back. I can forget that my grandparents are in their eighties (like Thelma and Parky are), that my grandmother's cousin just had her second triple bypass, that my grandparents regularly see people they know in the obituaries.
In my lifetime, the only people who have died in my family are the parents of my mother's second husband (people I was not close to), the mother of my uncle's wife, my great-grandmother when I was about three (she was in her 90s and I don't remember her at all), and my great-uncle Ted a few years ago. I have three living grandparents (my Mom doesn't know her father), several living great-aunts and great-uncles, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, parents, nieces.
I am living on borrowed time when it comes to family illness and death, I know this. But there is very little I want more than to have my grandparents hold my children. And while I know I am not worthy to ask such a magnanimous request, I beg the Powers That Be to make that happen for me.
Anyone who's a praying type can send one out to Thelma Olivastro in Woonsocket, Rhode Island tonight. And for another one of my friends who could really use it. <3
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