Saying Goodbye to Grady
Grady was my husband Charley’s best friend. Charley and Grady were part of a group that met at Birmingham Southern College through the theatre in the late 1960s who have stayed lifelong friends. Grady had a successful international career in acting and set design. He was also a talented artist and extremely funny. He gave it all up and came home to Alabama to care for his brother and then his mother through terminal illnesses. When I first met him he was an unpaid carer for a young man who lived across the street with multiple mental and physical health issues. He was drained and exhausted, suffering from severe back pain himself; and it was only several days into the trip that he began to relax and I got to know the man Charley loves and I fell in love with him too. We tried to convince him to set some boundaries around the demands placed upon him; but for Grady, caring was a way of life and he just didn’t know how to not do it.
Our 2nd visit followed Grady’s ill-fated back surgery that he was waiting for on our first visit. He nearly died from sepsis and was left with loss of movement and sensation in his hands; meaning he could no longer edit sound files which was how he was earning a living at the time. Whilst in hospital he posted a hilarious video ‘pretending’ to have come back from the dead to let us all know he’d survived! We spent 2 weeks that time helping him settle back home; caring for him…
