I Need to See an Obituary to Excuse Your Absence
I was twenty when I lost my grandma. It’s not talked about enough — but college is a common time to lose grandparents. It seems we treat the death of grandparents differently than other losses. As if their old age lessens the grief. As if we are not supposed to mourn, because we should’ve known it was going to happen.
Death anxiety is a real thing. For most, death anxiety is the fear of dying. But for some reason I wasn’t afraid of that. I was afraid of my grandma dying — even though she’d already died. I had nightmare after nightmare about her lying in her hospital bed, falling asleep just after Jeopardy, not knowing her heart would stop after one REM cycle.
A few hours before she was taken to the hospital, I thought about her. I rummaged through all the photos of her on my phone, trying to convince myself she hadn’t deteriorated that much in the last five years. I went to bed that night assuming my anxiety disorder had got the best of me.
For once, maybe it was my intuition and not anxiety.
I woke up the next morning to a missed call and voicemail from my grandma. She was in the hospital and concluded her message with “don’t get worried.”
I’m not sure if my grandma was an optimist or constantly in denial about her state of being. Perhaps, she wanted to shield me from the truth.
I called her immediately, hoping nothing tragic had happened in the two hours since her voice mail. She answered. Her voice was foggier than usual — she always had a gravelly voice from years of smoking and COPD, but this time she sounded ill. Croaking. Ready to croak.
“I couldn’t get a hold of your mom or your other grandma. No one was answering me, I was getting worried,” she explained, feeling sorry for calling her college-aged granddaughter on a Saturday morning.
I reassured her I was happy she called. She told me they found pneumonia hiding in her bottom left lung. “I’ll be okay though, don’t get worried,” she said again. As she rambled on about the latest gossip from the nursing home, I overheard a nurse tell her that talking was not good for her oxygen levels.
Our minute passed. The nurse prompted her to hang up to complete her treatment. “I love you, be good,” Grandma said. She hung up.
I burst into tears, sitting upright in my lofted bed. My roommate was sleeping peacefully across the room. Grandma said not to be worried, but I was. Worrying is what anxious people — -intuitive people do. I repetitively Googled the outlooks of COPD and pneumonia. I even went as far as to use my university account to read scholarly articles on JSTOR about my grandma’s prognosis. There was no clear answer.
Grandma had pneumonia almost every Fall. Each time, she went to the ER, got antibiotics, and was sent home. But this year, she was particularly frail. She survived hip surgery and was moved into assisted living. I couldn’t remember any other time in my life where she had to stay overnight for pneumonia. It must’ve been serious.
And serious it was. She died the next day.
I emailed one of my professors an hour after my grandma died. It was late at night, and I wasn’t expecting a response. I wanted to clear my possible absence, knowing I might fly home for a funeral. My professor kindly acknowledged my loss, but expected me to attend class the next day. Less than twenty-four hours after my grandmother’s passing. Since we had a dropped class at the end of the week, she assumed I could fly home then. How kind. Telling me I can skip class on a day we don’t have class.
My other professor told us we’d need a death certificate and/or an obituary to get out of class. Neither of those materials were available to me that week. I was a good enough student that my professor would have believed me, but we had an exam the following week, so for my own sake, I couldn’t really skip class. I never bothered telling that professor what had happened.
Sure, I knew my grandma was close to death. But I deserved time to mourn in the middle of my semester. Just because she was old and dying didn’t make it any less painful.
