This I believe…
Cherish the time you have with those you love
She was a very strong woman in her time. She bore 12 children and was married to a very powerful politician who passed away when my dad was at the tender age of nine. She was the best roti maker ever and I have seen the mystical patterns that she made using crochet hooks and yarn. I have heard stories about her great strength, her renowned recipes, and her card playing strategies; but I have never taste her cooking or seen the great card shark in action. My Grandmother suffered the last decade of her life with Alzheimer’s. My Grandmother spent one of the most difficult parts of her life living with my family comprised of my little sister, little brother, my parents and myself.
My Grandmother was born in Grenada and moved to Trinidad and then finally years latter began a new life Florida. My family and I at the time lived in South Carolina but visited Gran’s house pretty much every summer. I remember finding out that she was coming to live with us so we had some renovations done to the house and converted our garage into a master bedroom for her comfort. As a few months went by her memory began to deteriorate. The doctors thought it would be best if we took her back to where she was most familiar with and that was here in South Florida. We moved into her house in Florida at the beginning of summer that year.
While we lived with Gran we had to do everything for her feed her, bathe her, and dress her. It was never really all that much fun or easy especially since her joints and muscles began to stiffen. Not to mention the aggressive behavior that accompanies the mind erasing disease. One thing about my Grandmother is that she always loved to dress up. Everything had to be perfect, her hair, her nails, the outfit, shoes and pocketbook to match. And despite her forgetting some things she never forgot how much she loved to dress up. Since my sister and I were at the age where dressing up was fun for us too we didn’t mind playing nail and hair salon with our Gran.
A few years past and my Grandmother’s eldest daughter decided that she wanted to take care of her mother now. So she packed my Grandmother up and took her away. My Grandmother still lived in Florida but half an hour away. We only got to see her on the weekends, which meant that she only got her nails polished on the weekends. One weekend we went to get her but she wasn’t there my aunt explained that she put my Grandmother in a nursing home, which was my dad’s biggest fear. Since my aunt had power of attorney there was nothing we could have done about it. The nursing home had rules that you can only take the patient on weekends. Now we only got to see her every other weekend because my aunt wanted to take her on weekends too. And now Gran’s nails were done every other weekend.
As I got older we got to see our Grandmother less and less due to her mobility becoming even more difficult and my aunt insisting my Grandmother being moved to different homes which just happened to be further and further away from us. Unfortunately we made too many unconscious excuses not to go see my Grandmother and before we knew it my Grandmother developed a urinary track infection commonly known as a UTI. She was then hospitalized for a few days and then transferred to Hospice. I spent my 14th birthday in hospice with her praying she wouldn’t die or at least she wouldn’t be in any pain since should lost her ability to speak and would not have been able to tell us.
March 20th 2004 the day after my 14th birthday Gran passed away just as we entered the house that night. After that all I could have thought about was the nails on my Grandmother’s fingers. They were not done in her favorite pink colored nail polish and they were not even done to match the gowns she had to wear in hospice, they were not done at all. I reflected and cried about all the times that I could have done Gran’s nails but always found something else to do. And at that moment, that’s when I started to believe that you cannot take the moments you have with people for granted, eventually we all have to go and I never want to be in the same position that I was in with my Grandmother, regretting the fact that I didn’t take that extra five minutes out of the 1,440 minutes of the day to polish ten finger nails. You never can tell when your last moment with that one person may be so cherish the time you have with those you love and this I believe.
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3 comments:
the draft was great. You did a good job talking about someone that is important to you. One thing you can do at the end is tell how did it make you feel when you didnt get to see your grandmother that often but other than that it was great. You can also try to re read your draft maybe you will find something you want to change or adjust
i can really relate to your essay! and it was with my grandmother ass well! but the difference was that she was my mother for my entire life, till she past away.your essay makes me really emotional and i think thats the important or principle point when you write something.
try to touch and persuade with your words.
well done.
This is a well-focused essay with a clear connection between the belief you hold and the story you relate. The most sophisticated writing strategy here is the recurrence of the discussion of her nails across various stages of the disease. Such details are memorable and help the reader appreciate the changes in her condition more than simply describing it directly.
Perhaps your biggest challenge is how to refine this essay down to the expected length while not losing anything you want to keep, and adding things that you find you want to mention.
One thing you might want to grapple with is the difference between your message "cherish every moment with your loved ones" and the reality of Alzheimer's in which you spend time with someone who is increasingly not him or herself. You somewhat displace the blame onto the eldest daughter for making it less likely for you to visit your grandmother. But what else contributed to your excuses for not visiting? how much of this is related to the disease itself and your ability to cherish moments with someone who is, increasingly, not there?
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