I wrote this one morning while just trying to understand the death watch and all of its emotions. I’m a do-er and not being there was agonizing for me. It was a lesson in trust and letting go and I hated every moment.

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My Nannie Farrar is dying. We’re letting her.

For over a week now she has been a patient on a hospice floor in a hospital I’ve never laid eyes on in a city a million miles away from me. But I am in that room. I’m there with her even while I’m educating the girls and doing laundry or making dinner or booking our next RV park. I’m in that room.

In my mind, Nannie occupies a different room. It’s the kitchen of their farmhouse, a place so familiar to me that just writing this sentence causes memories to flood over me and tears to spring to my eyes. The nearness of that room is powerful and its absence in my life because we just recently sold the farm? Well, that absence wrenches my gut and fills my throat with something large I can’t swallow. That room is gone and this other room takes its place and its toll.

Nannie is dying. After the last two seizures she couldn’t swallow anymore, wasn’t awake. Those three letters ‘DNR’ take over and while it is easy to casually say “this is what she wanted,” the truth of it, the reality of it is so difficult and horrible I can barely write it down. It is commonplace to write out a DNR. To specifically tell loved ones to stop extra measures, to just let me go Home. But if you are the ones stopping the medicine, refusing the feeding tubes and saying no to Western medicine and all its death-defying powers, the days are long and the guilt is real.

It’s also beautiful which is still hard for me to wrap my befuddled and emotional mind around. Beautiful? My grandmother’s last days on earth are beautiful? According to my parents, hospice workers massage Nannie and play hymns for her. They read scripture over her and my mom holds her hand and tells her how we all love her. My friends with hospice experience say she can hear us. Can she hear the angels, too? When will their voices become louder than ours? When will she fly to join them or has she already?

Is she still in that room or is that just a shell left and my Nannie, the woman who sat on a small couch with me twenty years ago, in a strange church with her arm around my shoulder while I wept for my other grandmother…is that woman gone? I’m trying to write this without using still more question marks. The thing is, all of this is one big question mark and I haven’t a clue if we will ever have satisfactory answers. I’m a million miles from that room but I can’t breathe without a sharp ache in my chest and I can’t speak without it coming out just a little bit catchy, full of the anxiety I feel and the mourning that has started for a woman who is not dead but isn’t really with us anymore either.