The Blogher site directs you to some book club thing for weekend prompts, but I was unable to find one. No matter -- I have startling news. After being defeated by my allergies last night and going to bed at 10pm (UNHEARD OF) and setting my alarm to start playing "The Edge of Glory" at 9am (thinking I'd be up way before that), I got up at 12:30pm. That's right -- I slept for FOURTEEN AND A HALF HOURS. Generally, I feel good, but my eyes feel swollen like they always do when I sleep like that. I think my mom is napping -- I had a latte and an Amy's burrito, and I didn't hear a peep from her.
Mom was telling me about Grandpa yesterday as we were running errands. She thinks the reason that he's lived so long is that he never ate much food, and that he had kind of a weak constitution. That second bit was surprising to me, because Grandpa always made a point of being as active as possible, walking everywhere until the Parkinson's got really bad. She told me that he and his brothers grew up very poor in the country, and that because they were so poor, there wasn't enough food. His mother's breast milk either didn't come in, or dried up very quickly. Because there were so many mouths to feed, they didn't give him rice as a baby, just the water that the rice had been cooked in. The malnutrition was so bad that he didn't start walking until he was 4. Given that there was so little food available when he was a child, it's surprising to me that he didn't become a glutton as he got older and there was more food, but he's always just eaten enough to take the edge off the hunger.
Because he's always had that weak constitution, apparently Grandpa was also into alternative medicine quite a bit, maybe a little too much so. He's always been into herbal concoctions and cupping and acupuncture and the like. Mom said that one time, he went to an acupuncturist and had a foot long needle inserted into his head. Now she wonders if that caused the Parkinson's Disease to develop. We'll never know, but holy crap -- a foot long needle. Grandpa is brave.
He's also always been extremely generous, maybe also a reaction to growing up so poor. When the Korean War broke out, Grandpa moved the family out of Seoul south of the city where it was safer. They sold one of my grandmother's rings (maybe her only ring) to buy a house and a bit of land. When the war was over, and it was time to move back to Seoul, the thought was that they would sell that house and get my grandmother's ring back. Instead, my grandfather saw that one of his brothers or cousins or someone had nowhere to live, so he gave them the house and land. Instead of living there, they sold that land and ended up somewhere else, and the impression I got was that some of that money was squandered on useless things. My grandmother made one remark decades later that she was upset about not getting the ring back, but Grandpa's philosophy was that you kept enough for yourself for your family to be clothed and fed and sheltered, and you used the rest to help people less fortunate than you.
It's a commendable attitude, but it's caused all sorts of problems in the family ever since. When your father is giving away the little extra money there is to less fortunate family and strangers alike, some bitterness builds up. He took in his eldest brother's eldest son and directed a lot of resources toward raising him. The man's a sociopath, whose wife is unjustifiedly uppity and snobby toward her husband's poor family. Maybe it's understandable that she'd take that attitude, since he had a series of mistresses all throughout their marriage, mistresses that he kept the old-fashioned way, in their own houses and with allowances. He didn't bother to send any money to his uncle and aunt, whose generosity allowed him to go to college and make something of themselves. And there was a time when they really needed it, when they were stretching the rice with extra water to make it last longer, after my mother had married my father and moved to the US. My mom sent what money she could, but it wasn't much.
My mother, her three brothers, and her sister harbor a lot of resentment toward my grandfather for all of that. Her brothers especially feel like they didn't get the start in life that they deserved and are struggling as a result. They blame him. My first and third uncles married women who feel that my grandfather is a waste of time, so now that he's 92 and struggling, they can't be bothered to help take care of him, even though they live in the same city. This is where the idea of going to church breaks down for my parents, because these women go to church and feel sanctimonious and justified in their behavior -- their churches say you should discard your parents in favor of God. I think God's message is being warped into something that allows them to mistreat my grandfather and feel ok about it.
I'd like to believe that karma is real, and that these women are going to receive some sort of punishment for being so selfish and for preventing their husbands, my grandfather's sons, from giving him the kind of help he needs. My mother doesn't think anything bad will happen to them. All I can hope is that their own sons marry the same kind of women who don't stop them from going into nursing homes to die, which is what they keep insisting needs to happen to my grandfather. He is mentally still there, he just needs physical help, and he doesn't want to go into a nursing home, but because they don't want to expend the effort, their rallying cry is, "Nursing home." Nursing homes mean almost certain death. None of us have the resources to send him to a nursing home where they might have the staff to take good care of him -- if we did, we could hire a 24-hour nursing service to help him at his apartment.
Getting older is scary. Aside from the vanity side, with the wrinkles and the slowed metabolism and the gray hair, there's the deteriorating health that can rob you of your independence. My sister says that Grandpa's like a cat in that he has nine lives. I don't get as worried about him when he has emergencies because of that. He always pulls through, often through sheer force of will. Maybe I'm wrong to be as calm and unworried as I am, but he always, always, always lands on his feet: he beat cancer, when all the doctors were trying to convince us to put him in hospice care; he beat sepsis, when his stent got blocked and his entire system got infected; he beat sepsis again recently; and he ended up not needing to have a feeding tube inserted into his stomach.
I wonder about his quality of life, though. Mentally, he's still there 100%, but he doesn't interact with the people around him much. We have someone who stays with him during the day, but then he has to get strapped into bed at night so he doesn't suffer a fall while nobody is there. He's like a baby now, in that he's not bothered when he has a dirty diaper. My mother wants desperately for him to live to be at least 100; I understand that she doesn't want to lose her only living parent and be an orphan. I just wonder if he's happy and satisfied, especially as I hear my mom say less and less often, "Grandpa said."
Anyway, I think the lesson for me in all of this is to be so grateful for my first world problems and to eat more vegetables and less meat. Also, I think maybe I know where I get my stubbornness now, too.
